Building A Business Online

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A Complete Guide to Building a Business Online

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Copyright All contents copyright C 2002-
2005 by So Play Me Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. No part
of this document or the related les may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of the publisher.Limit of Liability
and Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher has used its
best efforts in preparing this book, and the information
provided herein is provided as is. So Play Me pty ltd.
makes no representation or warranties with respect to
the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this
book and specically disclaims any implied warranties
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and shall in no event be liable for any loss of prot
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names and services known to be trademarks, registered
trademarks, or service marks of their respective holders.
They are used throughout this book in an editorial
fashion only. In addition, terms suspected of being
trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks
So Play Me pty ltd. cannot attest to the accuracy of
this information. Use of a term in this book should not
be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark,
registered trademark, or service mark. So Play Me
Pty ltd. is not associated with any product or vendor
mentioned in this book. ISBN: 978-1-4477-9584-1 Email:
info@creativedevelopment.com.auWebsite: www.
creativedevelopment.com.au
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Contents
Sign up to get unlimited free updates. 6
Introduction 7
Road Map for this book 9
Important Reading Materials 11
A quick glossary 12
Eleven steps to ecommerce success 14
How the web works (a very quick overview) 16
Some common misconceptions about the web 17
How modern websites work 19
Some free tools before you start 22
The eCommerce Model 24
So you have an idea what now? 25
Core aims of any online business 25
Will your idea suck? 26
Testing your business idea 29
Open Source ways to become an internet mogul 32
Are you Competition Resistant? 37
Planning your website 38
Keyword Set up 39
Attention Interest Desire Action in Keyword Choices 41
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The Long tail 42
Our Search Terms 43
Choosing the right web host 45
How To Choose A Domain Name 46
Choosing a domain 47
Blogging Start Early 48
Lessons from Obama on Web Design 51
Ecommerce 53
How eCommerce Works 53
Considerations for selling online 55
Shopping carts/ecommerce systems 55
Payment Gateways 60
Security 64
Ecommerce Success 66
A Whirlwind Introduction to SEO 68
The value of SEO why it pays to be number 1 79
Top 11 SEO methods for Plumbers 80
Top 9 Real Estate SEO Tips 83
New SEO Strategy Keep your customers happy! 85
Google and the 10 Commandments of SEO 86
How Google Places works Improve your position 88
Why Local Search Marketing? 91
Week Website Launch Formula 92
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What is better than SEO? 98
How to get people to buy 100
Pictures worth a thousand words
Online Marketing Rule#1 100
What makes a good call to action? 101
Landing Pages 101
Product pages that encourage conversions 102
How to get people coming back 105
8 ways law rms can use social media 105
Creating Brand Evangelists 107
The key to social media 108
5 Tips to using Social Media Networking 114
Creating Word Of Mouth Generating Buzz 115
10 Ways Cafes Can Generate Customers
Using Social Media 117
Marketing out of a recession 119
9/10 People Like Brands on Facebook 122
Marketing with videos 123
Email marketing 126
10 Tips for the best email marketing campaigns; 131
Advertising Online 134
ppc vs seo when to use Google Adwords 134
Improve your Google Adwords performance 136
Evaluating Content Sharing Methods 138
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A Comparison of Social Advertising
Digg, Facebook, Reddit 140
Mobile Marketing in a nutshell
- Android, iPhone, Blackberry 143
20x click through, 1c per click advertising 145
Using Seduction in B2B Marketing 146
Advertising Ofine 152
Branding 152
Direct mail yers 154
Case Studies 157
Tough Mudder A Marketing Case Study 157
Hidden Pizza Restaurant A Wasted Opportunity 158
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Introduction
My company is Creative Development,
a marketing and web design agency
based in Sydney. Every year we
build ecommerce websites for clients
across a wide range of industries,
from recruitment to Baby products.
We have made many attempts to
launch new businesses online, with
mixed levels of success.
Over the course of the last ten years,
I have had the pleasure of working
with some global brands and have built some great websites
that have more than served their purpose. However, I have
also had some catastrophic failures. Most of the failures can
be traced back to one or two key issues or moments in time
where we made the wrong decision.
I have found it difcult to get good impartial advice on how to
build a business online. Web designers have their personal
preferences for the types of websites they build, and often the
so-called mentors have very little experience in the eld in
which they are advising.
We have tried to take as much of the knowledge we have
on marketing, web design and ecommerce, and distilled it
down to an easy to understand language. We hope that this
book will cover enough information to keep those new to the
internet as entertained as seasoned veterans.
The internet has become a massively open market where
anyone who has an idea can nd someone to develop it and
make it a reality. You do not have to be a rst mover (Google
came along 5 years after the launch of the rst search engine)
and you do not have to create something completely unique.
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Almost all of the chapters in this book have come from
question and answer sessions we have run with our clients or
with people starting out with ecommerce. Our main aim is to
provide as much actionable knowledge for you.
This is not a get rich quick book. This is not a book about Multi-
Level Marketing or Afliate marketing (although we do cover
afliates as a sales channel). This book is not necessarily only
about eCommerce.
This book is about creating something new, that wasnt there
before.
I am available for consulting and speaking
All you have to do is go to our website,
http://www.creativedevelopment.com.au and contact us for
more information.
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Road Map for this book
Like all good works, this is in progress. Below are some of the
things planned for this book. If you want to see other chapters
here, go to our website and suggest some.
1. Think of a better title
2. Growth Industries Online - Micro Trends, Micro
Niching ( verticals etc), Freelancing
3. How to nd great business ideas - Make notes, read
business magazines, read blogs,
4. Do I need a designer?
5. Taking an existing idea and changing it
6. Some Things To Look Out For -Hosting scams,
domain name scams, website submission scams.
7. Proper Planning for Online Business - Ecommerce
or not, content, selling, sign up, subscriptions,
Communities advertising.
8. Planning your website - Hosting web pages The
Cloud Online vs host.
9. Surveying customers
10. Use amazon mechanical turk
11. Crowdsource
12. Shipping, Handling, Privacy oh my!
13. Building store fronts that sell
14. Free advertising Methods:eBay, communities,
classieds, directories, advertising contra, squidoo
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15. Subscriptions, Shopping carts
16. Afliate marketing systems
17. Only mothers share pictures online. - How information
is shared online, Facebook etc.
18. Using Freelancers oDesk etc.
19. The legalities of domains
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Important Reading Materials
Someone once said Leaders are Readers. If you want to
nd some of the books that inspired me, here is a list.
37 Signals Getting Real:
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Its a free ebook. Some of the key
things you learn there, are Underdo your competition, Outside
money is plan B, Launch on time and on budget.
The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
Purple Cow - Seth Godin
Blue Ocean Strategy -
The Innovators Solution - Clayton M. Christensen
8 hour work week Tim Ferris
Internet Business Mastery An online course that has a
podcast each week.
1 http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php
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A quick glossary
Broadly speaking, we are using terms like he/she
interchangeably. We are also using terms like products
and services interchangeably. Unless we state otherwise,
products and services have the same mechanisms for buying
and selling as each other.
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.
I am going to use this as a catch-all term to mean anything
that promotes your site to number one. Eventually we will
differentiate between things that improve your website (on-
page SEO) and things that promote your site with links etc (off
page SEO).
eCommerce
Again some people break down eCommerce and eBusiness.
However I am going to use the word eCommerce to dene
anything within business marketing and transacting online.
Keywords
For keywords, think; words people will use in search engines
to nd my website. When a person is browsing, reading,
researching what are they putting into search engines to
stumble across your product.
Open Source
When something is described as Open Source it means that
the developers have allowed access to the end products
source materials. It does not mean free/gratis, and it does not
mean the system is not offered without conditions. Broadly
speaking, Open Source systems are good because they are,
usually, developed in a way that anyone with an understanding
of the development language can make changes to it. They
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can be tricky, though, for people without a grasp of the system
because they are offered usually only with the support of a
community. There are a variety of open source systems
available for different uses, from Auction websites to Content
Management to Operating Systems.
Content Management System (CMS)
In the early days of the web CMSs were restricted to
Newspapers and Academic organisations. Now anyone can
install Wordpress and make it work to their specications. The
main idea behind a CMS is that a user can add content and
make small changes to the layout, while the look, feel and
structure does not change.
Landing Page
This is a term for a page on a website that will receive hits from
your advertising and marketing. It could be your front page, or
it could be a product specic page. Usually the landing page
is meant to convert browsers into customers as efciently as
possible. Some websites are ONLY landing pages, designed
to target specic customers and have high conversions rates.
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Eleven steps to ecommerce
success
For those that dont have the time to go through this whole
book, here is the distilled version.
1. Sell as many unique products as you can
2. Do your research. Use Google Keyword tool to
nd the most likely combinations of keywords your
potential customers will use
3. Pick a system that will help you sell. We use
Wordpress with WP eCommerce (for small stores) or
Magento (for more than 20 products) to sell, they are
both free and open source.
4. When naming your products, and writing on your
pages, be consistent with your use of words to
describe your products (using the keywords from point
2)
5. Try to write a blog about your products and industry, it
will help you stay on top of trends and it will help with
your Google ranking
6. Try to limit the time a user has to spend nding the
products they want, and buying them. A one-click
checkout will help.
7. Use lots of small images. They need to be small to
help with load time of a website, and you need to vary
them to keep people interested
8. Encourage feedback and participation, through
Facebook, your packaging, how you send to people
etc.
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9. Payment gateways connected directly to your bank
save double handling, and increase trust. If you cant
afford the monthly fee, pick a gateway like Payment
Express that has exible payment options and can still
connect directly to your account.
10. The key to selling more than the next guy is in your
terms and conditions. Ship faster, for less money, give
a 30 day money back guarantee, offer 24 hour phone
support etc.
11. Build as many links back to your product pages as
possible. Use Public Relations and SEO strategies to
make your product pages the most prominent part of
your site.
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How the web works
(a very quick overview)
Websites are documents sitting on a computer somewhere
in the world, connected to the global network of computers,
called the world wide web. Computers are identied by an IP
address, something like 209.192.268.2. Website addresses,
www.apple.com are translations of those IP addresses into
something memorable.
There are globally recognised standards and protocols that
everyone tries to adhere to how people interact with these
documents and how they relate to each other. The system is
freely open to anyone to interact with, change and modify within
those protocals. The major benet of this is that innovation is
a core principal of the internet.
Anyone with a computer can change the way everyone in the
world does business. Websites like YouTube and Amazon,
both of which started at someones home, forever altered how
people will use video and buy books. Programs like the Fire
Fox browser or Open Ofce are created by a collection of
people who have often never even met each other.
The downside to an open, collective, system is that there
are no hard and fast rules on how the web should work. For
governments this means a hacker can disrupt national security
in a heartbeat. For poor web designers it means that a website
never looks the same from one web browser to another.
Do not worry you cant break it.
The point is, get stuck in. Jump online to some forums and
interact with people. Download some software and start your
own wiki. Download Firefox and view the web with different
set of eyes. Buy something from Amazon. Get someone to do
something for you for a ver at www.verr.com.
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Some common misconceptions about the
web
In the early days of the web, it was only used by a few
universities, connected by telephone lines and using simple
text to exchange messages. Now almost anyone can browse
the web with internet connections that can stream live video
or download movies in minutes. The depth and breadth of any
market on the internet is astonishing.
Everyone who buys speaks English.
We have a website that is almost exclusively geared to selling
products and services in Australia, yet around 1/3
rd
of our trafc
comes from India and China because we write about issues
that affect businesses globally. When doing business online,
you have to keep in mind that your next customer may be
from the other side of the world, browsing using a translator.
If you have automatic payment gateways, what will you do if
someone buys from overseas, how will you ship to them?
The web always looks the same.
There are hundreds of different ways you can interact with the
web. Traditionally using Internet Explorer on a PC was by far
the dominant way people interacted with the web, because no
one changed the default option that came with their computer.
Now people are starting to use other browsers like Opera and
Google Chrome, and using their phones. Each browser and
system works differently and has different features.
Google is Search Engines
In Australia, Google makes up around 94% of all searches.
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Whereas in China Baidu makes up 65% and Google makes
up 33%
3
. Globally there are thousands of different search
2 http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-AU-
monthly-201010-201012
3 http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-CN-
monthly-201010-201012
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engines for different areas of the web. There are some, like
Froogle (Googles product search) that just focus on the price
of products sold online
People make decisions exclusively on their own
97 percent of consumers now use online media when
researching products or services in their local area. Consumers
use 7.9 different media sources when shopping for products
or services in their local area, up from 6.5 sources in 2009
and 5.8 in 2008.
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Consumers soak up a massive range of
information before they make a nal decision.
The internet is increasingly becoming a place of constant
feedback. Between Twitter and Google showing user
reviews, businesses and customers can see how a business
is performing in real time. Word of Mouth is now THE most
important consideration in operating a business online.
People who spend time online, only spend about 30
seconds per website.
There are communities for everything, from ecommerce
to babies. The level of interaction in those communities is
staggering. A user on a website like Reddit.com spends
an average of 15 minutes per session,
5
and Facbook, 11.5
minutes per session.
6
These people are loyal and interactive.
Visiting and spending time in the forums of your industry is a
must.
Only Kids use Facebook
Amount of information shared online. Products shared online.
WOM. Time spend on Facebook
Only Geeks use their phone for the web.
4 http://www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr100310.asp
5 http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/evmek/2010_we_hardly_
knew_ye/
6 http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/facebook-users-
average-7-hrs-a-month-in-january-as-digital-universe-expands/
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Times spent browsing, types of browsers, Mobile users
currently make up around 5% of all web browsing,
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and we
already know that those browsers are tech-savvy, heavily
connected, early adopters. By the end of 2011, we expect,
mobile browsing to make up as much as 15% of all web
browsing. We also know that mobile browsers spend more
time on websites than normal browsers do. Mobile browsers
have different requirements (screen size, media use etc) to
desktop browsers, they do not have all the same functions as
normal desktop browser.
How modern websites work
When websites rst became mainstream, they were mostly
made in such a way that a person needed special tools to
edit them. Now websites are made using a wide range
of languages and tools, most of them very accessible to
everyone. Most websites are not made with hand written
code, they are created using a system that allows you to just
change the text, and then the website does the rest. Just to
get you familiar with how these things work, there are usually
7 key parts that make up a modern website.
Domain this is the www.yourwebsite.com bit.
Host this is where your website documents site, and
it controls your email.
PHP is language used to create dynamic websites.
CSS makes it look pretty and controls the colours,
images and layout of some parts of the website
HTML is what browsers read. Usually links and
images are pulled together using this language.
Javascript makes things active, like drop down menus
and some animations.
7 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-
monthly-200812-201011
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A database that stores all the information such as
page content and administration preferences. The
most common one in most modern websites is
MySQL, but there are plenty of others out there.
Most websites have two distinct areas.
The Website (Front End), which has the following notable
areas;
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The Administration Section (Back End)
Most modern website architecture works like this;
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Some free tools before you start
Take some time to play around with these online tools; what
you learn from this will become a huge part of your online
business later.
Gmail Free email
Use Gmail to set up a free email account. One you have this,
you can also use the full suite of Google tools to improve your
business.
Wordpress.com - Create a free website here.
Wordpress.com is a hosted version of the popular blogging
platform. This website allows you to set up a very basic
website, with a few pages and some functions of a full
You will not have access to your own email address, but you
will have a lot of the main functions of a website that you need
to get started. I thoroughly recommend starting a blog about
the product you are selling. Just write about what you are
looking for, and what you are going to achieve. You dont have
to be too specic, but just start gathering feedback.
There are other websites that offer similar options like Blogspot.
com, TypePad, Moveable Type etc, but we nd Wordpress.
com the best experience for what you will need later.
Google Keyword Tool
The Google Keyword Tool is a part of their website analytics.
It can tell you how often particular keywords are searched for
online. This is particularly useful when looking for the market
size for your product.
Use the Google Keyword tool to see how many people are
searching for the products you are selling. Some caveats;
This will show all local and global searches that include you
keyword. So if you search for books this will include buyers,
sellers, researchers, everyone. The gures here are also
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known to have some variations from reality,
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especially if the
keyword you are using has low search volumes.
Facebook
There are a plenty of things you can
do with Facebook that will help you
investigate your market. It is not just a
place to post pictures of your cousins
Bar Mitzvah. It is free to set up a page
for your product or service, which you can use to gather a
following. You can use the Facebook market place to nd
buyers of your product. You can use their advertising platform
to a) research your market size and b) gather leads. Finally
you can use Facebook to see if there are any groups that you
would be able to use to gather feedback.
Keyword Spy
www.KeywordSpy.com allows you to look at what other
competitors there are in your market place and how much
they are spending on marketing with Google Adwords.
eBay
eBay is a great place to start out looking at the market for
your product. You can see historical and current sales, and
you can see how your competitors pitch themselves. In the
medium term I dont think eBay is a good way to actually sell
your product, for reasons I will go through later. For now I will
just say that you want to own the means of processing the
sale and the means of transaction.
Online Forums
There are so many online forums worth getting involved it.
There are plenty of people out there that will give you feedback
on everything from the product you are selling to the website
your are building. All you have to do is search on Google for
your industry forums.
8 http://www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2008/07/how-accurate-is.html
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The eCommerce Model
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So you have an idea what
now?
Answer the following questions;
1. Our customers are....
2. We are offering them.
3. Which is we create by taking.. and adding..
4. Which will help improve customers lives by.
5. They will pay us $xxx because .
6. Which we will take from them by
7. They will nd out how good we are by
8. We will keep making money from them because..
If you have a basic idea of what it is you are offering, then you
can do some early market testing.
Core aims of any online business
This is really what this book is all about, and what should drive
any online business decisions. These core aims
Build income as autonomously as possible. There is
very little point in working 24/7 just to maintain a small
website. You also want marketing methods that will
keep driving customers to you, even when you are not
maintaining them.
Own Intellectual property and a brand that is worth
something. This allows you grow the brand, and the
website, beyond something that is just a website. It
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also means that the business has something of value
that can either be sold off or kept as an asset.
Have a website that is easy to maintain. You dont
want something that has thousands of dollars in
licensing fees. You also dont want a website that
costs $200 an hour to x when there is a problem, or
you want to make a change.
Own the customers that buy from you. This
differentiates an eBay store from a website that
works. You want to be able to gather as much
information on your customers as possible. You also
want to turn them into fans of the store, not just the
products they buy.
Will your idea suck?
We get asked all the time what we think of this idea, or that
business concept. Most-times it is as plain as start a skip hire
company but occasionally the idea is one that really blows the
doors off. So we thought we would write 6 ways to tell if your
idea sucks. Obviously this wont apply to all situations, and in
most cases you wont be able to truly know if the idea sucks
until you are knee deep in it paddling like crazy. However, if
you tick one or more of these boxes, maybe it is time to go
back to the drawing board.
You must be able to talk about your idea.
How often have you heard this;
I have this great idea for a business, but I cant tell you about
it
Unless you work in the intelligence community, this is the
NUMBER ONE way to tell that your idea sucks. Aside from
this being an unhealthy level of paranoia, it also pretty much
dooms your idea to the scrapheap. If you think your idea is
unique, but it relies on complete secrecy, then your idea is
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almost certainly a) not that unique and b) destined never to
get off the ground. You can tell if you fall into this category
because you punctuate any mention of your idea with the
phrase but tell anyone and I will kill you.
