Posted by Tom Allinder on Tue, Aug 31, 2010
On a fairly regular basis, I am approached by investor relations people and stock promoters about how to get more traffic to their site.
To about 95% of these people there are only two ways to get anything done:
The first method (email) is nearly useless when it comes to anything to do with publicly traded companies. The larger IR and promotional outfits have already found all the email people or have the budget to go and find them.
If you are not a big player, you will need something else to make you a big player… that item is MONEY. And, if you are not a big player, then you likely have very little MONEY to spend. What came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s a paradox.
If you don’t have all that MONEY to build an email list, you have to have something to engage site visitors and give them a reason to sign up for your email list. But first you have to have site visitors…
The same solution applies for both, email signer uppers and site visitors; it’s called CONTENT.
Content is text, video, presentations or something else that is worthy of being looked at or read. A website needs to have this dynamically updating content to attract visitors. So if you don’t have 5 or 6 figures in MONEY, this is the route you must go. I know, it’s a lot of work; I do it every day.
The problem with IR and stock promo types is that they all want a “switch” (PPC campaign) that they can turn on and instantly generate the results they are looking for. Well, there is no “switch” without a big budget. Another major concern is that if you run out of your big budget for your “switch” your site all but disappears from the face of the Earth.
Do you want to know how the big players do it?
Well, here is how:
- Set up a website and hire a really good SEO person.
- Set up a PPC campaign with a monthly budget of $5-50K
- Plaster all their past “stock pick successes” all over the front page (in many cases, the ONLY page on their site) regardless of their own performance
- Spend $20-30K a WEEK on email lists while they are building their own through PPC
- Put out their own news releases with links back to their site… lots of news releases…
- Buy links from high traffic sites
- Buy advertising on high traffic sites
- Set up Facebook and Twitter and use every gimmick known to get followers, fans, friends etc and blast their “picks” out daily or several times daily
OK, so there you go… that is how you do it. If you have a budget of $100-150K PER MONTH to spend, you too can be a big player. All you need is 2 or 3 “deals” a month to cover expenses and put a tidy sum in your pocket too.
The alternative? Go organic (marketing, not veggies and fruit). Learn the inbound marketing way, the only way for lasting results. And, no, it’s not easy and it’s not a switch…
Do you want to learn the best way? We can help!
Posted by Tom Allinder on Wed, Aug 04, 2010
Finally, at long last I am beginning to see a change in attitude of management teams of publicly traded companies with regard to marketing their companies. Since the Internet and email craze came along in the 90s, certain methodologies have been in place which has been slow to yield to the changing times. CEOs are now seeing the value in the websites, news releases and social media platforms.
So, here are the old way-new way methods I am seeing with regard to investor relations and marketing of publicly traded companies:
Effective use of inbound marketing (Internet marketing) can open a company up to a whole new audience. Finally, companies are seeing the value of the importance of their websites as well. A “web presence” is not enough.
There will always be a big market for short term stock promotion but for real companies, there is a much better alternative.
Posted by Tom Allinder on Thu, Jul 01, 2010
When I first read about inbound marketing it made complete sense to me; I “got it” immediately. The principles of inbound marketing, search marketing, social and digital media are the only way to build a business for today and the foreseeable future. I have talked with a lot of old outbound marketers lately and they are starving but steadfastly refuse to change their anachronistic business model even in the face of eminent death…
So, a couple of years ago, like many others, I embraced the inbound marketing thing and have been with it ever since. I have read a lot of blogs, eBooks, white papers, watched many videos, absorbed a lot of slide shows, been to many webinars and online conferences on the subject.
It seems that the great majority of references out there are on how inbound marketers can get more leads. It seems that is the name of the game. GET LEADS into the funnel and convert them.
One of the most popular ways of getting leads is to create and distribute free references. Many inbound marketing companies feature things like white papers, eBooks, blogs, videos, and what have you on how to attract more leads and close those leads and make them customers.
So, after a couple of years, here is what I have figured out:
If you are not a rock star of social media or inbound marketing, spending weeks creating things like white papers and eBooks are a WASTE OF TIME.
