In 2000 it was the dot-com crash. Right now it’s the death of Web 2.0.

According to Michael Arrington, writing in TechCrunch, the recent crisis on financial markets has ended not just easy credit, but more importantly for many startups, easy capital.

Just as occurred following the dot-com crash, it seems that venture capital firms will have less capital to invest in startups, be much more choosy about which companies they do invest in, and will be more actively involved in how the capital they have invested in startups is used.

With less money available, Michael Arrington predicts startups will start laying off people, with the ‘bulging marketing and communications departments’ the first to go.

Apparently that’s not such a bad thing since these are not only ‘the very people who make Silicon Valley such a nasty place to be in the boom times’, but as ‘the number of startups dwindle, it won’t be so hard for them to get attention from press and users, so those marketing and PR flaks won’t be missed all that much.’

Of course, it’s my view that tough times call for more marketing and selling - and less techie perfectionism – so I’m not sure that slashing and burning in the marketing department is the best idea.

Then again, we’re talking about people who equate ‘marketing’ with fluffy, irrelevant, non-direct response advertising and PR. Hardly real marketing, is it?

Meanwhile, this quote from Michael Arrington is priceless:

“We’ll look back in later years and think of this most recent boom as the Web 2.0 period, when we were wowed by the magic of user generated content, copyright violations on a massive scale, and neat little widgety things that used Javascript and Flash to turn web pages into pretty close equivalents to the old desktop apps. Of course there were other evolutions as well. Advertising technology has advanced steadily, particularly in tailoring ads to an individuals needs, and tracking them properly. This is the period that social networking as we think of it today was born, and we’ll never be rid of it in our lifetimes.”

Dot-com. Web 2.0. Boom. Bust. At the end of the day, no business survives without… marketing.

Source: Michael Arrington, “An Ignoble But Much Needed End To Web 2.0, Marked By A Party In Cyprus”, TechCrunch, October 10, 2008

You’ve probably heard many Internet marketers extol the virtues of “name squeeze” pages - pages designed to force a visitor to give you their name and email address - and join your email list - before allowing them to enter your website. I’ve certainly discussed the benefits of doing so too - the major one being to yield a much higher optin rate than is typical for an “open” website.

But here’s a timely newsflash: a name squeeze page may be killing your sales.

For a few of our own sites we tested (a) having a name squeeze page fronting the website and (b) providing open access to the site i.e. allowing visitors to navigate all public pages in the site, and to choose to optin to a mailing list if they wished. We found that while having a name squeeze page certainly yielded substantially more optins, sales were much higher when we did without the name squeeze page.

Looking at customer orders in these particular niches gave us a clue as to why sales were higher - the vast majority of customers bought when they visited such sites for the first time. It seems that having a name squeeze page caused a lot of people to sign up who were curious about what lay within our site… or wanted the free offer available as part of signing up (i.e. each of our name squeeze pages had a free report, email mini-course or something else to entice subscribers). But not necessarily customers.

Meanwhile, legitimate customers seemed deterred by our name squeeze page. Perhaps, in these particular niches, our name squeeze page undermined the perceived trustworthiness of our site and product/service offering among potential customers.

We are certainly not alone in finding that most of our customers in these particular niches were more likely to buy on their first visit to our site rather than later. The head of a large corporate Internet marketing department told me that 60 percent of his company’s online purchasers bought when they first visited the company’s website. Furthermore, 80 percent of customers bought within two days of visiting the website for the first time.

So… what is YOUR sales data telling you about your customers? If they tend to buy on their first visit to your site… and if a name squeeze is likely to detract from your perceived trustworthiness or legitimacy… you may be better off ripping that name squeeze page off your site. Sure, it may mean you build a smaller list… but if your main aim is to generate sales, it may be the way to go.

Of course , a name squeeze page may still be optimal in other circumstances - for example, where your primary goal is to build a list. One site where we have kept our name squeeze page is the website of our motivational newsletter, Success Accelerator at http://www.successaccelerator.net Because the main aim of that site is to build a list of subscribers and to subsequently promote various of our own products, affiliate products and advertiser products, a name squeeze works best.

All this just goes to show that, as Internet marketers, we can’t afford to blindly follow what others - even experts - advocate. By all means, try lots of things, but always look at results and data to work out what works, and what doesn’t, for your particular niches and offerings.

Marketing - the conscious effort to sell you stuff - is more prevalent than ever. You’d think, by now, it would be more sophisticated too.

Yes, in some cases, it is. But when I consider how many small businesses and large corporations pour their marketing dollars into vague campaigns that lack any real understanding of the needs of their target market… lack a specific call to action… are never properly tracked or tested… and are chosen based on their “creativity” rather than their effectiveness… I can only think that millions of dollars are being wasted.

And let me reiterate - we’re not just talking about “inexperienced” small businesses investing in weak, ineffective marketing efforts. You might be shocked, for example, at how many large, prominent corporations invest enormous sums of money in campaigns they never bother to split-test. Split-testing is simply testing two executions of a campaign in order to find out which is the most effective. Ideally, you should always be split-testing, in order to continually improve your results (e.g. response rates, sales, etc).

Why don’t more companies split-test or apply more rigor to their marketing? It’s because they’re lazy. Not lazy in the sense that the average marketing department doesn’t work hard. Of course they do. But lazy in how much effort they put into continuously improving their marketing in order to achieve optimal results. It’s so much easier to choose one execution… rather than test and improve, test and improve, test and improve.

Many marketers and ad agencies also want to be “right” or be “creative”. After all, if you “just know” that a given campaign will work… or opt for a campaign because it’s the “most creative”… you don’t have to put any effort into testing, tracking, innovating, improving , etc. And you get to be the expert too.

But any marketer or advertising executive who thinks they’re “right” or is the “expert”… is deluding themselves and the company or client they work for.

The only person who is “right” every time… is the customer.

And any company that doesn’t test its marketing properly is leaving money on the table. No joke - lazy marketing is costing companies millions.