If your idea is a good one, you MUST be able to bounce it
off people. Also your idea should unique enough that no one
except your closest competitors would be able to implement
it, and even then they may not be able to do anything about a
truly exceptional idea.
You need to get in-the-eld experience, or nd someone
who has
The road to culinary glory is littered with people who just love
food but have never worked in restaurant before, or havent
since they were 16. People love ideas because they are low
maintenance, low risk and dont harm anyone. When that idea
is put into practice, that is when the damage is done.
The best ideas come from people who work in a eld for
years, and then have an ah-ha moment. Archimedes had
some experience in math before his Eureka moment.
However, do not feel that if you have never worked in your
target industry you will never get your ideas off the ground.
Taking inuences from multiple industries is what makes some
ideas completely unique. Just be careful to enlist the right help
from within your target industry rst. Also make sure that you
can nd someone you trust within the industry to support the
creation of your idea.
You should make money from the start
In order for an idea to actually oat, you should be able to pre-
sell the product rst. This gives you two motivating factors,
one an idea that you can actually make money from your
business and two that you actually have to ship the damn
thing. Pre-selling your product also helps you crystallise your
marketing and sales information. If you are looking at 12
months of development before anyone can even look at your
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idea, or you are going to give the product away without any
other nancial support, your idea is probably doomed to the
trash can.
You can give away a product to gather feedback, as long as
you have a deadline when you are going to ship and start
charging people.
Before anyone says but Google! and other fabled rags-to-
riches stories from silicon valley, there is one small addition
to this point. Pre-selling includes gaining VC funding, which is
what Google and other tech companies eventually did. Even
hoping for VC funding is a bad sign as we see when;
You must be able to map the business process in detail
from beginning to end
If your business plan looks something like;
1. Collect Underpants
2. ? insert magic here ?
3. Prot
then there is a good chance your idea sucks. If you rely on
VC funding, or something coming together at the last minute,
then there is a good chance your business is doomed to fail.
For one thing, VCs really will only fund businesses that are
making money already, (see the above point). For another,
VCs only fund a very small portion of the programs that get
presented to them.
If you build it, they almost certainly wont come. If you cant
answer the questions at the start of this chapter, or you cant
map the process of building the business, you may be in
trouble. Another reason to map out the whole process is it will
give you an idea of how long it will take you to build the thing.
Ask your customers for feedback, not your family.
Unless your family are the Rothschilds or the Trumps, asking
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your family for feedback is generally a pointless exercise.
Your family are pre-programmed to give a particular type of
feedback, whether that is good or bad. Sometimes they will
tell you they love it, when they dont. Other times they just
wont be able to give any specic feedback, because they
know how you will react. You need to nd potential customers
and get feedback from them.
It is ne to give away the product when you are testing,
because that can be a good way to iron out bugs, as long as
you are getting good feedback.
You must be able to put a deadline on availability.
Not putting a deadline on availability is usually a kiss of death
for a business. If you have mapped out your business process,
then you should be able to put a timeline on availability,
and billing. Saying sometime next year is also a bad idea,
because next year is always just around the corner, just ask
the creators of Duke Nukem Forever. Deadlines also need to
be adhered to, so if you get to your deadline without the end
in sight, then it may be a good idea just to pull the plug and
move on to more protable exercises.
Testing your business idea
Whether you are a large corporation with cash to burn, or a
bootstrapping start-up, testing your idea can be cheap and
can yield some great feedback. The main goal of testing your
idea is to help you rene your idea. Most ideas or programs
you want to develop will never make it out of the testing phase,
but they might lead you onto something else. The three key
things about business testing are;
1. You generate real, quantiable results that you can
use later
2. You use real market conditions, ie your family doesnt
count
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3. You keep the cost to a minimum.
How big is the market for your niche?
You can use tools, such as the Google Keyword Tool
9
, to see
how many people are searching for the product you are looking
to sell. The ideal number of searches changes depending
on the market. If you are selling Shipbuilding services in
Jakarta, there is a good chance anyone searching for those
services is a genuine buyer. However if you are selling shoes
globally, the market breaks down into buyers, sellers, writers,
researchers etc.
Who else is operating in your niche?
Even if you are building something that world has never seen
before, there is still a very good chance people were already
using something else before your product existed. Before
freezers existed people used to buy Ice from companies that
would ship it in from colder countries, (obviously from not far
away). You should be looking for a niche where people are
already advertising, because if there is money to be made,
others will be advertising. You can simply enter your search
term into Google to see whether there are a decent number
(say 4 to 5 at a minimum) of sponsored links associated with
the search term.
Are the First Page Websites Selling Similar Products or
Services?
You should look at the websites that appear on your rst page
of results for your selected keywords. You want to make sure
that there are at least 2 or 3 of these websites selling similar
products or services. This is a further validation of the market
viability. It also helps you understand the competition, in order
to determine how you can add value in this space
Can You Achieve a position in Google that Gets You On
the First Page of Search Results?
9 http://www.google.com/sktool/
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Getting listed on page one of Google can be a lot easier than
people realize. However, it requires you to select keywords
that are less competitive. Specically, you want a search term
that has less than about 30,000 other competing web pages.
There are some excellent tools available online, as mentioned
at the bottom of this article, to help you nd out how many
competing web pages exist for any given search term.
You also want to look at the strength of those competing
websites, and specically, the strength of the top 10 results
for your search term. This involves analyzing the Pank Rank,
number of backlinks and metadata of those sites. Again,
excellent tools to do this research quickly and accurately
are referenced at the end of this page. In essence, you are
looking for at least one or two weak websites on the rst page
of results that you could potentially displace.
The One-Page Website Test.
This is the ultimate, low cost, test to see if your product has a
market. This is adapted from Tim Ferris The Four Hour Work
Week, which has a good outline of other methods for testing
the market. After reading through this book, you should have
a better idea of how these items t together, but for now, this
is the recipe.
Basically what you do is you build a small website using a
cheap domain and hosting. You can use something like
Wordpress.com or your own host to promote just one product
or service. Just make the front page the product focus page.
In the top right hand corner place a button that says ll in your
email to buy now for $xx. Ensure you have adequate privacy
policy on display. Use the form to then display a page that
says you are out of stock, and the customer will be notied
when stock is available.
You then use $50 of Google adwords to drive some trafc to
your one page site and see if anyone is buying. The more
trafc you can send the better, because it will give you a
chance to tweak the wording of your marketing.
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Open Source ways to become an internet
mogul
Here are some free/cheap combinations of ideas that you can
use to get started with your business online.
10 Years ago if you had an idea for a new business, especially
online, you had to go out into the dirt and plant the seeds
yourself. Now, however, there are a thousand programs that
you can buy, re-purpose, develop and change to create almost
anything you might care to build. Facebook was crafted from
PHP and Javascript, now there are open source programs
you can use to create your own social network that wont cost
you anything. Here are just some of the inernet properties you
can without spending thousands on development.
Your Own Facebook/MySpace
Creating a social network around your brand is probably the
direction most businesses will try to take over the next 5 years.
Whether that is on Facebook or on their own website, it is the
best way to connect their brands with the users.
Wordpress mu has now been folded into just straight Wordpress.
However the features are still the same. Using this free
exible blogging platform you can create a network of blogs,
homepages etc with very little technical expertise. You could
build your own network of cat lovers with everyone having
their own subdomain like johnny.catlovers.com.au. Wordpress
is an open source program that is probably the largest
blogging platform in use today. Out of the box it comes with
all the things you would need for a website, including SEO
facilities, templates and some eCommerce features etc.
Ning isnt free, but it is a pretty good, low cost, social
networking platform. Groups like The Plain White Ts use it
to connect with their fans. Out of the box you can choose
from one of 50 distinct and unique themes. Ning allows you
to dene your own network prole questions. Like Facebook,
every Ning Network comes with a rich invitation engine, with
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full web address book and .csv le importing to enable you
and members to invite new members.
Joomla and Com Builder are probably a little more advanced
than the previous two, and really only for those that have some
development knowledge and skill. However they are free, and
very powerful. In order to keep up with other CMS systems,
Joomla is slowly shedding some of the problems it has faced
in the past, so issues over novices using the program have
started to recede.
Your Own eBay
There are thousands of things you
could use auction scripts for. You could
auction off your time, your users time.
You could auction off your soccer
players for the off season.
There are a plethora of open source auction scripts out there.
However the one with the most promise is probably WeBid.
It comes standard with all the things you would need to get
started, templates, pricing structures and an easy to use
admin section.
Your own Digg.
The basic premise of a Digg clone would be to allow users to
vote on links posted. This could be an in-house voting system
on the next project you work on. It could be a voting system at
school for the next class president. Either way there are a few
options for open, online voting and networking.
Reddit code is open source, but not really for the faint of heart.
It does have a great community of developers working around
it, but you need more than a basic idea of what you are doing.
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Your Own Mashable
Mashable has some incredible viewing gures, with something
lik 30 million plus pageviews. In part this is because it has a
large network of bloggers and writers working to create new
content all the time.
If you wanted to create something like that, again you would
turn to Wordpress. It already has all the different author levels
built in, with plugins that can help with quality control, spam
protection etc. There are already a thousand article sites
that take advantage of this, but you could use it for something
more worthwhile. You could get your developers to write about
their experiences working on the latest project. You could get
your friends to write about their experiences around town.
Wordpress comes with a range of free plugins that can help
you turn your website into a hub, with aggregated feeds from
other websites etc.
Online Forums
Again, open online communication is going to be key for
brands over the next 10 years. Scripts like SMF offer you the
chance to have an online forum for your business. You could
use it to build a forum on the latest in car building trends. The
possibilities are actually endless.
Your own Google
Creating your own search engine is, unsurprisingly, not
nearly as easy as the other options listed. Most open
source search platforms require a server to which you have
complete unrestricted access, and a good knowledge of the
language they are built in. The other thing is that if you want a
search engine that covers a lot of ground, you need massive
processing power and storage space, which is usually more
than you would get leasing a server on its own.
You could use Googles custom search but this is restricted to
a search of only 3000 websites, which is still big enough for
most people, but not big enough to create a complete search
36
engine. Also, of course, you are restricted to Googles own
engine.
Your own Twitter
There are a few reasons why you would want to build your
own Twitter clone. Maybe you have an event where you want
to keep the microblogging on your domain, within your own
website. Maybe you want secure internal microblogging at
your next function.
Probably the most complete is Status.net, with a good range
of themes and plugins for you to choose from.
Your own Craigslist/Gumtree
Having a classieds site is not a bad way of making money.
It is also a good way for you to sell things specic to your
industry. Being an industry leader is important, and owning a
way for users and suppliers to communicate is a big part of
that leadership.
Some cPanel/Fantastico systems come with a free classieds
program called Noahs Classieds. They claim that NOAH
is the fastest growing Classieds Platform on the Web. It
comes with sub.categories, custom elds and e-commerce to
charge to post. OSClass is another fairly complete classieds
program, with the added bonus that it is open source.
Your own Realestate.com.au/Domain.com.au
If you are a real estate agent, the reasons for having your own
website with listings is clear. Wordpress has templatesthat
allow you to blog and upload your listings. However there
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are some programs that are more geared towards multi-user,
feed aggregation.
Again, cPanel comes with Open Realty, which has, integrated
blogging and lead capture. Combine this with commercial
add-ons such as IDX data importer, RETS data importer,
and advanced Google map integration and you have all tools
needed to have a top real estate website in your market.
Your own Wikipedia
Building a wiki around your brand/
business is another trend that is
moving quickly. Universities use the
technology to share information across
departments, business can use it to
allow all stakeholders to contribute
in a project. There a hundreds of
different open source wiki platforms to
choose from, including the popular one that runs Wikipedia
itself.
Choosing the right wiki platform for you comes down to what
you want, and how capable you are of building the templates
yourself.
If you have any great open source programs you know about,
let us know in the comments below!
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Are you Competition Resistant?
Strong businesses are resistant to competition. If you want a
business to last, you need to aim for a few of these aspects.
Be difcult to copy. Things that are difcult to copy; A brand
name, a trademark, a recipe, a personality.
Intellectual Capital, copyright, trademark, patent, systems,
process, innovation etc, are the most powerful ways to avoid
copycats.
Exclusivity. A distribution monopoly or licence agreements.
Large asset based production, where the barriers to entry
are high.
Promote the value of your product not the price. Pricing
is transient, value can be sustained. This also means not a
monetary value, but a value in the mind of he customer. It
could be more functions than X brand, works better than Y
brand, but uses more resources than Z brand.
Maintain a Brand. If you continually reinforce a space in your
customers mind, it is difcult for you to be removed. A perfect
example is Ansett in Australia or Jaguar in the UK. Ansett has
not existed in Aus for sometime, but people still remember the
company. Jaguar has not been a British company for longer,
but it is still considered so.
Allow for exibility. Systems, processes, methods and even
revenue streams need to be exible to allow for adjustments
in the market. It also stems from a business plans that are
sustainable.
Know how to change. It sounds funny, but it is something that
is inherently lacking in some large corporations. Sometimes it
stems from a CEO wanting to see out his tenure. At other
times it just comes from engendered work practices that
cause a this is all we know, mentality.
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Planning your website
Properly planning your website will save money and headaches
later. Before you spend any money, make sure you have but
as you go, make sure you have looked in to and lined up the
following items. All of these items are explained in more detail
later;
A Domain Name this controls what your www.
XXXXX.XXX will be for your website and your emails
A Website Host that meets these requirements
PHP 4.3 or greater
MySQL 4.0 or greater
The mod_rewrite Apache module
You have decided a website Username and Password
You have text Editor Software (this is for making small
changes to your website on your computer)
We recommend Edit Pad Lite
You have FTP Client Software (This is for taking les
from your computer and putting them on the web)
We recommend Filezilla
Your Web Browser of Choice
We recommend Firefox
A single compelling offer or proposition
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A single goal for users of the website (buy, subscribe,
download etc).
The 3 and 4 Keyword Phrases for your website
A Google Adwords account (which is free)
Keyword Set up
Search engines look for keywords that best describe the
webpage they are looking at. In building your website you
need to know what people are searching for and what words
they are using. This gives you an idea of what to call your
business, and what words to focus on when writing your
marketing information.
When you are planning your website you need to set in stone
a two-word phrase, three-word phrase and a four-word
phrase that you will use consistently to describe your service
on your website.
1. Go to the Google Keyword tool (https://adwords.
google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
2. Use the search function to nd all the keywords
related to your industry.
3. For this we will use a case study: Bondi Pilates.
4. We would search for words related to; Pilates, Bondi
Pilates, Pilates exercise, where to nd Pilates, how to
do Pilates, Australia Pilates.
5. Export the results to a spreadsheet, so the data is
easy to manipulate.
6. You then need to sift through the results and remove
the keywords that dont relate to Pilates or the content
you are producing.
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7. You then select the top 10 groups of words.
8. Based on the results we want to build content around
the following keywords;
Keyword Monthly Searches
pilates yoga 90500
pilates reformer 90500
pilates exercises 74000
pilates classes 60500
pilates studio 60500
pilates workout 60500
Common keyword groups to include in your research;
How to, guide, help with,
Locations, make sure you include country, state,
region and town
All words that are used to describe your industry
specically, it might be accounting, nance, tax.
Any activities associated with your industry such as
excersizes, classes etc.
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Attention Interest Desire Action in
Keyword Choices
AIDA is an acronym used in marketing that describes the
stages a buyer goes through when purchasing a product.
A - Atte\ntion (Awareness): They have become aware of a
need for a product or service
I - Interest: They have become interested in a group of
products or services.
D - Desire: They want to buy that specic product.
A - Action: They actually take action in buying it.
As an online marketer it is your job to motivate people through
this process. Also you can use this model to predict the types
of keywords people will use at different stages. The best
keywords for a website will use a variety of these.
A - Attention (Awareness): The customer will use research
words like MP3 players and best stereo systems
I - Interest: They will use comparison words like iphone vs
android
D - Desire: They will start shopping around for the best
product and price eg Asus NJ61 Laptop
A - Action: Usually at this stage they have already bought the
product, but they may also still be looking for their local
retailer with words like Sydney ps3 bundle deals
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The Long tail
44
Our Search Terms
The Long Tail is a term given to situations where a larger share
of a market rests within the tail of a probability distribution
than observed under a normal or Gaussian distribution. The
term The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an
October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned
Amazon.com and Netix as examples of businesses applying
this strategy.
What Chris Anderson found, with Morris Rosenthal of Foner
Books, is that with Amazon.com titles outside of the top
100,000 in sales made up 36% of Amazons book sales.
To put this into practical terms, Amazon has a massive
inventory, with only small portion making up more than a few
thousand sales each month. All other products might only sell
once a month, but because this is such a massive amount of
products, it accounts for a signicant amount of revenue.
Another example is online travel company Expedia and their
afliate booking system. The top 20 travel destinations account
for only 10% of the total number of bookings. Thousands of
bookings are made to out of the way places, off the beaten
track, from Mooloolaba in Australia to Deadwood in the USA.
Its the diversity of destinations and the amount of available
inventory that has driven the growth of Expedia TAAP in
Australia and New Zealand. The inventory, they claim, is
simply not available through other sources.
This theory works for both search terms, and products. When
building a website you should try to cater to as many people
as possible with your marketing, because you
Long Tail keywords are search terms used by only one or two
users. The graph above shows the number of visitors to our
site per keyword over the course of the month. As you can see
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our top 20 keywords supply just 10% of our trafc. The other
90% comes from the long tail. Here are some of our popular
keywords;
creative development
best e-commerce lightbox gallery
product developers sydney
web design sydney
seo Sydney agency
And here is a list of long tail keywords
web development recruitment agencies sydney
web development agency
web developers sydney
web developer agency sydney careers
web develop marketing
web develop cafe
You can see that long tail keywords are typically groups of
words you would not normally use in conversation. They might
include keywords that are misspelled, or in a strange order.
Most of our long tail keyword phrases are 5 words or longer.
Who uses long tail keywords, why are they good?
People type in strange and long combinations of keywords
when they know what they are looking for. These are
customers that are doing research for something they know
they need. As opposed to people searching for marketing or
web design who could be anyone, long tail keyword users
will be people who really need magento ecommerce web
design sydney. This makes them very valuable, because you
know the people using them are ready to buy.
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What to do about long tail keywords
Here are three tips to increase your chances of snagging long
tail keywords;
Write original, quality, content. This goes without saying,
however the more you write, the more likely you are to snag
some of these keywords. Dont keyword stuff, because there
is a) the chance you might only optimise for one keyword, and
miss out on all the long tail and b) you just get hit with a spam
tag anyway.
Use your meta tags well. Dont keyword stuff them, because
this will guarantee you will miss out on natural keyword
usage. Make sure your title and description tags have natural
language in them.
Build links naturally. Having links anchored with a variety
of keywords will improve your chances of being optimised for
a range of subjects. Only anchoring with one keyword might
make you number one for a popular word, but as you can see
from the stats above, that would mean you miss out on a large
portion of valuable users.