Videos… If you are not well established, there is no point in creating resource videos unless you are happy with just a few views. I have done plenty of videos following best practices and the interest is just not there. I could make a video of me flinging dog poop with the scooper (which, by the way, I am very good at) and get thousands more views than something intelligent on business.
OK, so what does work?
First and Foremost!=> Serve your clients well. Instead of building references, spend your time thinking of better ways to SERVE YOUR CLIENTS. If you serve a client well, you will get more leads without trying and those leads will be much better leads and will make much better clients. This has worked really well for us at InBoundMarketingPR. We may not have a hundred clients, but we always have 6-8 clients that are happy with what we do for them. And they pay us… We don’t have to chase them to get paid.
Blogging… A great way to share information and thoughts; it is better to spend a couple of hours on a blog than a couple of months on an eBook that no one is going to give a damn about. People will read a blog but not a 15-25 page eBook or white paper unless your name is Michael Stelzner or one of the other big-time gurus.
Slide Presentations…I have found that there is far more interest in slide presentations with regard to inbound marketing/search marketing etc than there is videos.
Networking on Social Media Platforms… This has led to much business and some great relationships. I cannot emphasize the importance of networking with other people in business. You never know who you might meet and what it could lead to.
When all these discoveries sunk in, I was very disappointed. I like to write in detail and I thought my niche was white papers and eBooks. But, after a few days, I realized, much to my relief, that it was no big deal…
I was now free to serve my clients! And business has been getting better and better ever since!
Posted by Tom Allinder on Mon, Jun 21, 2010
Over the last 10-12 years I have become familiar with the sorts of things that investors want to know when they are thinking about buying stock in a publicly traded company. Most investor’s questions can be avoided altogether by having a complete investor relations section on their website.
Many small publicly traded companies have little more than an address, phone number, and email address on their website.
Over the years, the single question that I see investors wanting to know the answer to is: How many shares are in the public float. This is especially an issue with Pink Sheet companies. Yet, a lot of companies don’t post that information; some no doubt because the number is increasing so fast that they don’t want to publish it.
Company’s can save themselves a lot of phone calls and emails by having a complete investor relations SECTION on their website.
Recently, I have had the pleasure of working with a great Investor Relations and Public Relations Firm, Elite Financial Communications Group. What they outline for an investor relations section for their clients is very comprehensive.
- Message from Chairman and CEO
- Stock Chart/Delayed Trading Info
- Corporate Fact Sheet
- Investor FAQ
- Press Release Archives
- Media Coverage
- Corporate Governance
- Management Team
- Board of Directors
- Code of Conduct/Ethics
- Whistle Blower Policy
A section for capital structure also eliminates a lot of questions as well as long as it is updated in a timely manner. A link to filings rounds out the investor relations section.
What is your experience? What else can be added to the investor relations pages to eliminate a lot of phone calls and inform investors better?
How does your website stack up?
Posted by Tom Allinder on Tue, May 11, 2010
A few times a month, I get a call from someone in the Investor Relations or Stock Promotion business wanting to learn how to do inbound marketing. And they want me to teach them over the phone, in a half hour what I have worked for two years to learn. It amazes me… If what I am doing is so simple then why aren’t they all doing it?
One such case occurred a few months ago. A long time business acquaintance (let’s call him “Bill” for clarity of the story) called me a few times to pump me for information but assured me that we would be hired to do the work on their website, marketing and such. Being in stock promotion, Bill and his sidekicks wanted to get as many people signed up to an email list as possible. Stock promotion is heavily reliant on email blasts because nearly all of the promoters know of no other way to do business. Many of them don’t want to know either… As it turned out, neither did Bill.
Bill stated that he wanted an organic campaign because their website was new and would rather hire us for an organic effort because I had warned Bill off the Pay-per-Click (PPC) programs. Stock promotion related ads are one of the most competitive and are very likely to be subject to “click fraud”. Then I did not hear from Bill for a while; he was off drinking PPC juice…
From Wikipedia: Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud.