Choosing the right web host
When you are looking to build a website, you should spend
some time searching for the right web host, at the right price.
You may nd somewhere where you can host your website
and get your domain for a reasonable price. When you are
purchasing hosting, most companies will throw in a free
domain. Most of the time your web host will also control your
email.
Find a webhost that has its servers in the country you will
do the most business in. This is because users will nd your
website faster to use.
Make sure the package they offer meets your minimum
requirements.You should nd web hosts that offer the following
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AS A MINIMUM:
Ones that offer cPanel or Plesk, Fantastico and have
WordPress built in.
Fantastico allows users to install wordpress with one click.
Cpanel and Plesk allow you to make change to the hosting
system without having to request extra features or go through
tech support. This is why hosts like Melbourne IT are NOT
very easy to deal with. Also they are VERY expensive for what
they offer.
Disk Space measures the amount of space your website will
take up on the web. Most websites will be at least 50MB but
we recommend getting at least 100MB. Most web hosts now
go up to GIGs of space, which is ne, but if you are trying to
save money you probably wont need that much space. We
developed a website that has 50 pages and nearly 40 videos
online and the total space used is about 120MB.
Bandwidth measures the amount of disk space accessed by
someone using your website. We recommend getting at least
500MB per month.If your website is used by 5 people per
day, and they access 3MB of data, (say a 1MB Pdf, a 1MB
video and some images), that means you are using 465MB of
bandwidth a month.
How To Choose A Domain Name
Here are a number of steps to take and things to consider
when choosing a domain name. Selecting the right domain
name can really mean the beginning and the end for your
business. Even the brightest business ideas can be overtaken
by competitors that have better domain names.
Determine your niche blog strategy. Think about the main
thing you will be selling. This is important, because you dont
want to have a domain name that describes just what you will
be discussing in your blog. If you are discussing marketing but
48
intend to sell marketing training, then it would be a better idea
to try to secure the domain name marketing-training.com
Make a list of keywords. There is a good chance that your rst
or second choices for a domain will be gone. Start thinking
about alternatives early then you wont be disappointed.
Use Urban Directory. Find out if there are other alternatives for
the words/names you are using. Find out if people are using
slang terms instead.
Dont worry about length, just make it memorable.
Make the Domain Unique.
Avoid Hyphens and Numbers.
Make it easy to type and easy to remember
Check for Domain availability. Use our domain name checker
to see which domains are available.
Use our domain name registration service for cheap domain
names.
Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains
Avoid Copyright Infringement
Secure Multiple Domains
Other tools to use;
Domain Tools
Google Keyword Checker
Choosing a domain
Choosing the right domain has an impact on your search
rankings and how people perceive your website. Make sure
49
you get it right rst time. Use the following list to narrow down
your own shortlist of domains.
Choose .com or your local TLD(Top level domains like .com.
au or .co.uk) over other options like .NET
If you can, buy the domain name that is closest to the keywords
you have selected for your website.
Choose a domain name that includes a word for what you
are selling and the location, for instance www.kentinsulation.
co.uk or www.brooklynbicycles.com
If you can, do not break up the words using hyphens or
underscores.
The length of the URLis not a huge concern. For most
businesses it is FAR better to have something like www.
sydneyaccounting.com.au rather than www.sydacc.com.au
Make sure you shop around. Some domain retailers will
charge you a fortune to renew your domains, or just to redirect
your domains to your website.
Below are some examples of what you can expect to pay for
TLDs for one year.
Website .com .co.uk .com.au .co.nz
linkdaddy.com $10.69 $9.99 $59.49
cheapdomains.com.au $24 $19 $9 $24
webbase.co.nz $29.95 N/A N/A $29.95
cheapdomainnames.co.uk 7.99 5.48 N/A N/A
Blogging Start Early
Sometimes it can be hard to nd enough content to write
about, especially when attempting to blog weekly. However,
once you have some techniques on nding content, you will
50
nd there is more than enough out there to last a few years.
Blogging for a law rm can be perilous, because you dont
want to overstep the mark with providing advice. However we
have come up with a list of blogging ideas that any business,
particularly law rms, can use.
What you can do once you have a lot of ideas, is write the
title of the post and then le it as a draft, or save it as a word
document. That way you can save them for the days when
you dont have any ideas. The main thing is to focus your blog
posts on the niche, in this case law rms, you are writing for.
We thought we would share some of the things we do, and the
places we go, to nd great blogging content.
Spend some time reading forums. Here are a three forums that
are high trafc and have lots of good threads on marketing,
business and web design. All of them have a legal issues
forum, which is a nightmare in itself. You can sort each topic
by number of views to see which ones attract the most
attention.
1. http://www.v7n.com/forums/
2. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44
3. http://www.warriorforum.com/
4. http://www.yingsolo.com.au/forums/
5. Read Seth Godins post on blogging for trafc .
6. Read anything off The Big List of marketing blogs.
7. Read through social networking websites to see which
content has been tagged and commented on. Here
are three quick websites that are great for nding
content.
8. http://www.reddit.com/r/law
9. http://www.digg.com
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10. http://www.stumbleupon.com/discover/law/
11. HubPages
12. Squidoo
13. Delicious
14. Read through trend spotting websites to see what
is an up and coming topic. Here are some great
websites for spotting trends;
15. http://www.tweetmeme.com
16. http://trendistic.com/
17. http://www.google.com/insights/
search/#geo=AU&date=today%207-d&cmpt=geo
18. http://www.trendhunter.com/cool-hunting/category/
Business-Trends
19. Read the Gok Dot Com post on newsletter content
20. Use the content suggestion tool from WordPress
21. Write short, quick, posts on something in the news.
You can use Google News or your local newspaper,
anything will do.
22. Write long, tutorials
23. Write posts that are take the opposite view of one you
have recently read.
24. Use websites like Yahoo Answers, Ask.com to nd
questions people are asking, and then answer them in
your blog.
25. Read other blogs. Search for blogs. Post comments
on as many blogs as you can.
26. Review products.
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27. Highlight one of your customers.
28. Read through Googles Hot Trends.
29. Write a list. Some of the things you could list;
30. Your top posts
31. Your favourite blogs
32. Your favourite people
33. Your least favourite people
34. Save some of your proposals to other companies, and
use them
35. Write about how hard it is to write about your industry.
36. Write a follow up to a post you have recently written
There are plenty of great ideas out there for writing blog posts.
You just need to dig around for them.
Lessons from Obama on Web Design
A great post over at Optimizely on how they used analytics
to improve the Obama campaign. They ran all sorts of
combinations on a splash page asking people to sign up for
their newsletter. The difference between the top combination
and the bottom combination was 3% conversion, from 8% to
11% . According to them, they learned;
Every visitor to your website is an opportunity. Take advantage
of that opportunity through website optimization and A/B
testing.
Question assumptions.
Everyone on the campaign loved the videos. All the videos
ended up doing worse than all the images. We would have
never known had we not questioned our assumptions.
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Experiment early and often.
We ran this experiment in December of 2007 and reaped
the benets for the rest of the campaign. Because this rst
experiment proved to be so effective we continued to run
dozens of experiments across the entire website throughout
the campaign.
However if you look at the post, and the results, the lessons
learned about optimisation should be;
Use People, the more people you have in the image the better.
The more people can connect with the people in the image
the better.
Use non threatening action words. They went from Sign Up,
a commitment, to Learn More a non threatening request for
information.
Use emotive words. The top combination had their slogan
Change you can believe in which obviously has a stronger
brand and emotive connection than Get involved.
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Ecommerce
How eCommerce Works
The players:
A website: In order to sell on the web, as far as your website
goes, the minimum you need is your own domain, a web host,
and a website. You can even get away with just having one
page on your website, (which is what some people do).
A Shopping Cart: (or some way to capture customer
information): Most eCommerce systems are shopping carts,
but in a minimalistic model you can get away with not having
one. Basically you MUST have some way of capturing your
customers details.
A Payment Gateway: You can just use the standard PayPal
as your payment gateway, however this will not deposit funds
direct into your account. A payment gateway will take the
customers details over a secure connection and pass them
to the bank. If you are a large store, you can host payments
yourself without a gateway, however you must meet certain
conditions of security.
Your Bank Account: Obviously you need somewhere to
store all your revenue.
PayPal/WorldPay/Money Bookers etc: In the absence of a
bank or payment gateway, you can use PayPal or another
system that will host payments for you. This is a cheaper short
term option as they often have no overheads, but can have a
higher cost per transaction.
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You could build your website with just a few pages on the
products, and a buy now button that takes people straight
to PayPal. This works for digital products where the customer
can download from a link in the invoice email (from PayPal).
The downside to doing it this way is that you will have no
way to update a customers information for when a product is
shipped etc.
This is probably the most secure, stable and common form of
eCommerce.
Which one to choose?
1 to 10 CMS + Payment Processor
Wordpress
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More than 20 = Ecommerce system
Magento
10 to 20 = CMS + Shopping cart
Wordpress/Joomla + WP/eCommerce or
Website host CMS/ shopping cart Payment gateway
Considerations for selling online
Walk through this checklist and makes notes on what you
need/want in your online store. Keep these in mind when
selecting an online system:
1. How web savvy are you? Do you just use Facebook,
or at the other extreme, do you have a good grasp of
CSS and Javascript?
2. Are you selling more than 100 products?
3. Will your products have multiple options, like colour,
size or shape.
4. Are you delivering overseas
5. Are you connecting the site directly to your bank
account.
Shopping carts/ecommerce systems
There are many open source ecommerce systems available
to web developers and designers. Some have great support,
whilst others are meant to stand alone. As part of our launch of
the new Baby and Home store, we decided to take a look at a
group of ecommerce systems from the perspective of a small
to medium sized store, with 20 products. Our store is looking
to do some newsletters, small amounts of marketing and will
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need some SEO facilities. This case study store will have to
stand on its own, without the need for tinkering, however the
administrator will be capable of making small changes to the
product catalogue.
osCommerce / Zen Cart
osCommerce and Zen Cart were one and the same thing.
However recently Zen Cart split off and now does its own
thing. Although the code is similar there are a few very
important differences, namely that Zen Cart has its own
template system built it, a feature frustatingly lacking from
osCommerce. osCommerce is one of the older ecommerce
systems available, and it is starting to show. The system is
easy enough to install, and if you want to have just a very basic
shop that processes payment via email or paypal, then this is
probably ok. For the hardcore systems admin, this system will
probably cover most bases, however it is seriously lacking in
any niceties, which will put off all but those with the strongest
stomach.
The nasty bits;
The manual Credit Card payment is not PCI
Compliant and should be used for testing only.
Image thumbnails are in fact full size images reduced
for display which impacts bandwidth.
The main cause of stress, however, is that almost all
of the add-ons and additions, which you will almost
certainly need, have to be coded in manually.
Be prepared to back up your website frequently
because a large number of contributions come with
little or no support and some are very old and no
longer work.
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The back end is very clunky
Although there is a simple template system, the front
end is still hardwired to the system, so you are unable
to easily move to a better looking design.
Nested tables virtually all the content exists in some
form of a nested table GAH!
Almost all of the templates are outdated.
The good bits;
There are MASSES of options to tweak, improve and
add to your site
The community support is good, if a little high level. Its
ne if you understand php.
There is support for MIGS, which is used by almost all
of the banks here in Australia
The basic additions are relatively easy to add on,
if time consuming. Most of the seriously offputting
issues are taken care of by contributions from the
community
Its very lightweight and fast. A full installation, with
images, can compact down into less than 10MB
If you are a tinkerer, then you can get in and work
under the hood. There is no gloss to the code, so you
can get your hands dirty if you want.
It supports multiple languages and multiple
currencies/prices and shipping options from the
beginning.
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Magento
If osCommerce is an old sea dog, then Magento is speed boat
racer. It is slick, good looking and improving every day. It is
very easy to install, but has only been around for a few years.
The good side to that is it looks modern and has a lot of the
functions we expect as standard. It claims to be the fastest
growing eCommerce system available. The downside is that
it is still working through some issues. When we looked into it
again 6 months ago, there was a MIGs gateway, but it needed
tweaking.
The pretty bits;
Very slick inside and out
Module installation is as automatic as you would want
Comes with SEO optimisation and analytics out of the
box
iPhone support from the beginning
A good range of addons and plugins
The code is well put together
The grungier bits
MIGS is unsupported at this stage, which can be a big
drawback for Australian retailers
The community is not as strong as other open source
software, and being young there is not as many help
les available
The way it handles variations in size and colour is
ddly and time consuming
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The interface is easy to understand, but clearly
designed by a programmer.
The code is complicated for rst time developers
WordPress and WP-eCommerce
WordPress has started to become all things to all people,
which is a good thing and a bad thing. The once humble
blogging systems has been tweaking and hacked apart and
now can pretty much be used as anything. The problems start
when people try to turn it into something that it probably isnt.
As far as basic eCommerce goes, using the WP-eCommerce
system is easy. Using WordPress native coding and
templating makes it by far the easiest option for someone to
set up a small store. If you have a few products and are happy
to sell through PayPal or through another payment gateway
like that, then you are ne. However the system does not
naturally support a lot of gateways and does not have support
for multiple currencies. Also, as far as we know, it does not
support membership and sign up, so you cant tell if people
are abandoning carts etc.
The sexy bits;
WordPress is pretty much magic. Modern, sleek, sexy
SEO comes easily
You can have a blog with a shop attatched, which is
content gold!
So easy to set up
Support is generally good, from a lot of capable
developers
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The gruesome bits
Its not really meant to be an all singing eCommerce
system
Some parts are actually open source and some arent
Most of the best add ons you have to pay for
CSS coding for the shopping cart is completely
seperate from the blog itself.
There is little or no support for multiple currencies,
languages etc
There are more opensource shopping carts out there, and
over time we will probably assess them too. For now, however,
the three/four above are probably the best for most situations,
and are well worth taking a look at.
Of course if you have your own experiences with eCommerce,
you are welcome to share them here
Payment Gateways
eCommerce is still risky business these days and many people
are still skeptical of giving out their credit card or banking
information online. Considering that Creative Development
would never send you out to the sea to be eaten by sharks. All
payment gateways compared have strict security measures
and they all use the latest and state-of-the-art datacenters. All
of the gateways are compliant with the security programs for
the major credit card providers such as Visa, MasterCard, and
Discover. You can also double check that the payment gateway
is NOT on The Match File which is a list of payment gateways
that are not compliant for online payment processing.
The criteria that will be compared in this review will be
available features, cost and reliability. Payment gateways have
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additional features that will help managing your e-commerce
website. The most common features are: virtual terminal,
fraud protection, recurring billing and eCheck processing.
There are fees associated with using payment gateways and
the most signicant of those fees are setup fees, monthly fees
and transaction fees. Reliability can be the most frustrating
issue out of any situation. When a customer is online making
a payment the payment processing needs to be instantaneous
or the sale may be diverted to your competitor. The payment
gateway needs to be able to service your transactions at all
times.
Depending on your business you may or may not want to
enroll in some of the additional services that can be provided
by your payment gateway. A virtual terminal may be key if
your customer has contacted you by phone. This will allow
your agent to process payments over the phone instead of
having the customer go back to your website. Again, you need
to be able to process those payments as quick as possible so
there is no time to think about the money they are spending
and create buyers remorse. The virtual terminal would also
be key in handling customer service issues after the product/
service has been purchased. It can allow an agent to process
a return and void transaction taken place prior. Fraud detection
is a services that well, detects fraud. The service is proactive
and can help prevent transactions that seem out of place or
unusual. The service will complete an address verication
(AVS) and allow the customer to input the security code that
is on the card (CVV2). Recurring billing is a tool that could be
used when your product/service bills the customer every single
month. A few examples for this would be internet service bill,
gym memberships, and subscriptions. Lets face it everyone
does not own a credit card or debit card. You still need to
make it accessible for the customer to purchase your product/
service. That is where eCheck Processing is handy. This
process allows the customer to input the checking account
information as a payment method.
The cost of running a payment gateway has to be based
on a number of situations for your business. Will you be
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processing a small amount of transactions per day or will you
be processing hundreds or thousands per day? The cost of
setting up your payment gateway can range from nothing to
several hundred dollars. In most cases, the setup fees are
non-refundable. A monthly fee is usually assessed and that
fee will range from the volume of your transactions. In addition
to the monthly fee, the payment gateways may charge you for
each transaction that is initiated. I say initiated because the
fee would be assessed whether the transaction is approved
or declined.
Authorize.Net
Authorize.net has been in business since 1996 and is very well
known in the ecommerce business for payment gateways.
Features: Their fraud detection is programmed to ensure
that the transaction is legitimate prior to the product being
shipped. They lter their transaction to compare with a low
and high value of the transaction to ensure that this is the
usual behavior of the consumer. They also have suspicious
activity monitory that can determine if the product or type
of service is usual for that consumer. They tract how many
transactions are being received in any given hour for each
consumer. They compare the billing address to the shipping
address (which does not mean you cannot ship to a different
address but rather watches out for suspicious activity). The
detection service can lter individual IP addresses that have
been known for suspicious activity. In fact, depending on the
severity of the suspicious activity authorize.net can block
individual IP addresses. Authorize.net offers both recurring
billing and eCheck Processing.
Cost: Authorize.net does not sell directly to the merchant. If
you visit their website you can nd a reseller of their service.
This means that the cost of authorize.net can vary from
reseller to reseller. The pricing here are only estimates and
you would need to contact one of the resellers to get more
accurate pricing.
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Setup Fee: $25-$300 (average is $100)
Monthly Fee: $10-$30 (average is $15)
Transaction Fee: $0.05-$0.15 (average is $0.10)
Recurring Billing: setup fee $40-$100 (average is $50),
monthly fee $20-$40 (average is $30)
Fraud Detection Suite: setup fee $25-$50 (average is $40),
monthly fee depends on the capacity of usage. 1-100
transactions $8-$20 (average is $13), 101-1000 transactions
$15-$50 (average is $30), 1001+ transactions $50-$150
(average is $100)
eCheck: application fee $49, setup fee $100, transaction fee
is $0.30 and 1.75% of the face value of the check.
Verisign Payow Pro
Verisign holds the highest honors for security and trust.
Features: Verisign has additional services with their recurring
billing service. It will allow the for recurring billing to be initiated
at the time that the customer registers which can be a huge
time-saver. The recurring billing service will also create an
emailing service; the customer will receive a monthly receipt
in their inbox and notications of declined payments. There
is also a reporting capability built in where the merchant can
review billing transactions and individual proles for their
customers. Verisign has two fraud detection packages. The
merchant can select the basic package that will include the
following lters: AVS failure, shipping/billing mismatch, high
risk zip code, freight forwarder, CSC failure, high dollar value
and high item value. The advanced package would include all
of these lters and an additional 15 lters.