A few weeks later, Bill called me again and said that he and his sidekicks really wanted to go to work this time on organic marketing. They, against my advice had swilled from the container of PPC juice; their (PPC) campaign was a disaster. They set up a budget of $5,000 with one of the PPC entities and blew through their budget in just a few days and only got 220 email addresses. Do the math… that is $22.73 per email address. I could not even help myself, I laughed til I fell out of the chair. Bill was somewhat less amused at my reaction.
Their desperation to collect email addresses led to a short-cut that cost them a lot of money. So where does this leave Bill and his band of instant gratification hardheads?
- Out of $5K
- Only have 220 email addresses (that number will really impress their clients)
- No traffic to their site
As I have wrote on other occasions, email marketing, the way it is done now has a shelf life and is rapidly coming to expiration date.
If you do guzzle from the container of PPC juice, at least set up a daily budget and watch what is going on with the clicks carefully. But, if you are a stock promoter, you will be busy because there is a lot of competition out there that only knows of one way to get ahead.
That one way is to take down the competition in any way possible
Find out what an organic campaign can do for your company. Get a free report on your website and news releases.
Posted by Tom Allinder on Thu, Apr 22, 2010
Yesterday I had a couple of conversations with individuals that have been involved in investor relations for small companies for many years. When the topic of conversation came around to what I was doing, they literally scoffed at my suggestions of using inbound marketing, social and digital media platforms and search marketing as a tool to augment investor relations efforts.
“Oh, B--- S---, that stuff is just a gimmick; a fad. Once the economy turns around for good the traditional forms of marketing will return. People are just desperate right now,” one of them said. “Well, good luck with it; I think it’s just a passing fancy,” another one said.
Speaking of desperate… both of these individuals are. They are still pumping out their emails on behalf of small companies. Still getting mailers made and sent out to millions of people who don’t give a damn. They are spending ever increasing amounts of money to buy lists and generate new tools that truly are gimmicks. They are still buying time with media sources that no one pays a bit of attention to anymore.
I told these two “gentlemen” that I was doing just fine with the new stuff… Their response was universal: enjoy it while it lasts and don’t quit your day job…
Well, inbound marketing IS MY DAY JOB.
Will someone please tell me what is going to replace inbound marketing next week or next month or next year or next decade, century?
I see no replacement for attraction-based marketing with regard to any sort of business. With the proliferation of social and digital media platforms, stats do not lie. Let’s take INVESTOR RELATIONS for example… I viewed a great presentation recently by Darrell Heaps of Q4WebSystems; here are some of the numbers he presented:
72% of all Internet users are part of at least one social network.
85% of financial services professionals under 50 are using social media… 86% of those under 50 agree that social networking will be an important business development tool within five years.0% claimed that social media wasn’t worth their time.
47% of institutional investors read financial blogs for investment research and ideas…
20%
have used blog research to execute a recommendation or investment decision. 63% of US pro investors say blogs and social networks will play an increasingly important role in investment decisions in the future
The fact of the matter is that the entire landscape has changed over the last few years. Social networks are dominating the Internet and will for a long time to come. Yet, many company management teams continue to pursue traditional marketing.
It’s a point of great interest to me that these companies will spend tens of thousands or even six figures on traditional marketing even thought its effectiveness wanes every day. Yet they will not spend a smaller sum on something that might work because they DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT…
Another interesting response I get with regard to rebuilding websites to be found and building a presence on social media platforms is: “We don’t have time for that…”
Even though I heard this before, it still makes me grab my head with my hands…
Improve your website's performance. We will send you a report via email.
Posted by Tom Allinder on Tue, Mar 30, 2010
A few days ago, I was asked some interesting questions by a person I know that works with micro cap companies (OTCBB and Pink Sheets).They detailed the failure of two companies that had substantial “investor awareness” campaigns underway on them. The stated cause of the collapse of these stocks was from shorting.
I asked what sort of awareness programs were being conducted? “The usual, email campaigns,” was the reply… I will come back to the shorting issue but first a few statements on email…
Promotion of micro cap company stocks has pretty much come down to one method and that is: email blasts. Since the 1990s when stock email newsletters became popular, the email blast has become the way in which companies on the OTCBB and Pink Sheets are promoted.
Here are a few points in no particular order on email and its use for stock promotion:
· Email provides immediate results, good or bad. We don’t have to run any expensive metric measurements to see if the email blast worked. The only metric that counts is stock performance that day. How do I know this? This is what all the promoters and company management teams say; I have talked to hundreds of them in the last year.
· Email results are steadily declining because of server side spam arrestors, individuals have spam catchers and many emails simply land in the inbox of people that don’t care about micro cap stocks. I have 5 business email addresses and between them, I get over 2,000 emails a day. Fortunately since implementing server side email anti-spam software, I don’t see most of them. People are buried under email; it’s a saturated market.
· For promoters that rely on email (all of them), refreshing their email lists is getting expensive. I know this because I have talked to several of the big budget emailers. They are now asking me if I have some good lists. Good email lists are costing some of these promoters $20-30 thousand dollars a week. They are still turning good profits though. One big time promoter told me he gets $100K week for a budget and spends $30K in outsourcing and $30K on his own lists, about $10K on news releases and other odd and ends expenses. He still clears $30K a week so it’s not all bad…
· The state of email marketing is of no importance to anyone in the micro caps except those promoters struggling to keep up. Those that do not have a budget to build or buy lists are dying on the vine. For companies and their management teams, they understand email marketing completely. Other methods of promoting their company and stock is not well understood therefore deemed a waste of time and money. In other words, companies and third parties will readily spend $30-100K a week on email marketing than $5,000 a month on optimizing news releases, optimizing their website, doing a PR campaign or anything else that might provide dividends in the future.
· Speaking of the future… Micro cap company management teams, promoters and all the deal-doers are only concerned about today. They have obviously read the book, The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh which teaches the value of living in the moment; in other words be mindful of what you are doing at this moment in time. For micro cap companies, IR people, promoters and what have you, there is only today… this moment. What can we do to raise money right now? An effort to build a company that will perform a month or 6 months on down the line is not a consideration. To most, there is no such thing as the future in the micro cap world. That is why email marketing is the only accepted way of awareness for 99% of the companies traded on the OTCBB and Pink Sheets. Being mindful and living in the moment is great for an individual, but running a company that way is counterproductive.
· Email marketing targets traders. Short term promotion leads to short term shareholders. The entire marketplace on the OTCBB and Pink Sheets is for traders only. Why are there no investors? Isn’t it true that companies are built on the backs of investors? Yes, it is true, investors are needed over a period of time for a company’s business to grow, but we are not interested in selling products or services right now. Let’s sell as much stock as we can now and raise money then we will worry about selling products and services. You see, when you are in the business of selling stock, you don’t have investors. Investors invest in companies because they believe in that company’s products or services. Traders invest for a few minutes or a few hours in stocks. But the reality of the situation is that small companies absolutely have to sell stock to raise money to grow their businesses.
· Many Deal-doers and Investment Banking Firms have no clue as to how to sell stock. As covered in the previous paragraph, it is imperative that these small companies sell stock to raise money to grow their businesses but let’s be real about how all of this is done:
1. There are legitimate companies that are led down a path of destruction by financiers, deal-doers and their IB firms. The only people that make money in these cases are the financiers, deal-doers or their IB firms. The company and its shareholders are victims.
2. There are plenty of companies that have virtual businesses led by professional micro cap people that are there to do one thing and one thing only: Make as much money as they can as fast as they can and move on to the next deal. The shareholders are the ones that get hosed in these cases.
Many of the legitimate IB firms that are trying to build their client companies only know how to sell stock. They never buy any; they sell and sell as long as the demand is there which subsequently eliminates the demand and kills the stock. How many times have you seen what seems to be a good company with great news trade millions and millions of shares of volume and the stock not budge and actually closes in the red for the day? These sellers know the volume is coming and go to the warehouse to get millions of shares to sell.