Cost:
Setup: $249
Monthly Fee: $59.95
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Transaction Fee: First 1,000 transactions are free and every
transaction thereafter is $0.10
Recurring Billing Fee: setup fee $39.95, monthly fee $29.95
Fraud Protection Basic Plan: setup fee $29.95, monthly fee
$19.95, transaction fee $0.05
Fraud Protection Advanced Plan: setup fee $89.95, monthly
fee $49.95, transaction fee $0.10
Account Monitoring (additional to fraud detection) fee: setup
fee $29.95, monthly $19.95
Veried by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode (additional to fraud
detection) fee: setup fee $150, monthly $9.95, transaction fee
$0.10
Total Fraud Protection package (summary of above): setup
fee $260.90, monthly fee $79.85, transaction fee at minimum
$0.20
Security
The required security for an Ecommerce Store should be
at its nest. You want to ensure that the customers data is
safe in your hands and you, yourself are also protected from
fraudulent activities. There are a number of things you can do
to ensure security is your number one priority on your website.
Start with developing a privacy policy, it is not necessarily a
measure to protect you or the customer but what it does do
is instill trust and integrity that is required to run a successful
business. Dene your promise to the customer and what it is
that you have done to create that security and what will you do
if it were to be broken. The privacy policy is an oath that you
will, by all means necessary; keep their information secure
from any 3rd party. There are three major security measures
that you should take into consideration when operating an
ecommerce store.
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SSL Secure Socket Layer encryption: You will need to purchase
an SSL Certicate if you are going to accept transactions
online, offer a login screen, process sensitive data (social
security numbers, birthdates, addresses, etc.), and comply
with privacy and security laws. Even if none of the above is on
your agenda it is still considered a statement that you value
your customers privacy. An SSL Certicate allows encryption
and data being transferred from the user to the server and is
sent in a manner that cannot be read by anyone or anything
else.
Choose a Payment Gateway: A payment gateway makes it
possible for you to complete credit card and electronic check
transactions. It is highly recommended that you research the
various payment gateways to ensure that you get the features
you need and stay within your budget. The reason why a
payment gateway is highly recommended is because it takes
the security part of the transactions out of your hands and
into theirs. The payment gateway takes care of all security
concerns for you. Some of the most common payment
gateways are PayPal, Authorize.net and Verisign. They also
have fraud detection services to protect you, as the company,
against people trying to purchase items with a stolen credit
card.
Fraud Detection: As mentioned above payment gateways will
also have fraud detection features when they are processing
your credit card transactions. There are many different fraud
detection programs to choose from within the payment
gateways. One of the primary features you should choose
is address verication. This will ensure that the owner of the
card is receiving the product at their billing address. The fraud
detection packages have many outstanding ways to prevent
fraud and you can feel more secure with the transactions that
are being placed through your business.
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Ecommerce Success
We see many businesses online busting a gut to build an
online store, and then they waste their time worrying about
how their logo looks, and not what the customer experiences.
What an online store loses out on the touchy feely side of
buying, they have to make up in other ways.
Can Australian small businesses compete as online-only
entities if they use their lack of a physical store to price more
competitively?
Of course a lack of a physical store has its benets, as well
as its problems. There are more and more businesses that
are taking advantage of cheap technology to build an online
presence. Competing on price is one way to build a business,
however it is very short term thinking. Businesses who claim
to be price competitive now, will nd the tides can turn very
easily. By far the best two things a business can do online is
a) build a brand around unique products b)offer a customer
experience that is hard to beat in the real world.
Can local online retail compete with international online retail,
and how?
Yes of course, and they often do. Displaying a local address
and telephone number is a big plus. As is having a .com.au
domain name.
Local retailers can also take the ght overseas. The rst thing
a business needs to do is make sure they can transact in
different currencies. Next they need to make sure they can
ship their goods overseas, and they have overseas shipping
pricing. Of course this does not apply to businesses that sell
eBooks etc.
Next they need to make sure they have optimised their site for
international search, so that means not just ranking for local
searchers, but also other target markets.
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Here are four things you can do that make your website
successful online:
Sell a product that is hard to nd at the local store. There are
a lot of price competition online, try to nd products that are
rare. Most of Amazons revenue comes from products in the
long tail, you should sell similar hard to nd products.
Make it easy to return, complain, review. Unlike a print catalog,
you have the chance to give people more reasons to buy from
you.
Be original.
Returning customers are more likely to buy again. Use
newsletters, specials and discounts to bring people back.
Make sure you have enough new products to keep things
fresh.
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A Whirlwind Introduction
to SEO
The Algorithm(s)
SEO Value = Links in + Page Content
PR (A) = PR(B) + PR(C) + PR (D)
The rank of a webpage is the sum of the value of links pointing
at it. Just like recommendations. This is no longer the complete
picture, but is still a base
The Main Factors in SEO
On Page Factors
Meta Tags (Title & Description)
Image Tags
Content
Bold and H1 Tags
Originality
Off Page Factors
Trustworthiness of a domain
Links (Authority)
Website loading speed (affects 5% of websites)
Competition for keywords
Googles Fickle Algorithm
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Keywords
The words that people are using to search for your services.
People use one word (plumber) or many words (Best Sydney
Heritage Home Plumber). Understanding which words to aim
for and which words people will actually use is an important part
of the SEO process. The main aim of selecting keywords is to
be CONSISTENT, dont overuse them in your website.
Selecting Keywords
Use Google Keyword tool to nd the most common keywords.
When thinking about which keywords to target think about
these things;
Your location is important
When someone is ready to buy, they will put buy
at the start
People doing research on a topic eventually buy
Long Tail Keywords
90% of visitors to websites use keywords outside of the top
100 most frequently used
AIDA in Keyword Selection
Think about the keywords people use when they go
through the buying cycle (Researching, Comparing,
nding retailers, purchasing etc)
Researchers use words like best cheapest
Comparison shoppers use brand names
People about to buy look rst for local and then for the
cheapest vendors
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When someone is ready to purchase they will look for
reviews on the retailer.
Meta Tags
Used by websites to describe content
Found at the very start of a web page (before a
Browser gets to build how it looks)
In old HTML they had to be manually put in
Most systems, like Wordpress, allow you to specify
Google uses these (mostly) in its search pages
Image Tags
Content Quality
What you have written about
Is your content readable?
Does it make sense
Have you repeated yourself (negative points)
For any good content, 250 words is the minimum
amount before Google takes notice
The volume (number of pages) of content is also an
important factor
Bold and H1 Tags
Bold tags make a word stand out, Google looks to see
where you have put emphasis
H1 Tags are used at the top of a document to give the
page a visible title.
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Originality
Now even more important as Google is targeting
duplicate content
It is important to write in your own voice
Dont copy your competitors
Dont copy from other websites
Trustworthiness of a Domain
This includes the following factors
The age of the domain
Where the website is hosted
If the domain has been
Links
Links coming from websites with high authority are the
best way a website becomes highly ranked
Links coming in from bad areas do nothing AT
WORST. Poor incoming links will not harm you
Website Speed
High speed websites indicate user experience
Websites that load well and fast are more useful than
those that dont
It is estimated this factor only affects 5% of websites,
but that is likely to increase
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Tips For SEO
Write as much good quality content about your
industry as possible (blog)
Start exchanging links with other quality sites (or use
a managed link exchange like linkmarket.net)
Guest blog/write articles for other websites that allow
you to promote yourself
Engage in an industry forum that allows signature
links
Tips to Turbo SEO
Hold competitions with high value prizes
Sponsor sports clubs/sporting events with the clause
that you get a link back from
Write contentious blog posts that could gain industry
attention
Use PR (talk to you local papers/industry mags)
Try to generate customer testimonial videos
What about highly competitive markets?
Engage an external link and content builder (oDesk)
Re-Write blog content (into smaller attention grabbing
chunks) and syndicate it to article directories
Use Wordpress.com, Weebly.com, Blog.com to create
supplementary blogs about your industry
Things to keep in mind
Use several browsers, and continuously clean the
cookies/temp les off at least one. Google stores
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browsing information on your computer that inuences
the results only YOU see. If you want to see what the
world sees you need a clean browser
What are nofollow links?
A link can be given a nofollow attribute:
<a href= rel=nofollow>text</a>
This tells a search engine that the website cannot
guarantee the quality of the webpage it is linking to
Whilst this was an issue in the past, it is now
understood that this attribute matters less.
It is good to aim for links that dont have this attribute,
but it is not critical.
Should I buy links?
Generally no. You cant even offer people an incentive
to link to you (discount etc).
There are some instances (good directories etc)
where paying an administration fee is relatively
acceptable.
What about link directories?
Good for small websites starting out on low time/
money budgets
Value is questionable for large scale link building
exercise
Some industries have a few select directories that are
VERY good for trafc
Some directories (like Yahoo) are worth spending the
money on in highly competitive industries
What about article directories
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The value is highly questionable on their own
(especially after the recent Google update)
They are not bad if you use them to build a link wheel
to your other blogs, and if you link to your author page
(look up Angela & Pauls backlinks)
What about blog commenting?
Excellent way to engage in your industry
Great way to build up a network
Spam commenting is a massive no-no
How do customer reviews count?
Yes, Google has said that positive reviews are good
indication of the quality of a website
Encourage your customers to write a review about
your business
The reviews can be left almost anywhere that is
recognised as a review website.
Google Places
What about Local SEO?
(Google Places)
One listing per physical location
Use information as it would appear in the real world.
Do NOT try to SEO your business name and
business listing.
Provide individual location phone number in place of a
call center.
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If you have the chance to list your business in a small
local area, do it. Do not try to go up against larger
competitors in bigger areas.
Local citations are king. Get your business and
address listed in as many local places as possible.
Good reviews will improve your position
What about Social Media
Social media includes Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon
They are great places to nd what people are talking
about in your industry
Submit content that is only of interest/high value
Submit content at your own risk (online communities
can be policed vigorously)
What about Social Networking?
Facebook, MySpace, YouTube etc are all good places
to have another web page
The value of links FROM these pages is questionable
They are great for trafc
They are great to have a second/third/fourth presence
on a search page. Sometimes your Facebook page
will rank number two to your website at number one.
SEO vs PPC
PPC = Pay Per Click, Adwords advertising
SEO is long term, tactical and relatively permenant
SEO Takes time to build up but allows a very broad
base. It is great for building a brand.
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PPC is tactical, shorter term, non-permenant. It is
great for short term offers, events etc.
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO covers anything that is deemed
good by Google (note this is an ever changing
playing eld)
Grey Hat SEO
Mass duplication of content not against the rules,
creates links of questionable value, sometimes can be
the only way to get thousands of links
Creating fake forum users (where you can list a
website)
Social media, blog and forum spamming.
Black Hat SEO
Anything that will get you blocked by Google.
Cloaking links
Faking content
Misleading search engines as to your content
Linking to malware
Linking to bad websites
What is Sandboxing?
Short term penalisation that Google has been
speculated to impose on websites that build links or
content too quickly. (or somehow break the myriad of
Google rules)
You can get into this by Over Optimising
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Sometimes the only thing to do to get out of it is to
stop working on SEO and wait.
Pure Speculation
Google has agged that it will measure how long a
person stays on a page as measure of the quality of
that website
The position of a link on a page may indicate
intention/value. For instance a link in the body of a
page will carry more value than that on a menu
In order for your website to be picked up by search engines
and ranked well, there are some things you need to do and
keep in mind. We will cover these topics in more detail later,
but you need to know a few things before you start building
your website.
Understanding how SEO works will make the difference
between success and failure of a website.
Content is king. It is the number one thing all search engines
look at. It is the number one thing that will draw people to your
website. The best way to keep people coming to your website
is to develop good regularly updated content.
Links to your website matter. Two reasons, 1)It will take
people from other websites to yours. 2) Search engines look
for links to rank the importance of a website. The more links
you have from other websites, the more trafc you will get
and the better your website will do. The wider the range of
websites the better. Also the anchor text, which is the words
used to make up the link, matters. You are better having a link
look like this
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Low Cost Insulation
than this
Another insulation website
Be consistent in your language on your website. Try to use
the same phrases to describe your business and your service
or products. Make sure you are consistent with your keywords
in all parts of your website. This includes the page titles, the
link text and the website description.
The things that matter the most in SEO;
1. Trust/Authority of the Host Domain The longer
you have a website at a particular location/domain
the better. Also Search engines rank links from .gov
websites higher than other domains.
2. Link Popularity of the Specic Page The more
links you have the better
3. Anchor Text of External Links It matters what text
is used
4. On-Page Keyword Usage
5. Trafc and Click-Through Data
6. Social Graph Metrics
7. Registration and Hosting Data
DO NOT try to scam search engines by faking any information
or links, or using Black Hat tricks. The risk to your business
is too great. Google and other search engines can ban your
website from appearing, which is denitely something you do
not want to happen.
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The value of SEO why it pays to be
number 1
Top 3 spots in Google make up 62% of all trafc
10
How much is the top spot on Google actually worth? According
to data from the Chitika network, its worth double the trafc
of the #2 spot.
In order to nd out exactly how much trafc number 1 spot
was worth, Chikita looked at a sample of trafc coming into
their advertising network. The top spot generated 34.35% of
all trafc in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2
through 5 slots combined.
Here are the positions and their total/relative values.
1 2,834,806 34.35%
2 1,399,502 16.96%
3 942,706 11.42%
4 638,106 7.73%
5 510,721 6.19%
6 416,887 5.05%
7 331,500 4.02%
8 286,118 3.47%
9 235,197 2.85%
10 223,320 2.71%
As you can see, the benet of being in the top three is huge.
This is backed up by an eye tracking study performed at
Cornell University. They used a sample of undergraduate
10 http://chitika.com/research/2010/the-value-of-google-result-
positioning/
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students instructed to perform search in Google for 397
queries of topics covering movies, travel, music, politics, local
and trivia.
In 2006 AOL leaked millions of search records showing click
rates by position. Jim Boykins blog reveals the percent of
clicks for each position for 9,038,794 searches and 4,926,623
clicks. Donna Fontenot shared the relative click volume of
lower ranked results relative to the top ranked site.42.13%,
2,075,765 clicks
Top 11 SEO methods for Plumbers
Over the last two weeks we have had dozens of plumbers
ask us for SEO advice on growing their business through
their website. Plumbing is a highly competitive business,
particularly online. The top plumbing business, for the search
Sydney Plumbers, on Google has a PR of 6, over 4500
indexed links, and has a domain authority of 63.
What SEO methods do plumbers use increase their trafc
and increase their sales leads? It is the same as any other
highly competitive industry.First you need to know you should
be focussing on quality trafc. That means you are looking to
attract visitors that are looking to hire you right now.
SEO is about getting people to spend money with you, NOT
your competitors. To that end, chasing after people looking
for Sydney Plumbers may not be the best way to go. Your
primary goal should be to drive people to search for you, nd
you and then spend money with you.
You need to know your tools. We use the following;
Google Keyword Tool You will use this to nd low-competition/
high trafc keywords.
OpenSite Explorer You will use this to nd the highest ranked
AND most relevany pages linking to your competitors
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Directory Critic -This is where you will nd the most relevant
quality directories for articles and links.
Yahoo This is a much better search engine for nding links,
who is linking to you and your competitors. Google Webmaster
tools are ok, but for some reason they dont list all of the links.
Use Google Analytics. If you outsource your SEO functions,
make sure they give you a full detailed report, or at least
access to your analytics data. This will allow you to see where
you are getting the most trafc from, what is working for you,
and what keywords most people are using. If anything it will
open your eyes to the volume of trafc that can come from the
most random places.
Spread your keywords/look for the long tail. Everyone is
competing for sydney plumbers. I am not saying abandon
this completely, but start thinking outside the box. There
are more people searching locally for Hot Water Service
(12000+) than for Sydney Plumbers (~9000). Also there will
be people who are more likely to buy when they are searching
for Emergency Hot Water Plumber. Also would you rather do
business with people looking for a Cheap Plumber or luxury
home plumber or best quality plumber sydney?
Build Content. This means you have to look at building up
your quality content around lots of related keywords. I would
suggest building a blog. You could write a few how to articles.
Once you have written them, wait 2 weeks, and then submit
them to the article directories listed in Directory Critic.
Follow these rules; Use unique interesting title tags for each
page. Do the same for the meta description.
Use Video. Firstly, few plumbing businesses do use video, so
you will stand out. Secondly, it is a great way to bridge the gap
between those that do and dont trust your business.
Dont look for high PR links only Use the Open Site Explorer
and Yahoo to nd out where the most authoritative links are
coming into your competitors. Try to get links in relevant
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directories. You dont have to chase the top PR websites
on the web, because not only is that unrealistic, but you will
probably miss out on a lot of other places that could give you
quality trafc.
Strive for publicity. Sponsor a local soccer team, donate to the
local hospital, hold a How to change your water heater event
for old people. Write information that can be used by the press
and local media. The bottom line is, by doing all of this a) you
will get a lot of people linking to your website and b) it will raise
your prole in the local area.
Get links in sparingly. Only initiate link exchanges and directory
submissions from website that are highly relevant and have
been indexed for a long time. If you do use a reciprocal link
exchange read this rst. Avoid buying or selling links. Pretty
much the only place you should buy a link from is the Yahoo
directory. After that you might want to get a premium placement
in a plumbing directory online. Everything else is a waste, until
you know where your trafc is coming from.
Control the number of outbound links on your pages and
on pages where you place your links, avoid link-farms, links
to gambling, pills, etc. If you want a rule, never link to other
plumbers in your country, only overseas. Only link to websites
related to home improvement or plumbing. Only link to
websites that are ranked on the rsst 3 pages of the search
engines.
Spend money on other things, like Facebook/Twitter, before
Yellow Pages. The yellow pages rarely rank top for any of the
keywords you would want. Few people actually read the books
any more, and there are better ways to spend your money. If
you want a cheap alternative to PPC, look at social media,
or having a Facebook page, and spending some money on
PPC. Also think about using Twitter actively to nd clients.
Get a Google Places listing, and focus on improving that.
Firstly your location matters in Google places, and that cant
be faked. Secondly it relies on a lot of data sources to see
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where your address is, so every time you place a link back to
your website, make sure you put your telephone number and
physical address down.
Want some more great reading about SEO for Plumbers?
Here is some great information about the SEO Success
pyramid, which has a great, in depth, breakdown of the things
you should be looking for.
Top 9 Real Estate SEO Tips
Real Estate SEO is a lot like Recruitment and Jobs SEO.
Unless you are one of the major aggregators, eg: Domain/
Seek, there is very little point in trying to optimise for New
Homes Sydney, because you are coming up against massive
players for the front page.
If you are a small Real Estate Agent, or even a franchise owner,
you are going to want to a)promote your existing properties to
people looking in your area and b)promote your services to
potential vendors.
With this in mind, here are our top 9 tips for optimising your
real estate website for search engines. We assume you have
gone through our other posts on SEO to get an idea of how to
keyword research etc.
Optimise your front page rst on your location, then on your
name. Dont think about going for words like new homes
or buy homes sydney. The more you can optimise for your
location, the more likely you will be able to promote homes in
your area. The better your name is optimised the more likely
you are to be found when people look for you. For vendors,
most frequent searches are for the name of the real esate
agent, and real estate + location comes a distant second.
Make sure you have your page structure built around the size
of the house, ie 4 bedroom etc, and then separate pages for
each property, with descriptive page titles based on location.
If someone searches for 4 bedroom house, lane cove you
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want your pages to have the best chance of being found. For
buyers, the most common searches are for the number of
bedrooms and then the location.
Search for link partners from your local geographic area.
Local search is becoming more important, so nding other
businesses who want to link to you within 20kms of your
business is a must! You can do a search for add url your
location etc.
When you have your pages for each property built, use the
target term evaluator from SEO moz to see if your page is best
optimised for that property. Some common things websites
miss having good descriptive terms for their images, and
using the H1 tag properly.
Find out where your competitors and near competitors are
getting their links from. Use the opensite explorer to nd out
if they are using directories or link partners to improve their
position. You can also use the operator link:yoursite.com in
Google to see what has been indexed.
Sponsor local sports teams. Make sure you ask them for a link
back to your site, from their front page, that is both image AND
text. If you can, instead of sponsoring the one local soccer
team for a few thousand dollars, sponsor the local team for a
small fee, and then sponsor several other local teams too. We
once looked into this for a client, and found we could sponsor
the local table tennis competition, badminton competition and
chess tournament, all for less than $500. The more teams you
can sponsor the better. You get double points if you can get
naming rights to the competition.
Allow for Q+A or comments on pages, or at least somewhere
on your website. This is about increasing the amount of
relevant and interesting content on your website. If you can
allow people to post questions and you answer them, this is
going to increase the amount of interaction and content that
is relevant to people searching for you. You dont have to
approve every comment, or even have a full time effort at it,
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but just post some of the most common questions about a
property or about your service, on your website.
Another content tip is to have a blog. Talk about upcoming
real estate trends, vendors nightmares, anything that relates
to buying and selling a property. You dont have to make it all
about one house or another apartment, talk about the industry
etc. One of our biggest sources of leads comes from this blog!
If you manage to start writing some lengthy blog posts, then
you can start to post those to other blogs, article websites or
squidoo etc.
Talk in forums. There are forums for new immigrants, new
buyers, newly weds etc. Spend 15 minutes a week on a few
forums to spread your name around. You dont have to be
mercenary and JUST talk about real estate, make it real and
give some sage advice. Try to nd forums that allow you to
have a signature, which will help with links back to your site.
For Australians, there is the expat forum or the Australia forum.
Remember SEO is a long process, especially in competitive
markets. What you are aiming for with your Real Estate
website is to allow the properties you do post to have the best
chance they possibly can to be found
New SEO Strategy Keep your customers
happy!
If you havent seen the New York Times article on DecorMyEyes,
you are missing out. It is quality reading for anyone interested
in how not to do customer service. The story breaks down like
this; Clarabelle Rodriguez orders something online, does not
get what she ordered, complains, and then gets what has to
be the worst customer service in the history of the world. The
proprietor then goes on to brag about it online.
Some of the choicest parts of the exchange include the owner
of the website saying Listen, bitch, I know your address.
Im one bridge over which is apparently a reference to
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the companys ofce in Brooklyn. Mrs Rodriguez says he
threatened to nd her and commit an act of sexual violence
too graphic to describe.
Now, however, Google have responded directly with the issue.
In the last few days Google has developed an algorithmic
solution which detects the merchant from the Times article
along with hundreds of other merchants that provide an
extremely poor user experience. The algorithm Google
incorporated into search rankings represents, they claim, an
initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting
a better experience as a result.
In 4 days, Google just changed their core product to address
a concern published in the New York Times that is otherwise
minor.
So basically now, negative reviews count heavily against you.
Google and the 10 Commandments of SEO
We thought we would throw together our own version of the
10 commandments of SEO. There are a few versions of the
SEO commandments around, but we thought we could do a
better job. Firstly we wanted to keep to the original script of
the commandments, with easy to understand and critical laws
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that can be passed down through generations. If I had had my
way, the main picture above would have had me coming down
from an Apple store with two giant iSideTables in my hands.
These commandments also have a bias towards those
guidlines created by Google, partly because they are readily
available, but mainly because Google makes up about 500%
of seo attention at the moment. We tried to pick the 10 that
were critical for the performance of your website, not just the
ones that we all do, like link building, that are nice. Our 10
commandments are;
1. Thou shalt not link to bad guys
2. Thou shalt not keyword Stuff
3. Thou shalt not cloak pages
4. Thou shalt not steal content
5. Thou shalt not use hidden links
6. Thou shalt create original content
7. Thou shalt use meta tags
8. Thou shalt use Robots.txt
9. Thou shalt link sparingly
10. Thou shalt provide a site-map
We also had a few commandments that got left over, and may
just end up getting moved to our version of the sermon on the
mount. Maybe that one will start with something like Blessed
are the bloggers Here are some of the things we could
have included;
1. Thou shalt have clear page hierarchy
2. Thou shalt be accessible
3. Thou shalt check for broken links
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4. Thou shalt use pretty URLs
5. Thou shalt cross browser test
6. Thou shalt optimize load times
7. Thou shalt make pages primarily for users
8. Thou shalt not spam the search engines
9. Thou shalt avoid doorway pages
If there are any more out there, we would love to hear them.
Maybe one day we will rewrite the bible from the perspective
of search engines. Perhaps it could start with
In the beginning TBL merged TCP/IP, hypertext and DNS to
create the world wide web, and he saw that it was good.
Maybe Moses is AOL and Jesus is Google, I dont know.
Perhaps someone else has a better idea of how this tortured
metaphor ts together.
How Google Places works Improve your
position
Google Places is the new primary goal for SEO experts. As
your website can sit, in most cases, at the top of Google, with
a map, it is the most likely place people will click on when
searching for businesses in their area. Google relies on a large
amount information from a few different places. However,
they claim the information that you submit to Google is the
information that they trust the most.
Anyone with a physical address can submit their business
to Google Maps. However there are a few things they do to
make sure the system is not being manipulated. To make sure
the basic information you submit is accurate, Google will ask
you to verify it rst by entering a PIN that will be sent to either
your business address or phone number.
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There are a few things you can do to improve your chances
of being listed high, or on the front page, of Google Maps.
Before we get into the nitty gritty here are three quick things
to remember about Google Places
There is a far higher value placed on information from
authoritative listings, such as Yellow Pages, White Pages and
other directories. The closer the information in Google Maps
to your Yellow Pages listing, the better.
It relies on your physical location. There is more emphasis
placed on the city/suburb of the search than the keywords
The more you try old SEO tricks to manipulate the results, the
worse off you will be.
Google Places relies on proximity to the centre of the location
to determine which results are called up. If your business
address is in a large city, and you are far from the centre, you
are going to struggle to improve your listing position.
The Easy Stuff
One listing per physical location. Even you cover multiple
towns, dont use two listings. Instead, use the description of
your business or categories to explain the different services
your business offers. Businesses with special services, such
as law rms and doctors or health centres, should not create
multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
Use information as it would appear in the real world. People
are going to be looking for you using your business card etc.
You will also nd your business listed by its real address in
professional directories etc. You should try to be as ofcial as
possible.
Do NOT try to SEO your business name and business listing.
Represent your business exactly as it appears in the ofine
world. Again, this comes back to directories and professional
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bodies, (authoritative listings), listing your business name. Do
not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
Do not create listings at locations where the business does not
physically exist. PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
The precise address for the business must be provided in
place of broad city names or cross-streets.
Provide a phone number that connects to your individual
business location as directly as possible. For example, you
should provide an individual location phone number in place
of a call center. Provide one URL that best identies your
individual business location. Do not provide phone numbers
or URLs that redirect or refer users to other landing pages or
phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
Use the description and custom attribute elds to include
additional information about your listing. This type of content
should never appear in your businesss title, address or
category elds.
The Harder Stuff
Pick your Battles. If you have the chance to list your business
in a small local area, do it. Do not try to go up against larger
competitors in bigger areas.
Try to get your address listed in as many places as possible.
Add your physical location to every time you list in a local
directory.
Local citations are king. You should try to get your business
and address listed in as many local addresses as possible.
Good reviews through Google Places will improve your
position. You should encourage your customers to write a
review of you as much as possible.
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Why Local Search Marketing?
Every business person knows the importance of marketing
in general, but why is the local market is so important? If you
have a local business, it is imperative to reach your local
customers by meeting their specic needs. Sydney marketing
will look different than marketing Melbourne because, while
these two cities are in the same country, there are many local
differences come into play.
Still, people are looking for local businesses using the Internet
to make their search easier. Here is a list of the top six reasons
to be locally a part of running your business.
At the moment, search marketing is the most important part of
the marketing mix. Almost all transactions are preceded by a
search online for reviews, or information.
With time being short for more people, customers look online
for where to shop before the head out the door. This saves
time and money by ensuring that they will give their business
to the local retailer who can offer the best deal.
Local headlines make a difference in what your local market
should look like. When people see something interesting in
a magazine or newspaper, may seek further link to see what
they can nd. A short PR campaign, or even just contacting
your local bloggers and news outlets will help.
People do not always live where they work. Commuters are
common, and when something happens at work that requires
your product or service offered by your company customers
will look for you online. Its invaluable that your local market
will nd you.
One thing has not changed in advertising. The objective of
advertising is to get people to buy their product. When you
couple Sydney online marketing to brick and mortar store, you
are looking at being responsive to the needs of two different
kinds of prospects. One kind likes to buy goods online, while
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another kind of love to nd a physical connection box so
you can visit the shop and concrete you try our product for
themselves. Using local marketing, you can capture both
markets.
All eyes are online. Consider that the billboards are getting
hired less these days. Magazine ads ipped past as if it was
not even there. Using good local Marketing you draw the
attention of people looking for your product.
Week Website Launch Formula
The difference between page two and page one on Google
can be tens of thousands of dollars in prot. It does not take
much to make the leap, but it will take one week, (seven days),
of intense effort. Firstly increasing your SEO position is a long
term thing, that cant be done over night. However, you can do
a lot in one week of intense effort. This is a quick guide on how
to improve your rank in Google in one week. It wont increase
your PageRank over night, but it might give you a short term
bump in position. Here is how you do it;
Day One Original Content
The rst day is the most intense because everything you do
here sets you up for the rest of the week. The rst thing you
have to do is nd your two word and three word keyword
phrase. This might be keyword + location and adjective +
keyword + location. In this examples instance, we are going
to use SEO Sydney and Cheap SEO Sydney. You should
use Google Keyword tool to nd related keywords. You then
export the list to excel, and divide the number of local keyword
searches by the competition. This will give you an idea of the
words that you can target. You should aim for Primary and
Secondary keyword targets. So in this instance we will aim
for SEO Sydney and derivatives as well as Using Google
Keyword Tool and Free SEO Tips.
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Next you have to write at least 500 words on the topic for
your keywords. They must be original, and they must offer
something of value to the reader. You get bonus points for
being provocative, clever, funny, outlandish etc. In this
example here are some topics we could go with
Why SEO Sydney is the best
How SEO Sydney is better than SEO Melbourne
How to make the most out of SEO in Sydney
Where to nd unique SEO opportunities in Sydney
The ten commandments of SEO in Sydney
How Google sucks at SEO in Sydney
And so on. In your 500 word article do as much original
research as you can. Find out what other people have written
on the topic and link to them. Try to write in a magazine style,
with bold words on the important facts. Try to draw some kind
of a conclusion about the state of your topic. Try to include
your keywords as consistently as possible. You MUST use
the keywords in the article title, in the rst sentance, and in the
meta description.
Post the article on your website. For at least one of your
keywords, but at most three, link back to the front page of
your website.
Post the article on stumbleupon, digg, mixx, delicious,
facebook and twitter.
If you are feeling energetic, write a second piece, of about 200
words, and post that to your website too. Make it on the same
topic. Make sure that every link in your second piece links to
your rst.
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Place two links in the footer of your website, or at least at the
bottom of every page. One to your article and a second from
to the root domain. Both links will use the same keywords as
the anchor. This increases the relevancy of your keywords to
your website.
Day Two Primary Links
Today you are going to get as many primary links as you can
back to your original article AND your website. First, use the
directory nder, ulimate link nder and directory critic, and
submit your front page of your website to as many directories
as you can stomach. Next use do follow blog search engines
and do follow diver to nd blogs that have written recently
about your topic. You can also use the ASK blog search. When
you write a comment, use some of the orignal information you
found to beef your comment up. Also mention the fact that
you have written about this topic on your website. Make sure
your blog comments are interesting and add something to the
debate. Google has said it will come down on people that blog
spam.
Searching for Your Keyword + Forum to nd where other
people have talked about your topic online before. Take the
time to read those forum rules, and read a few posts. Then
make an account and start offering your opinion on the events
in those forums. Dont worry about signatures just yet, just
make sure you comment enough on the topic you have
chosen, in an intellifent way. Try to aim for two or three forums
and make up to ten posts in each. DO NOT post links to your
website yet. You are still building an idea of what people post
and how you can help them with their problems.
Sign up for LinkMarket.net and use your chosen keyword as
the anchor for your website.
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Day Three Content Syndication
Sign up for Blogger, WordPress.com, Weebly and Tumblr.
Take your original article, cut out the main conclusion, and
reduce it down to a 200 word abridged version. Add some
small information you have learned from the forum posts and
blogs you have read so far. Post the abridged version on your
4 new blogs, making sure all the links back to your orinal
website are intact, but also that you link Blogger to WordPress
to Weebly and so on.
These blogs are not for SPAM. You are not going to ll these
blogs up with the same stuff you post on your website. Think
of these new blogs like Twitter to your website. Post short
posts about interesting things that might not make it to your
own website. Use them to network and share content without
cluttering up your own domain.
Content syndication is preferrable to article marketing because
a) you retain the content and b) you have a better chance of
networking and improving the SERPs of your blog on another
domain than a static page stuck deep in a website.
Once you have written the new posts, post those links on
Twitter and stumbleupon etc. I would also consider nding
other small directories to post links to your new blogs. You
should always be as consistent as possible with your keywords
and anchor texts.
The main idea here is that you are pushing your content out
to audiences that might not read it. You are also doing this in
a way that will allow you to control the process.
Day Four - Trafc Building
This is the bit where, hopefully, the clever writing and
interesting perspective comes in. This is where you should
return to your forums and start asking questions that will get
people to answer you in an interesting way. We might ask
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What do you the forum readers think about the state of SEO
in Sydney, or If you were an SEO in Sydney what might
you do? As people start to answer use a link back to your
original articles as proof of what you are arguing for. Use the
knowledge you have gained to post your link as back up.
Now would be the time to use a link back to your article and
your home page in the signatures on the forums. Some of
them require you to wait a certain amount of time, which is
ne, you just need to make sure you are answering in a clever
and inciteful way.
You should also now start to contact the writers of bloggers in
your feild and see if you can get them to mention your posts or
blog posts in their next post. It helps if you have linked to them
or used their material in your original post. Make sure you
use this as a chance to start building a good relationship with
other bloggers. It will help if you are a leader in your eld, or
if you have carried out some original research for your article.
Day Five The trendy follow up
This is the most crucial part of increasing your position in
Google. You need to post a follow up article on your website
and your new blogs. You can follow a similar process as
before, but your topic needs to be different.
First use Google Insights and Tweet Meme to nd out
ANYTHING that has been trending in the last few days. It
has to be AT MOST in the last 3 days preferrably in the last
24 hours. Then write a your new article with Keywords +
Trendy topic. It could be anything. In our case we might try
Justin Beiber and SEO. In the past we have written about
how marketing applies to the Australian election. Make sure
your post is provocative, and out there. This post HAS to be
something that will cause a reaction in people, even if it is one
with the up-chuck reex.
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Make sure you use the trendy words as the title keywords and
the rst words in the body. Try to write as much as you can
about how your topic applies to the trend, how it inuences
the trend, what works and what doesnt etc. ONLY link back to
your original article and your front page. You can pepper your
new article with links to other page about the trendy theme,
but nothing else, and try to keep it to pages that have a good
page rank.
Again, post the page out to StumbleUpon etc, and Twitter.
Make sure you use Twitter three or four times, aiming to get
people to read your posts related to the trending topic.
Day Six Trendy Syndication
Follow through the same process as before posting a cut
down version to your new blogs. However when you post this
one, focus on the trendy theme. Make sure you have at least
3/4s on the trend, and the other quarter on your topic. Again
make sure the only links back are either for the trend, or back
to your website.
Post this one out to Stumble Upon etc.
Post something about this in your forums, but this time link to
your blogs, not your main page. Say something like I found
this crazy post on Justin Beiber and SEO etc. The main goal
of this post is to improve the SERPs of your original page and
your front page of your website.
Day Seven Analysis
Like all good marketing people, the seventh day is for analysis.
Look at your analytics and see if there was any impact. See if
there were any keyword trends that was attracting people to
your website. Use yahoo search and open site explorer to nd
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out which other pages ended up linking to your topic page.
You should also use this time to look for other topics in your
eld that you can write about. The more you follow this
process, the better your position will be overall.Write down a
list of posts you can use in the future. Write a lot of back up
posts just for your blogs that are quick and easy posts to keep
the content fresh. Read other peoples blogs and comment
just for fun, not just for SEO purposes.
We rotate content across about 10 different blogs and our
website, with a focus on creating interesting content. We also
know that it is a long term prospect. However the main idea is
that we can build some SEO properties that gather external
links in their own right.
When you are in a competitive SEO market, after a while
more PR 0 links just wont cut it. You have to build ways to get
PR3+ links that come back to your website. Quality content is
the best way to do that.
What is better than SEO?
Good SEO should be a normal part of web design. Let me
say that again for those with a short attention span. If your
web designer is not giving you a degree of optimisation with
your web design, then it is time to nd someone else. On page
optimisation such as proper use of title tags, H1 tags and good
content should be free. But what about more time consuming,
costly, SEO practices such as off page promotion, competitor
analysis etc? What alternatives are there to spending months
trying to build a position in Google?
Being Memorable keep people coming back for more
because they remember who you are and your brand beats
being number one because you will always have customers.
Publicity Ofine press is just as important as online marketing.
Getting rave reviews from any form of traditional media has a
double effect of cementing the brand and driving trafc.
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WOM/Buzz Buzz around something unique is more likely
to drive unique trafc than just trying to place rst for original
organic widget company.
Unique products/services Selling the same thing as
everyone else means you are competing in the same space
for the same sh. If you can create something unique, you are
competing in a pond all to yourself.
PPC In highly competitive markets, it might take months and
thousands of dollars to get in front of customers. However you
can buy keywords on Google at a much lower rate.
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How to get people to buy
Pictures worth a thousand words Online
Marketing Rule#1
The is really only one rule to direct mail pieces that surprise,
and that is creativity. We get hundreds of direct mail pieces
every week, and they all look the same, are written in the
same boring copy, and have the same SCREAMING offers
on the front.
There really is only one secret to great direct mail, and that is
to be creative. Here are two quick steps you can take that will
help improve your direct mail response.
Surprise Broca Brocas area is a part of the brain that deals
with anticipation. It is a hard wired section of the brain that
would normally block out anything that is anticipated.
If you cant get through this section of the brain, your message
will get tuned out. Roy Williams coined the phrase when
looking at the anatomy of a marketing campaign. The quick
tips he suggested were,
Avoid words that do not contribute toward a more vivid or
colourful mental image.
Frosting. Replacing common, predictable phrases with
unexpected, colourful ones.