There is an overall attitude in the micro caps of “make hay while the sun shines”. When volume comes in on a stock, sell, sell, sell because it may not happen again for a few weeks, a few months or longer…
Every once in a while a good deal is put together with a publicly traded company and the stock performs for a few days, a few weeks or even months. Ultimately the selling of too much stock at some point leads to the demise of that company’s stock in the marketplace.
In the 1990s, when I first started studying the market and began to invest and trade stocks, I looked at patterns a lot. I noticed that NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX companies that performed over time had corrections in their stock prices but the price never went all the way back to where it started. The correction was typically 50% at worst. When I started trading penny stocks, I noticed that in nearly all cases, corrections were 100% and sometimes more. The reason for this was that there was a lot more stock outstanding when the stock arrived months later at its previous base so in many cases, corrections led to new, all-time lows in stock prices. You can bet that in most cases, if a micro cap company’s stock is climbing over days, weeks or months, they are diluting the stock to take advantage of its advance. Again, let’s make hay while the sun shines. The long term investor is the one screwed here.
So finally I now return to the shorting aspect of email marketing. Email marketing by its very nature is well understood and deemed as the only way to promote micro cap company stocks. Don’t you think that those on the short side of the market subscribe to stock newsletters? They know that all big email promotions end shortly after they begin and facilitate an environment that is very favorable to shorting. You have to know that the shorters are rubbing their hands together when they see a big email campaign.
Many of these email campaigns as well as hard mailers sent to mailing lists contain hype, overblown price targets and all sorts of other scammy aspects. This sort of activity is why many investment professionals tell investors to stay clear of penny stocks. The atmosphere of penny stock promotion is that of the wild west or the gold rush days; not very professional in other words.
These big email campaigns give them just what they need: The liquidity to short, be it legal or illegal (actually illegal in most cases). The absence of market makers and being an all ECN market now in the micro caps is a boon to the shorters. Without market makers, there is no orderly market and its nothing but a bunch of traders (many of them ignorant of what they are doing) playing against each other. I can also tell you that the short side of the market also looks for front loaded email campaigns. What do I mean by this?
Many of the big emailers have huge egos and lots of “friends”. Example: They will tell a couple of their buddies that they are “going out” (promote) on XXXX stock on Wednesday morning. They start feeding the symbol out to a few select people on Monday and Tuesday. By their very nature, human beings love to talk and spread secret knowledge. This gives them a sense of self worth and value. So the big emailer’s buddies tell a few more people, they in turn tell more people. By Tuesday at the close, before the campaign has even started, the stock has seen a significant advance and is loaded up with traders getting in “at the bottom”. When the big campaign starts, the stock is advancing on big volume. At exactly the same time, the front loaders are starting to sell into the demand for a nice profit and the shorters are sending their orders in. Given the front loading and a lot of people looking to get out with a nice profit, the shorts selling stock into the demand, the entire process collapses on itself because the supply has now exceeded the demand.
You can see this happen if you use Level 2 Quotes. You will see almost all at once, sell orders start lining up on the offer side. Once this process is underway, those that have stayed in a little too long get desperate and start selling on the bid side. The bid side of the stock evaporates in a matter of seconds as the full blown collapse starts. Who wins here? The shorters and those that got out early are the clear winners. Who loses? The greedy ones and those that bought on the email blast and believed the hype. That is why the big emailers have to refresh and rebuild their lists. Those that get burnt, unsubscribe or mark the sender as junk mail or just delete future emails.
Finally the object of email is liquidity. I have spoken with many micro cap CEOs and other management team members. Most, quite frankly will take good liquidity over moderate volume and price appreciation any day. They are not in the business to make shareholders any money. One CEO told me last year when I was trying to sell him on a longer term approach that would benefit shareholders too, “I don’t give a damn about the f-ing shareholders.”
So, you see, as long as the micro cap market horizon is only one day, the methodology and the results will continue to be the same. However, add in that micro cap stock in itself is getting harder and harder to clear brokerage accounts (for a lot of different reasons), we have a “market” that is collapsing inward.
At some point in the near future, the stock of all micro cap companies will be so hard to clear by third parties (it’s nearly impossible now) that the promotion business will become very limited. It will only be conducted by those micro cap professionals that know how to get stock cleared or find some way around all the hurdles that are growing in height daily.
In many ways the instant gratification mindset that exists in the micro caps will be looked back upon as the seeds of its own destruction. These seeds were sewn back in the 1990s much like the seeds of the real estate market collapse were sewn well before the collapse occurred.
I have been blogging, writing books, making slide presentations, case studies, videos and what have you for the last year and a half addressing newer ways for companies to help themselves and for those in the IR and promotion business to help these micro cap companies.
Here are some of the things I have spoken of so enthusiastically but met with apathy; I might as well been giving talks on continental drift:
Website Optimization: Micro cap companies are not concerned with an optimized website. A mere presence is good enough. A website that draws visitors and engages those visitors is unimportant because it is a longer term strategy. TRADERS DO NOT LOOK AT WEBSITES of companies they are trading; they don’t care what the company does or what products or services the company provides. A website is for investors; investors are not targeted by the companies, IR or their promoters. Why spend $3,000 -$5,000 on a new site when we can hire another emailer for that price?
News Release Optimization: I worked for three weeks building a comprehensive guide on optimizing news releases while saving money at the same time. I spent hundreds of dollars promoting the free white paper on news release optimization. I sent the white paper to many CEOs I know. I only got feedback from one of those CEOs… He said “This is a great resource Tom. It is extremely well written and informative; however… most CEOs are not interested in reading 16 pages on a news release. You need to find a way to condense this down to a page with bullet points.”
Again, silly me for thinking that companies want to have more people to see their news releases…
Never mind the news releases or distribution; when is the emailer going out on our stock?
Bottom Line: If it doesn’t provide results TODAY, then it’s a waste of time and effort. The half hour spent optimizing a news release for greater distribution and maybe syndication on the Internet beyond the financial pages can better be spent on the phone finding another emailer…
Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter: These have proven to be powerful tools for building a business by companies and agencies that know what they are doing. Social Media success depends on a certain methodology. Those running social media platforms must use them to ENGAGE an audience, thereby building a brand following. To date though, nearly all promoters, IR people and micro cap companies that are using social media platforms are using them as BROADCASTING platforms. In other words, they are not engaging others on these platforms, they are pushing a message out. Some of the promotional entities on Facebook merely copy and paste their emails into a message for their “Facebook friends” and send it out. Again, using social media strategies in the proper way is a longer term strategy and does not provide instantaneous results therefore is deemed a waste of time and effort.
The bottom line is that we are all results oriented and we need those results today. At the same time, our only marketing method is becoming harder and harder to do. And, it’s getting harder to get paid by the client companies because their stock won’t clear anywhere.
What are we going to do? Where does salvation lie? We ourselves are responsible for the world we have created. If our world is not such a lovely place anymore then its needs to be us that change it.
Posted by Tom Allinder on Thu, Mar 11, 2010
Well after weeks of work, my first white paper on News Release Optimization and Syndication is ready.
If you read through the blogs here, you will see that this is a subject that I have been beating to death for weeks!
News releases and search engine optimization combined together can create a powerful force for companies looking to get found on the Internet. Once a company starts getting found, it obviously improves their opportunities to sell products and services and if they are publicly traded, obtain more shareholders.
Posted by Tom Allinder on Fri, Feb 26, 2010
Yesterday, I was having an animated phone conversation (it’s the only conversation I know how to have) regarding all sorts of things “inbound marketing” with Dan Ronken, owner of PullnotPush.com and he said something truly remarkable. “These companies have about 18 to 36 months before they are so far behind that they will never catch up.” In Dan's most recent blog, he uses "death bed" in the wording which I love!
We are seeing outbound marketing die via a slow bleed. Even in my niche business
of dealing with mostly publicly traded companies, the cost of doing outbound marketing has become so prohibitive that only the big players with deep pockets can compete.
Complete Rebuild
The bottom line is that for now, we can apply some band aids like social media platform (Twitter, Facebook etc) presence, search engine optimization (SEO) for websites, social media marketing and so forth. But we are rapidly approaching the point that companies need to completely rebuild their online presence. Redoing the website to make it prettier and/or applying some SEO is not going to cut it anymore.