Seussing. Invent words. Read a Dr. Seuss book and you will
see how a man who invented words became a best-selling
author.
Ignore the details, exaggerate the colour, and remove the
black.
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Write in Style. Poor English, common boring sentances, they
all make for a bin-ward bound Direct Mail piece.Write like
you mean what you are saying. Write like you are entering a
creative writing competition.
What makes a good call to action?
On every piece of marketing you produce you should be
focusing on a call to action. You must compel your readers/
listeners to take action, otherwise you are missing out. I would
even argue standard Branding marketing should include a
call to action somewhere.
Timely/Time focussed. Give your readers a reason to pick up
the phone/email right then and there.
If you dont have a special on, or an offer, make one up.
The focus is on the action. Call this number Hit send on this
button. A web address on its own usually does not function
well enough as a call to action.
The call to action is easy to see, read and understand. On a
website the best place for a CTA is the top right hand corner.
People know what they are asking for/to do. They are
contacting you for a consultation, or they are going to get a
phone call from you etc etc.
Landing Pages
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Product pages that encourage conversions
Turning your website from a drab static website into an
exciting lead producing machine can take time and money.
Here we have a long list of lessons we have learned over the
years to produce the best web design that converts readers
into customers. First though, here are some quick tips;
Optimising your website for conversion is an ongoing long
term initiative, a few quick points from this page will not make
your website the best it can be.
Focus rst on the offer, then the layout.
Dramatic changes can yield dramatic results. - we once turned
a 40% bounce rate website into a 5% by scrapping the theme
and starting again.
Excellent Design. In the end, your website is the most
important piece of marketing you can own, and it must look
good. The best web design obeys the rules of aesthetics and
landing page design, this means premium real estate for the
logo and the offer, concise use of page layout, customisable
widget areas.
First aim to build trust
Use safe shopping logos.
Customisable. You should be able to make many changes to
a template without spending too much time sweating over the
code. You should also be able to do most of that through a
CMS system or something similar. The easiest CMS Systems
are Joomla and WordPress.
SEO friendly. Your website should at least be optimised for
seo, that meant no ash, good used of H1 tags, css menus,
title tags, meta descriptions and a HTML and XML sitemap.
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Title and description Tags. These are the main tags that
Google will use for your listing. Including the main city and
your telephone number will increase conversions. Also making
sure that the right products and services are included in your
description will make sure you are attracting clicks from the
right customers.
Accessibility. The best web designs work with all modern
browsers and have W3C valid code. Up to 30% of
Reduce form elds required
Remove distracting banner images
Strengthen the visibility of the headlines.
The offer should be easy to see and understand. A large
dark headline with light background behind a features area
will attract attention to the offer. The best web designs have
all other elements balanced, so they dont overwhelm. You
should use short, direct, language that speaks to the user.
A clear primary call to action. Dont just state click here. You
should have action verbs that relate to the offer, like Buy
Now or Find Me
Repeat the call to action. Drive customers to interact with you.
Use contrast. The more contrast you have, the easier the
website is to read.
Keep the pages short and to the point. Whilst it is en-vogue
to have a long page jammed with SEO Keywords, the best
performing web designs have less content, more focussed
offers and several calls to action.
Content on the left, call to action on the right.
You need a two column layout, with the sales proposition to be
the rst thing that the user sees. Their eye will naturally track
to the right, where you put your call to action button. When
they use Google to search for your product you want them to
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see the offer rst.
White background.
All research in readability points to having a white background
as THE best way to endure copy is readable. To put this another
way you should have black text on a white background. If the
background is not white, it makes it difcult to use any other
colours in your body.
Stretchable side areas (outside of the body)
Either you need to build your website at 1000px across with
stretchable side areas, or have no side areas at all.
Reduced Javascript and CSS fed from the bottom
Cut down on javascript and CSS, have them in one le each
and load them from the bottom. This will speed up the web
page load time.
Test everything
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How to get people coming
back
8 ways law rms can use social media
Social media is proving to be a low cost and effective way for
companies to market themselves.Whilst there is increasing
anecdotal evidence law rms are catching on, it seems the
legal profession is still struggling to make the most of the new
media. Apart from the obvious ways of using social media,
like interacting with clients, there are plenty of other ways
law rms can benet from using programs like Twitter. So we
decided we would throw 10 ways law rms grow right now
with social media .
Stay on top of trends. This works from and industry and a client
point of view. A lot of companies are now using twitter and
facebook to post company announcements and updates. By
following checking feed of a client once a month you can see
where their business is moving. This goes for industry trends
as well. Use Google alerts, Technorati Tags and Trendistic to
stay ahead.
Comment on trends. Social media gives you a great opportunity
to comment on trends and provide information to companies
that may be having the same legal issues in your industry.
All this adds up to making your company brand stand out
as an industry leader. Use your own blog, set up a new blog
on wordpress.com or use the information in your company
newsletter.
Use it to recruit. The prime age bracket (33 -55) for qualied
professionals is the largest portion of twitter users online.
Social media is not just for kids. Posting job vacancies online
is one way, but posting job vacancies on twitter and searching
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Linkedin is becoming more the norm.
Develop targeted advertising. Social media now allows you to
target customers by a range of demographics, such as age,
sex, location, profession. It should not replace other forms of
advertising, such as keyword targetted advertising. However,
companies can use it to narrow down their target and the
interests they may have.
Track who is talking about your company. No longer do you
have to wait to nd out the good or bad news of people are
saying about you. There are now a vast range of tools, such
as google alerts, twitter search etc that allow you to nd out
what people are saying about you.
Find out what your competitors are doing. Social media means
you can create feeds or bookmarks that track your competitors
posts, actions and announcements. This allows you to become
far more responsive to changes in the competitive landscape.
Use twitter tags, or follow your competitors on twitter.
Improve your position in Google. Three key things that will
help with your position in Google. One is you can build links
from your online proles back to your website. This can mean
that you can have authoritative links pointing to your website
that need little maintenance. The second is you can use social
media to nd trends that will allow you to comment and build
content on your website. The more content you have the better
you look to search engines. Lastly you can use social media to
nd out what other people are talking about in your eld. You
can use programs like Google keyword search and following
Twitter tags to see what other people are talking about. When
you add content to your website that is timely and on trend,
you are more likely to be found by potential clients who are
searching for that issue, it is good SEO practice.
Communicate internally, build relationships. There is a good
chance that your staff and coworkers are using some form of
social media, and are already familiar with websites like Digg,
Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. However more companies
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are adopting social media as a way of developing internal
relationships and sharing information.
ConnectBeam Tagging and social networking
Ning - Create your own social network
SuiteTwo - An integrated package of social network options
Creating Brand Evangelists
Brand Evangelists areyour key to outstanding of Word of
Mouth (WOM) marketing. These are the people that will go
forth and spread your marketing message. They are your
early adopters and the last customers standing behind your
business. They have the following characteristics;
They are vocal, they spread the word they are usually the
most active people in forums and online. They will be the rst
to claim a great victory and the rst to be crying over a great
loss. They are the rst to pass along information and help
make it become a viral sensation. Evaneglists will be the rst
to call foul also, and their cries should not be dismissed.
They are loyal Betamax became Betacam because the
product was high quality and the following was strong. Apple
fans purchase products that are higher priced, and often with
fewer features for the sames reasons.
They are the rst to try your latest products. They are early
adopters.
If you can capture this key, valuable, segment of your market,
they will spread the word for you, and act as an unofcial
marketing force. Here are the steps you should take to engage
this part of the market.
Create for one segment of the market. Target your largest,
or most valuable, portion of the market and create a product
specically for them. There is nothing that dooms a product
or service more to failure than something that tries to be
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everything to everyone. Find out how, where, when and why
they use your current products. Use this as a model for your
next product. Get your key segment to test the product and
get a rst look at it. Allow them to try it out for free.
Create a Culture. A culture is made up of traditions, heroes,
shared experience, symbols and rituals. Think of all the
Rocky Horror fans or the dead headers. Artists are great at
this because they always project something that their fans
can grab on to. Companies can create a culture by giving
customers more than just a service. Customers will become
proud followers of a company that shares experiences. If you
are selling a product, who uses that product in a unique way?
Which of your customers deserves to be recognised?
Empower your customers to spread the word. Social
networking has helped companies to spread the word to
their immiediate followers. Allowing them to spread the word
is the next step. This goes beyond t-shirts and free golng
umbrellas. This means inviting them to exclusive events, so
they can tell all their friends.
Create something unique. It does not have to be the best,
or the brightest. It can be the most functional, the most
interesting, or even something in a different colour. People
want to buy the hole, not the drill bit. However people will fall
in love with a drill bit that never breaks, or that glows in the
dark so you dont lose it.
The key to social media
Social Media is fairly new to the world of marketing and has
tremendous amount of potential for taking advantage of
emerging into the global marketplace. Social Media has been
dened as using online technology (accessible via a computer
or mobile device) to communicate through the internet
instantaneously. This may include sending a text, watching a
video on YouTube (or other sites), sending images or audio
messages, podcasts, reading and commenting on blogs, and
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using social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The possibilities are endless and when you start marketing
your product or service through these communication channels
you have opened your doors far and wide.
To narrow the scope let us take a close look at how to market
through social media websites. As of June 2011 the top 5
social networking websites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
MySpace and Ning. They are rated by the number of daily
users on their website. Take for instance our #1 website,
Facebook; they have 550 million daily users from all around
the world. Imagine what you can do using the tools to market
your product or service through an outlet of this size! In fact,
most Facebook users expect to be able to join a group or be
able to like your company. It goes with telling the story of their
life when they want to show the world that they like you.
Create your Marketing Plan: You have many advantages to
reaching millions of people a day using social media. Even
though the scope is so large on who you can reach you still
need to dene your marketing strategy and target audience.
You dont want to go out there like a loose cannon. Who are
you ultimately trying to reach? What is your capacity as far as
handling sales? What kind of return on investment are you
looking for? What is your advertising budget? How fast can
you process orders?
Some of the lters you can choose from for reaching your
target audience are location, demographics (age, gender,
language), likes, interests, education and work. With these
kinds of lters you can go local or global in a particular niche.
The possibilities are endless which is why you need to narrow
your scope.
Create your Advertisement: Now that you know what you want
to sell, how much you can handle selling and who you want to
sell it to you can create your advertisement.
Open up your business account through whichever social
media site you will be using.
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Ensure that you are able to stay within your budget and that
the potential return on investment meets your needs.
Input only applicable information about what you are trying
to sell. You dont want to get the person confused or off on
another tangent.
Always select a picture to put on your advertisement. People
are visual. First they will see the picture and then wonder
what you have to say.
Only run one ad at a time. This type of advertisement is usually
billed per click. If you are reaching your target audience then
one ad will be enough. Otherwise, you will have the same
person clicking on your ad and that will skew your data and
you wont know which ad really sold them on your product or
service. Run one ad for a period of time and then run another
ad when the one is over. This will give you an idea of which
strategy is working best.
Tips for Successful Advertising: Now that you have created
your ad you will want to follow these tips to have that ad work
for you more effectively.
Dont send people to your home website page people may
get lost or side-tracked.
Send people to a task specic landing page if you want
them to sign up for your newsletter then send them exactly to
where they sign up. If you want them to buy your product send
them to the shopping cart.
Create a Thank you page after they have completed the
task they will be taken to a page that says thank you and
this is where you would also ask them to either like you or
follow you.
Create a new ad people get use to seeing the same thing
over and over and next thing you know they dont actually see
your ad (even though it is right there). Create a new ad every
couple of weeks so you stay fresh and your ad pops out to
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them. This will also help you improve your CTR (click through
ratio).
Dont get discouraged the onset of advertisement may
appear to be slow. It takes time to build your marketing
campaign to be successful. If one ad wasnt as successful
as you wanted then try something different next time. Brand
recognition doesnt happen overnight so if you are new to the
website you have to get out there and build up your brand
reputation rst.
Customer Engagement: A true successful marketing campaign
includes engaging your customers. Social media networking
sites will allow you to do this on a fan page or twitter account.
Here are some tips to help you to engage your customers.
Design your page with excitement and brand recognition. First
of all, you want people to recognize your company. Second of
all, you want it to be fun to visit your page.
Add apps to your page. Some ideas include, placing your
favorite YouTube video on your page through You Tube
Box(of course, you will want it to pertain to your business).
Through Networked Blogs you can showcase your daily blog
on your fan page. These are just a couple of ideas there are
thousands of apps to choose from.
Create your publishing settings to where you can update
your fans about things they will want to know and make sure
you dont update them about minor details that may begin to
annoy them.
Create photo albums. People love to view pictures and want
to know who is doing what. If you have special events break
out the camera and put them on your fan page. You can also
put pictures of your logo or products.
Create status updates to keep people informed. Or to really
boost engagement ask your fans or followers questions so
that they will begin to engage in a conversation with your
business. This is a great way to nd out what people like,
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dont like or want to see from your business.
Keep an event calendar updated. You can invite people
to attend any special event. It can be an online event or a
physical location. Get people involved!
Return comments. When someone leaves a comment on your
prole page then shoot them something back in return.
Want More Likes? Naturally, in the world of marketing online
the more likes (or followers) you get the more successful you
are at reaching your customers. Here are some ways outside
of buying them that you can get more likes.
As already mentioned above advertising on the website
such as Facebook or Twitter.
Promote your business page to your family and friends through
your personal prole. You can suggest that they become fans
of your business through your personal prole. We all have to
start somewhere and really if they are your true friends they
should like your business, right? Ask your friends to suggest
your page to their friends and so forth. Before you know it you
could have thousands of fans and likes.
Send a powerful message. The power of headlines and titles
are sometimes not given enough credit. Have the title of your
fan page stand out and bring the WOW factor to people that
come across it.
Have credibility. Make sure your information is accurate and
free of grammar and spelling errors.
I have seen a number of marketing strategies as of lately in
my own personal web space. I found it amazing what one
can do in such a simplistic manner. Within the last thirty days
I have seen three very interesting new marketing strategies
take place. I would like to share these with you and hopefully,
you can take your business in one of these directions.
Angry Birds/Smart Phone: First of all, I had only heard about
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this game from other people in my ofce and havent ever
tried it myself. I found a You Tube video that went viral within
hours of being uploaded. Angry Birds created a joint marketing
strategy with the Smart Phone and T-Mobile. Within three
days this video has received 2.7 MILLION views! Along with
20,175 likes, 450 dislikes and 2,960 comments. I read some of
the comments and many people are looking forward to either
buying the phone or playing Angry Birds. Talk about going
viral! Here is a prime example why you want to get involved
with launching videos. Here is the link if you want to check it
out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzIBZQkj6SY.
Lady Gaga: The Lady Gaga is a very intricate woman and has
a reputation for the shock factor which by all means is a great
marketing strategy all in its own right. However, the Lady took
the promotion of her new single to a level no one expected.
She worked out a deal with the infamous game Farmville to
promote her latest single. Yes, the Farmville neighbors all went
to visit the Lady at Gagaville. It was quite the amusement and
Farmville took on new animals, seeds and trees to play along.
Not only did Lady Gaga use a social networking platform for her
business but she went deep inside the platform and invaded
an actual game. In fact, she invaded 43.5 million farms! Ill
be honest with you; I personally, wouldnt have listened to her
new song if it wasnt for Farmville. And I like it! Great move for
the Lady.
Capital One: Capital One has always been a huge television
promoter with fantastic commercials but you havent seen
much of them on the social networking scheme. Well, you
have now. After Lady Gaga was off the farm Farmville added
a new promotion with Capital One. If you signed up for Capital
Ones credit card then you would receive a Visigoth Statue.
That statue then gives the Farmville addict 7 days of double
mastery. I know, what the heck am I talking about? Or you
might know since Farmville has 43.5 million users. In fact, it s
projected that Americans will spend over $2 BILLION just on
Farmville in 2011.
Partnering up with popular games as part of your marketing
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strategy isnt a bad idea after you do all the guring. Americans
are expected to spend over $2 billion on Farmville alone.
Facebook currently has 500 million active users around the
world. Only 20% of those are Americans so if Americans are
spending over $2 billion then how much money is it total? I
sure hope you get the picture.
5 Tips to using Social Media Networking
Whether you are a small business, mid-sized business or a
large corporation you must be in the middle of the social media
networking craze. It has been determined by the everyday
folks (your customers) that social networking is a trend that
is here to stay. Everyone wants to know what you are doing
and when you are doing it. You are either already meddling
in social media are beginning to explore your best options.
Either way you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed. Here are
some tips to help you along your way.
#1 Create your marketing strategy ahead of time: The options
are endless once you start tapping into the global market and
trends are like wildre. In order to keep some control of what
you are trying to accomplish you will have to have a plan in
place rst. Sure as time goes along you can alter that strategy
to stay in the loop or follow a more promising lead then where
you started. However, no matter which changes you do make
sure you have a strategy in mind.
#2 Correct any product or service aws rst: We all know that
everything and everybody isnt perfect. That is why we know
that you may want to x any minor details before launching
into the social networking scheme. There is a lot of power
related to this world and it will do one of two things for your
business. It will make it grow quickly or it will kill it quickly.
Make sure your product is up to standards so you have rave
reviews.
#3 Ensure you have adequate staff: Once you enter into
social media networking it is possible that you will grow very
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quickly at rst. It is hard to say but hopefully, your research
can determine the type of growth you are to expect. If you
expecting a massive jump in sales make sure your business
is equipped to handle it. If you cant help the customers
effectively then the social network could squash you like a
bug.
#4 Create and participate in conversations: Once you begin
social networking you will need to keep it up. If you disappear
after a few postings or blogs then that can damage your
credibility. It can resemble not showing up for your appointment
or meeting with a client. As your business grows you may
need to hire someone to assist you with reaching out to the
public and keep those conversations going.
#5 Use your information wisely: You will have a ton of
information at your ngertips. What will you ever do with all of
it? You are going to use it to your advantage. Customers are
more than happy to share their experiences and what they
wish they could do with a product or service. Listen to them,
ask them more detailed questions and take your product to
the next level. You can jump ahead of your competition by
interacting and actively listening to what your customers are
saying.
Creating Word Of Mouth Generating
Buzz
All marketing campaigns should also promote the spread
of your message via word of mouth. Word of Mouth is
the most powerful marketing medium, because a personal
recommendation goes a lot further than a message on a
billboard or email. In developing markets and new product
launches, word of mouth has the most inuential effect on
whether a customer considers that product during a purchasing
decision.
Here are some ways you can increase the spread of your
message through word of mouth;
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Make your message important, imperative, time constrained
and interesting. If you are launching a product, it is far more
effective to say We are giving you the exclusive chance to
test our new product, but only for the rst week of June at
our website. In that one sentence, you have focused your
message to time, space and opportunity.
Make your message easy to spread. In the least your website
should have the option for people to re-tweet or post on
facebook/reddit etc. If you want to get really inventive you
should also provide an incentive for people to spread the
message, either through recommend a friend or here is
your exclusive token, you can use to to invite friends.
Encourage, create, promote and reward fans. You should
create/manage a group of your most loyal fans and leak
information to then about new products and new opportunities.
Encourage them to spread the word, by posting reviews or
comments on blogs and other review websites. Reward them
with either exclusive offers, complimentary products or news
information before anyone else.
Respond quickly and directly to early feedback, whether
positive or negative. At one company we work for, there is a
policy on customer reviews, that if someone posts a negative
review online, all attempts are made to contact that person to
attempt to x the situation. Creating two way communications
with your customers will help encourage the ow of positive
feedback. Negative feedback will be increased when there is
a communications vacuum.
Measure the spread, as much as you can. Measuring word
of mouth can take on several forms. Companies can make
offers/links to websites unique to each campaign, or medium.
You can also use websites like tweetmeme, trendpedia or
howsociable. In the least companies should track what is
happening on their website. Once you understand how and
where the message is spreading, you can feed and promote
the channels that it is working in.
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Celebrate success. When you have a word of mouth driven
phenomenon, display the success and promote it to anyone who
will listen. Share the glory with your fans, and give then a pat on
the back. Recognition of achievement can go a long way.
10 Ways Cafes Can Generate Customers
Using Social Media
There is no doubt that social media generates sales for
businesses. Over 50% of people are more willing to buy from
a company once they become a fan or follower online. Cafes
and Restaurants should be using social media such as Twitter
and Facebook to grow their business, with little investment
other than time. As social media is maturing, more websites
and applications are being created that target the Cafe and
Restaurant community. Websites such as FohBoh are now
promoting chefs and restaurant owners.
The 3 main goals of social media for cafes should be;
Engage with your customers, create discussion
Increase/empower your Brand Evangelists,
Increase your sales
Social media allows restaurants to achieve this in ways
that were not possible 10 years ago. Potential customers
increasingly use social media to interact and engage with
companies. It can only take 10 minutes a day to maintain a
social presence online, and the benets can be huge. In one
example a cafe doubled its clientelle just by using Twitter.
Use customer review websites such as eatability, google maps
and menupages to see what people are saying about you. All
are free to use, and Google Maps allows you to put up a lot of
information about your business. Engage with the reviewers.
Use the negative comments to address any shortcomings in
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your own service. Use the positive reviews as ways to focus
your own marketing. Above all make sure you are listed in
these websites. Getting on top of customer reviews is priority
number one for restaurants right now.
Use social tracking like TweetBeep and Backtype to monitor
who is talking about you. Dont just set up alerts for your name,
also look for people talking/tweeting about other restaurants
in your area. Use these conversations as a chance to a)learn
about your market and b)jump in and start a discussion with
potential clients.
Send out exclusive deals that are only available to those using
your social media of choice. Tell them to print out or show the
tweet or page with the special code on for a discount. This
has a double effect of measuring how many people are paying
attention to your social network.
Create a special Web 2.0 night/afternoon/drink. Make it a
mashup night where people can come and meet other social
networkers. It could become an internet singles night or a
IT Crowd night. Either way use social networking in your
promotion of special events. One restaurant teamed up with
a social application to generate 161 new customers on one
night.
Develop and promote a Facebook page. It is a way to network
with current customers and nd potential new customers.
As people using facebook can recommend pages to their
friends, this is a powerful way to encourage the spread of your
brand. Promote your use of the page with special offers or
invitations that are exclusive to fans of your page. You can
put up videos and pictures of your food. Allow people to engage
with your staff/chef as well as the food they serve. Facebook
should be looked at as another face of your business.
Make sure you have information, such as a simple logo,
inside your restaurant or cafe promoting your use of social
media. As people start to use mobile devices to tweet etc, you
will nd more people using social media while they are sitting
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in your establishment. This will allow you to connect to more
customers and engage with those that already know about
your business. You should also have this information on your
website. Again this only has to be a simple logo and link to
your Facebook page etc.
Connect with your suppliers, indirect competitors, corporate
customers (potential and current), online. Use social
networking to stay in touch with everyone in the supply chain.
Social media is still in its infancy, but never before has there
been an opportunity to become a cafe marketing gorilla
regardless of your business size. The more you connect with
the businesses in your ecosystem, the larger your presence
will be.
Find and connect to complementary services. You could
work with a supplier, eg a Soft Drinks wholesaler, to create a
social networking promotion to drive people to your business.
You could work with a local tourist honey-trap to create a
promotion for a day out. The possibilities are only limited by
your imagination.
Use Youtube or podcasting to engage with your customers and
increase the conversation volume. The ease with which you
can use online platforms to promote your brand is increasing.
You could easily start using YouTube to promote customer
testimonials. You could lm and promote your latest event.
You could create an audio broadcast of any bands playing.
You could give a guided online tour of your kitchen. You
could create a bio of your top chef. You could lm your food
being prepared. Again all of this must be integrated with your
business plan and your social media plan.
Ask/Tell people to promote your service. Give your fans a
chance to promote your service through badges on facebook
pages or asking them to re-tweet. Encourage them to share
your story through groups and other communities. We have
encouraged customers to go online and post reviews of us
anywhere they can. You could develop a team of engaged
followers that get special discounts.
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Marketing out of a recession
There seems to be more and more evidence that, in virtually
every market, there is recovery and growth. How long the
growth will last is up for debate. What is certain is, when
growing a business, when everyone else is growing too,
means you need to tweak your marketing. Two key things
occur in a growth market, one, businesses are willing to risk
more to gain market share and two the rewards for marketing
can be greater, feeding the cycle.
Your marketing should pick up pace and breadth in a growth
market, otherwise you will nd yourself left behind. A rising
tide carries all boats, but some boats get carried higher than
others.
So we decided to put together 10 proven marketing ideas
to generate new business in a growth market. Generally
speaking, now is the time to introduce new products or
services, particularly premium products, however we have
assumed that this is on your horizon already. The rst step
should be numbered -1. which would be to market your way
through a recession. The best way to grow your business in
a growth market, is to have been consistently marketing your
way through the recession in the rst place.
Touch base with all your old contacts. If you have lists of
people who have unsubscribed from your lists, contact them
directly with a proposition. If you dont have these lists, now
is the perfect time to create them. Get in touch with your old
contacts just for coffee or better yet, call them and arrange a
meeting. Now is the time people will be open to new ideas.
Launch a new starter pack. Try it for 30 days! Get a trial version
for free when you call us now! Give people a risk free option
to try your business. In a growth market you will have more
people looking for new services or products.
Discover and explore new markets. The size of potential
rewards can be higher than at other times. Use tools like
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Google Keyword search or browse through Yahoo Directory
and look for potential allied industries or groups of companies
you could enter.
Build more content into your website. Use this chance to start
that blog and start building more content. When the market is
abuzz with new ideas and new products, not is your chance to
cement your busienss as an authority in the market. You could
just use your blog to post press releases, and then use the
press releases in the market to industry news media.
Reduce customer turnover. A growing market can work
against you too. In a growing market your customers are just
as likely to leave your business, due to competitive incentives
and new market entrants. Now is the best opportunity you
have to cement relationships with your current client base.
By far the best program we have run to increase customer
satisfaction for one of our clients, was sending out a thank-
you card. In the card was a discount coupon for their next bill.
It was unexpected, genuine and it worked well too.
Rene your bulk purchase offerings. When the market is
growing, dont be tempted to lower your price as it will just
eat away at your margins. Dont be tempted to offer 2 for 1
offers etc as it cheapens the product. Use the Amazon.com
model and offer people added value purchases. For instance
you could say, buy one product at normal price and get the
second one at 30% off. This increases the total value of the
sale without cheapening the offering.
Investigate/invest in new marketing methods. Now that there
is a chance to increase your market share, you should be
looking at new and efcient ways to grow your business. Last
year the use of mobile browsers increased by 319%, is your
website mobile friendly? Could you launch a mobile app that
is part of your service? Have you investigated digital print to
direct marketing? Earlier this year we created a marketing
campaign to over 3000 targetted customers for just $3000
including database, print and post direct to potential customers.
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Ask your customers what they want. How do you know what
your customers want from you? Ask them. It takes very little
time or money to set up a questionnaire or online survey. Ask
your current customers a few, quick, key questions such as
when they will be buying again, what they will be buying, if
they would prefer a different size, quantity order etc. As the
market is growing, now is the time to nd out if there is any
more room for your products or services in their life.
Celebrate some successes. You made it through a recession,
you should be pleased! Now is the time for you to celebrate
and promote some of the successes over the last year.
Momentum generates more momentum, so you should be
promoting the things you have done right and celebrating the
members of the team who have helped you grow. Build more
testimonials, create some strong customer proles.
Look at new methods of distribution. There are hundreds of
ways to sell online now. They all take a small amount of time
and money to get going, but most of them require very little
upkeep. You could expand your distribution overseas, if you
manufacture a specic product. In Australia AusTrade will trip
overthemselves to help you expand. You could start looking at
major chains to pick up your products. Not all major retailers
are open to heart-toheart conversation, but some time spent
working on a way in may reap generous rewards.
9/10 People Like Brands on Facebook
A new survey conducted by Exact Seek has found that 90
percent of people using Facebook have become fans of a
brand. This virtually proves without a doubt that a balanced,
multi channel, integrated marketing program is what every
business should be engaging in.
With success stories like Ritas Italian Ice how can any
business not look at social media as a cost effective method
for building their business. What Lorel Marketing Group, the
team behind Ritas, did well was they integrated their online
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marketing, including their social media stratagy, with their
ofine.
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Marketing with videos
Did you know that You Tube gets over 3 BILLION views every
day? Wow! Imagine what you can do with a marketplace like
that? Dont be shy you need to get in there and take a piece of
that pie! Use the masses of social networking to market your
business. Sure you are going to post a video on You Tube but
it isnt going to just stay on You Tube with the right marketing
strategy it is going to go viral!
Lets get Started: Obviously, the rst thing you would do is
create your video. Here are some tips to getting just enough
coverage to be successful.
Length of Video The maximum length of a video should be
10 minutes. The most successful lengths are 3-5 minutes.
Video File Size It should be less than 21.9 MB
Video Bit Rates The most successful bit rates are 300-400
Kbps
Video Content: The content of the video must meet your goal
of brand recognition. The idea in marketing videos isnt to
create an ad campaign but rather create brand recognition.
Subliminal Messaging: You dont want an ad campaign (unless
it was featured during the Super Bowl) but you do want is more
of a subliminal message. Example, Coca-Cola and American
Idol are a duo. You never see an American Idol episode without
the Coca-Cola container in front of the judges. The judges are
not saying Drink Coke. The product is sitting there ready for
you to recognize their brand and without saying it make you
get up and get a Coke.
Product Placement: Product placement is related to subliminal
messaging and is in fact, very much the same. Probably the
most famous product placement and even one of the originals
was in the 1982 lm E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. In order to
feature a product in a movie the movie must get certain
rights from the product. The joint venture between ET and
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Reeses Pieces paid off. The sales for the little known candy
at the time tripled!
Select Popular Categories: The most popular categories on
You Tube are entertainment, sports, music, comedy, and
news/politics. Make sure you video falls into one of those
categories to ensure that it goes viral.
Riveting: Yes, the content needs to be something that is truly
amazing, shocking, heart-felt, and the list goes on. At the end
of the day the video needs to be viewed not only once but
again and again by the same person. You want that person to
share the video with all of their friends! Make it worth the 3-5
minutes!
When to Post your Video: Yes, it is all down to a science! You
should know when the best times to post your video are. The
most common times that people browse You Tube are on the
weekdays between 2pm and 6pm. The two most common
days are Wednesday and Thursdays. If the peak hours begin
at 2pm then you need to post your video between 12pm and
1pm since it takes about an hour for your video to be posted.
Going Viral: The whole point of posting a video is to ensure
that it goes viral. Follow these tips and you are sure to make
it on the most viewed charts.
Pay per Post: You can market your video to people that write
blogs about your latest video and pay them to post your video
on their blog that day.
Forums: You feature your video on various forums and start
commenting on them. Yes, people do it all the time. They
comment back and forth with themselves between different
accounts to make it appear as though they are other people.
MySpace: MySpace has the capability of adding videos to
your web design. You can embed your video on your prole
and see if your friends will also embed the video. Then their
friends and so forth.
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Facebook: Facebook has a number of ways to share a video.
First you can put it on your prole, suggest it to your friends,
create an app, tag the video with your friends names, like it
and encourage others to do so and you can even create an
event and invite everyone to watch the video.
Email List: You can email the video to all your friends, families,
and business associates. If you already have an emailing
messaging company you can create an email campaign with
the video.
Circle of Friend: Yes, get your friends involved. You need that
base to start the spreading the word and your friends should
be able to help you in all of the suggestions above.
Titles are Important: Make sure your title will do what you want
it to do. Use keywords that explain your video but make sure
it is riveting and people want to open it to see what you are
talking about.
Thumbnails: Pictures, yes people need pictures. If it doesnt
have a thumbnail attached to it, it is going to get overlooked.
People look rst at the picture and then the title. No picture
no one reads the title no one watches your video.
Comments on You Tube: You got it, just what you did for the
forums. You are going to do it straight on You Tube. Create a
controversy. People love a heated debate!
Multiple Videos: If people liked the rst video they are probably
going to be looking for more. Create a series to get more hits
in total for your concept.
Relevant Tags/Keywords: When I type in a search bar to nd
ice cream. I expect to nd ice cream. The only way I can nd
the kind I want is by tags or keywords. Make sure that your
video is tagged with the correct tag and as many tags as
permitted (yet, relevant).
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Email marketing
Launching an email marketing campaign may be one of
the most valued and cost-effective marketing techniques to
increase your return on investment and trafc to your website.
Marketing techniques are crucial in todays business world as
the competition for business is erce. E-commerce is running
like wild re and we need to keep up with technology trends
and what consumers expect. Accessing information via the
web is crucial. Here is a how-to guide on how to start your
email marketing campaign.
Dene Marketing Purpose: You are ready to blast the highway
of ecommerce but you need a plan of action. Where are you
starting and where do you want to end up? Dene what your
purpose is for each email marketing strategy. Go back to
the basics and determine what is the product/service, who
is your target audience, what is your budget, what price will
the customer pay, the return on investment must sufce the
expenditure, and nally what is the promotion or gimmick?
After you have determined all of the basics you can get started
on your email marketing campaign.
Choose a Mailing System: During your travel on the
ecommerce highway you have to understand that the trafc is
heavy and you will need a mailing system that can provide you
with features and service that can handle thousands of emails
at a time. This type of task will not be able to be managed by
a person but rather a program. A mailing system will help you
design and publish your email. There are many templates to
choose from and from the list of emails you provide they can
send your email to everyone on your list for you. In addition to
the original email you can develop auto-responders. Below are
some sample mailing systems with their highlighted features.
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Mail Chimp:
Design Email Newsletters: Choose a customizable template
to not only get your message through but promote your brand.
Publish Your Content: Provide your list and they can ensure
your email gets to their inbox versus their SPAM box.
Share your Newsletter: Allows you to use social networking
websites such as Twitter and Facebook to promote your
campaign.
Track your Results: Mail Chimp gives you detailed reports and
even suggestions on how to improve your email campaign.
Manage your Subscribers: Allows you to create groups, create
auto-responders, ensure data security, create custom forms
and participate in co-branding with Mail Chimp.
Integrate with Others: Mail Chimp will help you connect with
others through your personal email program such as Gmail
or yahoo, integrate with places such as PayPal, Google
and social networking sites, and sync with a shopping cart
program.
Mobile App: Take Mail Chimp on the road with you. You can
access Mail Chimp through your mobile phone.
Campaign Monitor:
Create and Send Emails: You design your own email and they
will send it.
Managing Email Lists: They are able to create your Opt-in
Emailing list and remove those who wish to unsubscribe. They
are also able to create and manage different groups within
your master email list if you choose to send email campaigns
to different groups.
Reporting and Analytics: Shows you who is opening the email,
clicking links, forwarding and interacting with your business
on social networking sites. Share your newsletters with Twitter
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and Facebook; determine who is using which email client and
compares campaigns and spot trends.
Resell and Prot: You can create subaccounts and sell
Campaign Monitor services under your own domain.
Sign-up.to
Managing your data, lists and forms: you can create an
unlimited amount of data and lists, create forms, set up texting
programs and auto-responders.
Design and test campaigns: Create personable emails, texting
and twitter campaigns with their designer program. They will
also test your campaign prior to launching.
Sending messages: Gives you data on the best times to send
messages or updates.
Sharing your message: Allows you to share your messages
with Twitter, Facebook and WordPress
Analyse: Provides reporting on the effectiveness of your
campaign from who is opening your email to who has
purchased your product/service.
Create Your Email List: You can create your email list at the
same time of researching which mailing system you would
like to use. In fact, you may already have been working on
gathering emails from people that are already interested in
your product/service. The main point is that you can only
solicit those that have an interest in your business otherwise,
it is considered Spam.
Stay away from SPAM: SPAM is using an electronic message
to people who have not expressed an interest in the product
or service. SPAM can give you a bad name and damage your
businesses credibility. Only send emails to those that have
expressed an interest in your business, product or service.
Snail Mail: You may already have peoples physical addresses
through your current customer base. You can send them a
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yer or letter asking if they would like to be added to your
emailing system for free newsletter or notication of different
promotions.
Advertise your email: Make sure your email address is on all
forms of advertising: business card, invoice, yers, newspaper
ads, television ads, radio ads and all direct mailings.
Voicemail: Leave your email address on your voicemail as an
alternate contact method.
Contact your business by email: Create a situation where
the person of interest is only able to get more information by
emailing you.
Opt-in Email Advertising: Partner with another business where
the customer can express interest, receive promotions, or sign-
up for your free newsletter. A few names of businesses that
promote this type of service is Submit Express, Optin Services
and Data Depot. You may be able to nd a Mailing System as
described above that has Opt-in Email List Management as
one of their features.
Just say no to SPAM: The point of creating your email list is to
ensure that you are not sending unsolicited emails. Here are
a few more tips to ensure you stay off the blacklist.
If you are sending an email to someone in the United States
make sure you are following the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The
act species that you must have a way for the customer to
opt-out and the business has 10 days to remove the email
address and once the email address is added to the opt-out
list the email address cannot be used for any further data. The
content must be accurate in the subject line and a label must
be added if the email contains adult content. There must be a
physical address of the advertiser or publisher. There are both
criminal and civil enforcement. You can read the entire act at:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-108publ187/pdf/PLAW-
108publ187.pdf.
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Do not buy email address lists.
You can use a double opt-in feature. The person will rst opt-
in for your newsletter and then you send them a conrmation
email. The person would then to select a link to conrm they
have opted-in.
On your opt-in form provide an example of what your emails
look like.
Suggest that the new email contact adds you to their white
list to prevent your email from going to the auto-ltered spam
box.
Use your subject line wisely and dont try to sell in the subject.
Use email etiquette. Stay away from red text, several
exclamation marks, all caps and certain keywords.
Set up an abuse@yourdomain.com to accept complaints.
This will allow you to see who has reported you to spam in
their email.
Do not add images as an attachment. Include them inside the
email.
Use an email mailing system (previously discussed above)
Finally, obtain your spam score from Contactology. You can
input your message into their le and they will score your
email to determine if you are likely to be ltered into a Spam
folder or not.