The company website needs to be an inbound marketing machine built from the ground up. I also know this: Any company with any sort of business needs to have an inbound marketing platform if they are to succeed from this point on.
Market What?
I am in the process of finishing my first Whitepaper; it is on news releases. News releases are typically the second most underutilized resource (second only to their website) that companies have at their disposal. I am pointing out in the Whitepaper how news can be repurposed in several ways to build website authority which results in more website visitors which, in turn likely means more customers, clients and if publicly traded, shareholders.
The real purpose of the website is to drive awareness of or make sales of products and services. But, as in the case of the news release, the right platform can increase awareness and sales across the board! Marketing of news on a company website is reason enough all by itself to build a platform that will facilitate inbound marketing.
Management teams of small companies in most cases are aware of their website. But, they have little knowledge of its performance and how the website can be improved. Management focus is entirely on selling products and services and if they are publicly traded, selling their stock. To me this focus is misplaced. The focus should be on the platform
for the sales; Google makes a lot of money through free platforms.
A big upgrade of your platform will result in better sales no matter what you are selling.
I look at businesses (the product or service) and their websites (delivery vehicle) like nuclear weapons… you can have the most powerful bomb ever built but without a delivery vehicle to put the weapon on target, it’s useless…
Posted by Tom Allinder on Thu, Jan 21, 2010
Every CEO, management team member and shareholder wants to see their stock become the next hot stock. But, here is where my opinion differs from many service providers and management team members in the small and micro cap stock community.
"What do we have to do to get the stock moving?" I hear so often from other IR types, CEOs and others involved with publicly traded companies. When I ask them about their business, more often than not, I get a long pause before any response. In most cases from my experience it seems that company management thinks- Get the stock going and we can get the business going.
The whole reason that investors and traders buy stocks is not because of the stock, but because of what the company behind the stock is doing. We have seen this time and time again: The companies that have stocks that are successful for more than a couple of days has a good story being told. The stock of any company is a reflection of the investing community's perception of that company- not the perception of the stock.
Now, I know you are thinking: We need to raise money from the sales of stock so we can get our business going. This is true, but think about it- If you have no business or your business is weak, why would anyone buy (and hold) the stock? You can do what many companies do- hire a promoter or short-term IR firm to pump the stock for a day or two to raise some money. Once they are done, then what? It becomes an endless cycle of pump, spend and pump again.
There will always be a market for short term promotion of microcap stocks. However, there is also a growing line of thinking that the only way to be really successful for weeks or months or even years, is to have good brand recognition and a great story being told across the Internet. For a company to be successful over time they need to have:
INVESTORS
Traders are great for short-term liquidity; but companies are built on investors; those that buy and hold the stock over a period of months or even years.
Strategy
Most microcap companies have no strategy at all for intermediate or long term success. Most of the management teams live in an instant gratification world. Instant gratification you may have noticed has caused a lot of trouble over the last 10 years or so.
Developing a strategy for 3 months, 6 months or a year or more is the only way to start to build a story that will lead to a successful company and stock. What should be strategized?
Web Site
It is my honest belief that many company management teams, not just of public companies but private as well think that just having a web presence is good enough; as if an online business card is sufficient. I have ran close to 500 company websites through HubSpot's Website Grader and the average score is still about 45 (out of a possible 100). You need a website that can be found, engage visitors and encourage people to communicate and interact with your company.
News Releases
I have written about news releases to the point of having no fingerprints left and still, most ignore the findings of HubSpot as well as my own research. There is a technique to writing news releases to ensure a maximum chance of syndication in as many places as possible.
The Story
Many stocks have had good runs because they had a "catchy and engaging" website and because they had a steady stream of good news. There is also no doubt that these companies thought their strategy out well and then executed on it. But also, the companies developments were being talked about not just on the message boards but in blogs, on Twitter and many other social media platforms.
The bottom line is that without some sort of intermediate and long term thinking and strategy with the proper help, you may keep doing what you have always done and keep getting what you always got...