Monitor your Mailing System Reports: No matter which mailing
system you choose make sure you continue to review the
reporting that they provide you. This will help you determine
who you are reaching and what their activities are once they
have opened your email. The mailing system reports will also
help you or they may automatically determine the best time of
the day to send your email. The global market is powerful and
even if your business is local you may need help to manage a
busy ecommerce site.
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10 Tips for the best email marketing
campaigns;
Target. Find out to whom you want to send the email campaign.
Make sure you know what they are interested in and what
market they operate in.
Produce quality content. Every day we recieve over 100
emails from various people that go straight to the bin. Make
sure you are given the recipient information that is up to date
(what is happening in your industry NOW), informative, (dont
just give facts, give analysis), fresh/new, (dont just cut and
paste from google, and dont just steal other peoples conent)
and above all make sure that it is well written. Poor content
can also get caught in SPAM lters.
Develop a list. Make sure that your recipients have allowed
you to send them emails. Make sure you have taken down
as much information as possible, at least their names and
company names. We use double opt in lists that people
actively subscribe to. We also use a different technique to
market to potential customers, however we are always moving
them to the opt in lists. We are also only marketing to small
numbers of potential customers so that we can keep the email
campaigns from becoming SPAM.
Use engaging subject lines. Try to sound informative and not
marketing. Try to show that the email is up to date and has
the latest information. Here are the top 5 subject lines, thanks
to Mail Chimp
[COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter
Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 Nov 4)
[COMPANYNAME] Staff Shirts & Photo
[COMPANYNAME] May 2005 News Bulletin!
[COMPANYNAME] Newsletter February 2006
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Personalise. By far more people will open, become engaged
and click through an email that has their name in it, or their
company name.
Use a good email marketing program like MailChimp. Mail
chimp is a good example of an email marketing client because
you can measure your performance, personlise the email.
They also have bucketloads of tutorials on how to improve
your email marketing campaigns.
Include several calls to action. We make sure in every
campaign we give the customer good reasons to click through
the email. This can be a particular special offer, a great article
or just asking them to update their information. We always use
immediate language and make sure that it is clear what is a
link and where they should click.
Test for design/looks. For every email campaign we produce
we run two different types of tests. Firstly we test the design of
the email in several different browsers. We test for useability
and readability. We want to make sure of the following;
Do the images show up, if they dont does the text make sense
on its own?
Does the image preview well, so people can see the heading/
rst paragraph of the content without opening email?
Does the design render correctly in a few different browsers
Does the content make sense? It seems easy to produce
content but is it short, punchy and readable in Outlook?
Do the links do what they are supposed to do?
Test for performance. We also run A/B tests to see which of two
headlines create the best response. Every email marketing
campaign we run a small test to up to 50 recipients with a few
different layouts of content. We keep track of the changes we
make and use this information to improve the performance of
our email marketing.
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Track Measure Repeat. All our email marketing campaigns
are active. We try not to run short term once off marketing
campaigns. We use our knowledge for each market in each
campaign to improve the quality of the next one.
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Advertising Online
ppc vs seo when to use Google Adwords
It seems to be the hip choice to spend money on SEO right
now. The forums are full of people claiming; dont spend
money on Adwords, it is expensive and short sighted. In some
instances, this is true, however it does not tell the full story.
Why does PPC advertising work?
The bottom line is Google Adwords works extremely well in
some markets. First of all you have to realize that spending
money on PPC advertising is a strategic choice. The strategy
could be long or short term, however you do need to look
at it in a targeted and outcome based way. You cant spend
money on PPC advertising in an aimless manner. Second
of all Google Adwords has to be one of the most ubiquitous
advertising method on the planet right now. More people
interact with Google on a daily basis than watch the Super
Bowl. You can reach any niche, any target in a cost effective
way not imaginable 10 years ago.
What is the problem with Google Adwords?
However in recent years Google Adwords has become too
good for its own boots. We regularly document changes in
the pricing of Google Adwords, and mostly they never go
down. Over the last 6 months the cost of ALL adwords has
increased, with some markets experiencing a 24% increase in
the cost of advertising. Some keywords cost $50 plus per click,
which is pretty much out of the reach of any small business
marketing budget. This is compared to a far lower cost per
click on something like Facebook. The other problem is that,
because almost anyone can have a panel of Adwords on their
website, and because the best markets have become wary of
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advertising from Google, the quality of clicks from Adwords
has also slowly decreased.
When does SEO work?
Building, and raising, an online prole takes time, effort and
skill. SEO isnt just about links, or just quality web content.
It too can take time and money that might not see a return if
done incorrectly. It is certainly more ckle than an Adwords
campaign. However it is generally a far more protable strategy
for long term lead generation. In some markets, where there
is little competition for certain keywords, one good link from
an online directory can be enough to give a website a front
page berth. In fact this would be the case with almost all local
markets, and local keywords, where there are less than 10
competitors looking to make the front page.
In this scenario, the cost to the website owners might be a
few hours in the beginning and then maybe one or two hours
a month after that to maintain front page status. This is
compared to $1 per click on Google adwords in a small market
that, in a $150 campaign, will only generate a few leads for
one month only, after which the owner has to start all over
again. Even if you look at spending money on Facebook ppc
advertising, you might get some response from 50c per click,
but again it is short term and may generate some followers on
your Facebook page, but that is about it.
When is a Google Adwords campaign a good idea?
Spending money on Adwords can be a very effecting marketing
strategy in the following scenarios;
The strategic campaign
Got a short term offer, or event, that might last for one day
or two weeks? Adwords is a great idea for this. If you are
promoting an event, or something that is only going to exist for
a short term, ppc in any form is one of the most cost effective
online advertising methods. Adwords or even social media
advertising allows you to target a diverse range of people,
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even in just one local area. SEO for this scenario would take
a long time to build, for something that exists for only a short
period of time.
Where SEO is expensive
Effective, long term SEO can be expensive in highly competitive
global markets. International insurance companies are a
good example. The leading Australian global insurance
companies have exceptionally high PageRank and have tens
of thousands of afliates linking to them. If you were to launch
a marketing campaign in this market, the $50 price tag per
click would actually see cheap. If you found the right target,
and could convert, almost any form of ppc would work better
than attempting an SEO campaign
Where you are branching out into new markets
If you are an established player in one market, and you are
looking to move into a new area, Adwords, or some other
ppc campaign, might be your best and only option for an
online marketing campaign. When a website builds an online
prole, the search engines will give the website a ranking for
a particular keyword. Once that keyword prole has been
established, it is very hard to shake. So if you have rated well
for Sydney Marketing if you suddenly want to add Brisbane
Marketing onto your keyword prole, you are not only looking
at starting again, you are also looking at having to work against
the Sydney keyword prole you have already got.
We will go into the major Adwords markets later this year, but
for now, you can see, Adwords are great in the right place.
Improve your Google Adwords
performance
Seeing as it is close to Christmas, and I am sure there are a
lot of people out there who are looking to sell more stock, we
thought we would run through a few quick lessons on how
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to improve your Google Adwords performance. If you have
not done so already I suggest you go through the Google
performance guide rst too. In the least you should learn how
to run your campaign budget effectively and learn how to pick
keywords.
Set up conversions The main reason to set up some sort of
conversion, is that you will be able to get Google to display
the ads that give you the best conversion rate. It isnt hard, all
you have to do is put a small piece of code on the page that
is the completion page. The main goal of a tactical Adwords
campaign is to directly increase sales.
Specic offer Google adwords are best performing when
there is a specic offer. If you throw up a generic ad, you will get
generic tire kickers. Your main aim should be to attract people
who are ready to buy. You dont want information seekers,
because that ad costs you money to educate someone who
may well buy from someone else. A specic offer is x product
at y price, delivered on z etc etc. A specic offer is not Cheap
insurance or The best baby products.
Specic details This is the difference between a good ad
and a bad ad. By the time people are ready to click on your
ad, they know what they want, and the price they are willing
to pay. The more specic you can be the better. If there are
any small technical details that might make a difference, then
put them in your ad. Make sure you ad two or more of the
following; price, height, weight, delivery time, colour, size,
stock levels, made in, guarantees, returns policy etc.
Lots of the right keywords In some tutorials I have seen
people suggest you use as many keywords as you can. This is
clearly wrong when you think about it. Someone searching for
buy bunk beds Australia is clearly more ready to purchase
than someone searching for bunk bed reviews. You do want
as many variations on a theme as you can get, but you only
want to pick the right ones that are likely to induce a sale. You
still want to include variations on the generic words if possible,
so in our example bidding for bunk beds is ok, as long as
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your bid is not so high that it will dominate your budget. The
reason for this is that your ads should be the second level of
protection against tire kickers.
Create as many ads as you can I dont mean create four
or ve ads, I mean create twenty or thirty ads. The more ads
you can think of the better, as you never know which ones will
give you the edge. Also the ads should be as specic as you
can make them, to help prevent against tire kickers. You want
people to click who are likely to purchase the product and are
not looking for comparisons. Here are the basic types of ad
we usually create
Long/Interesting words Fill your ad with unusual words like;
Incredible, Amazing, Fastest Selling!
Figures Price, weight, size, Was x now y, save xx%
Guarantee Money back in x days, delivery in x days
Headlines Include your keywords, include the price etc.
Benets (not just functions)- Removes stains in 30 seconds
Evaluating Content Sharing Methods
Your web 2.0 strategy should involve enabling content sharing.
Even the most basic of websites should be built to allow users
to share content they have found on the web. After Google
announced its sharing option in Google Bookmarks, we
decided to help you understand the pros and cons of content
sharing websites and how they may help you shape your
social media strategy. We only selected a few of the content
sharing options, as there are currently some 271 content
sharing websites available. Something also worth noting is
that email makes up the largest portion of all content shared.
Google Bookmarks. The new kid on the block. At the moment
users can share content with other contacts through email
and public lists. It is easier to use that the older bookmarking
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systems and it has the benet of being integrated into Gmail
and Google Buzz. At this stage it is difcult to see how the
community will act towards the bookmarking system, and if
there will be any further developments, ie Popular Bookmarks.
Stumbleupon. The biggest benet of Stumbleupon is that
users can Stumble through the most popular bookmarks
available. Like a good box of chocolates, users never know
what they are going to get. The downside is that sharing your
list of contacts is actually quite hard compared to things like
Reddit and Digg. Also the community is quite inactive. Even
the most popular content only has about 20 to 30 comments
around it, so it is very difcult to guage what people think of
the content that is listed.
Delicious. Probably the least easy to share out of all the
content sharing options, but also one of the oldest.. There are
no obvious ways to benet from other peoples lists or content
and the way that they bookmarks are created sometimes feels
non-sensical. Delicious makes up about 2% of all content
shared, but again it is hard to see where the community is.
You have to rummage around to nd comments, which are not
in a nested fashion anyway.
Reddit only makes up about 0.9% of all content shared through
the web, placing it well behind the bigger content sharing
systems like Digg and Delicious. The major benet is the
subreddits system which means you can share content with
users who are active and interested in your chosen subject.
Also, with the way the rating system is structured, if you have
genuinely interesting content, there are few barriers to getting
the content in front of Reddits very active community. The
voting system ensures that, largely, only interesting or new
content oats to the top. The downsides to Reddit are; their
search function is broken and sometimes the community can
downvote content based on the way it is submitted, (eg: wrong
subreddit or poorly worded title) not on the content.
Digg is one of the most popular social media sharing
communities. It regularly has guest speakers and blog posts by
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interesting people. The content is always fresh and changing
based purely on the volume of people submitting content to
the system. The major downside though is that it has become
a victim of its own popularity. You pretty much have to rely on
getting content in front of one of Diggs power users in order
to spread the word. Also the community is tightly focussed on
only a handful of topics, so if you have somethin interesting on
origami, it is unlikely you will get it out to the people that might
be interested.
Facebook is the largest content sharing website available.
Recently they came out with statistics showing they were also
the largest image storage system in the world too. The benet
to sharing through Facebook is you can quickly develop a
community around whatever it is you are interested in. You
can then go on to share just about anything with your close
knit community of crocheters. The downside is there are a few
barriers to spreading quickly beyond your own community.
There are millions of Facebook groups, some with similar
ideas, but it is very difcult to nd out where they are and
who are the members. Also there is no way of knowing what
content is good or bad or what other people think.
Twitter allows users to share content with less than 140
characters. It is also easy to spread content with use of
hashtags. However the downsides to sharing content through
Twitter are the short messages themselves. It is very difcult
to hold a long debate in less than 140 characters. Also Twitter
has a major problem with spam. A large percentage of tweets
are either retweets or the same tweet reworded. The best
content has no way of reaching the top. Through services like
ad.ly, people with a large following will be able to get paid to
spread content, further pushing up the volume of spam.
Overall you are probably better to use a combination of social
media websites to nd the content you like and spread the
content you enjoy.
A Comparison of Social Advertising Digg,
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Facebook, Reddit
Advertising is becoming the key way for social networks/
aggregators to make money. The lure for advertisers is, they
can target genuinely interested customers by placing the ads
in relevant sections. As social networks and media mature,
their audience size is beginning to exceed traditional media.
There are a multitude of dangers in using social media and
aggregators for marketing and advertising, but these are no
worse than the dangers associated with advertising on a major
news website. Every advertising medium is unique and has its
own benets. Below we took all the information we could nd
on advertising through particular online media to provide a
comparison. For each website, we took one campaign and an
average of other information we found online. Digg.com
Digg.com Most data we could nd indicated that it is VERY
expensive to advertise on Digg for the amount of click-through
you get. It appears they are running their costing closer to the
online newspapers model of charging per impression. The
major benets and risk to advertising on social networks is
you can get a community discussion about your ad or product.
On Digg, this is harnessed by allowing advertising costs to
come down if your ad receives a certain number of votes.
Digg is the largest social aggregator on the web, so it attracts
a very large and diverse audience. It may be worthwhile to
advertise on Digg as an alternative to TV or online Newspaper
advertising, because the audiences are similar. Conversly
though, it appears, it could cost less to write decent content
and submit it to this social aggregator, rather than advertise
directly. IDEAL FOR: Games manufacturers NOT IDEAL FOR:
Car manufacturers
Reddit.com The information we could nd about Reddit
showed it was excellent value on a cost per click basis.
However it appears that the audience on Reddit is signicantly
smaller than other media. By all accounts you are advertising
to college-going, bacon loving twenty-somethings with no
money. This signicantly narrows the number of potential
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advertisers for the site. However, if you are advertising a new
Star Wars convention, or you are promoting a T-Shirt of a
narwhal eating the Kevin Rose, you may be in the right area.
With thousands of subreddits available, you can pretty much
name your target. If you want to advertise to the 2000 odd
subscribers to the Doctor Who subreddit, then this may be the
way to go. IDEAL FOR: Magic: The Gathering wholesalers
NOT IDEAL FOR: Toothpaste producers
Facebook.com - Currently the advertising network in Facebook
is somewhere between Digg and Google, both in terms of size
and cost. You can target based on a wide range of criteria
including location and keyword. However the click through
rate is relatively low. We guess this is because the targeting
system is not nearly as good as you would nd on Google.
Just because a prole says the words football as an interest,
does not mean I am looking for anything to do with football
right now, or even that I really like the game. The audience
on Facebook is still expanding, however the targets are still
the younger demographic. IDEAL FOR: Get Rich At Home
schemes NOT IDEAL FOR: Photocopier salesmen
SMH.com.au (and other comparable newsosaurs) The
Sydney Morning Herald is one of the most visited news
websites in Australia. It still has one of the most active online
ad networks of any internet news media. However, as with
other Newsosaurs, it still justies its rate card by impressions/
views. This may be ne for banks and car manufacturers that
are looking to justify their branding spending by the number of
people who see their logo. However most small and medium
businesses would nd the campaigns grossley under-perform
compared to an online advertising campaign. Even when the
ads on the website are matched with ads in their newsletters,
the level of targetting and the activity associated will not
satisfy most small advertisers. IDEAL FOR: Telcos and Car
Manufacturers NOT IDEAL FOR: The manufacturers of Civ V
Google Adwords The online advertising behemouth is the
model on which all other online advertising is measured. The
major benets include targetting keywords and phrases, as
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well as reaching people when they are ready to buy. The
downsides to Adwords are not so often talked about. Adwords
are creeping up in cost in many competitive categories. Some
advertisers expect to spend $5 to $10 per click, which puts
some advertising out of the reach of those with a small budget.
Also the deliberate or accidental click fraud is on the rise, as
more competitors or adword spammers click on ads placed
in valuable keywords. To get a reasonable return advertisers
should be expected to start with spending at least $100 and
spread the load into keywords that are less commonly used.
Having said that, however, some markets are still untouched,
and a large number of keywords have no competition at all.
IDEAL FOR: The local Pilates instructor NOT IDEAL FOR: A
startup webhost
If you have any experience advertising on social networking
or news websites, we would love to hear from you!
Mobile Marketing in a nutshell- Android,
iPhone, Blackberry
Bank of America has more than 930,000 customers for its
mobile banking services and is one of leaders in the space.
Mobile click-through rates average 8.9% up to 49%
Android has doubled market penetration and overtaken
iPhone in the last 8 months.
There are basically three leading, different and incompatible
operating systems on modern mobile smart phones. First
there was the Blackberry, which handles email and business
applications very well, and over a secure connection. Next
there was the iPhone, which is Apples offering. The iPhone
broke the mould with its applications market and has lead the
industry for the last few years with slick design and exibility.
However, in the last few months, Googles Android has come
on the scene with its own applications market, and is now
leading the pack.
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So what does this mean for marketers?
Although mobile browsers only make up around 1% of total
web trafc, you have to look at the demographics of mobile
web browsers. For one they are almost certainly educated,
tech savvy and with disposable income. Secondly, the lions
share of web browsing happens during the commute. Basically
you know you are talking to the early adopters when you are
marketing online. Also, this segment is probably the fastest
growing market segment at the moment, with mobile browser
usage doubling every few months.
Who is doing it and what is working?
It seems that all the cool kids are doing it. Samuel L Jackson
has his own app. Most of the big companies have started some
kind of mobile marketing program, because Mobile Marketing
can provide marketers with the holy trinity of
marketing, timely, personalised, actionable marketing
messages. There are dozens of great mobile marketing case
studies to look at that show how easy it is to get a response
out of targets. The methodologies vary too, with some mobile
marketing groups using SMS, and others using applications.
SMS marketing?
An example is this case study; McDonalds says, send a SMS
to Santa & get your gift within seconds. Promoted using unique
codes on cups for consumers to send in with 1 text message
right in the restaurant. Every code wins for the rst time
even physical prizes. It resulted in a stunning 25% response
rate with more than 1.5 million participations in ve weeks.
Mobile App marketing?
This is where the cutting edge cool is at. Almost all smart
phones now use GPS to give users their current location.
Now marketing professionals are tapping into this, providing
targets with information about their brand. Reebok released
a free app that allowed users to customise their trainers. This
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creates engagement and interaction directly with the brand.
Time Out offer an app, like many other media groups, that taps
into their information system and provides users with what is
going on, events, gigs around them right at that moment.
So what does this mean for marketing professionals?
In almost any industry, you must be looking at mobile
marketing as part of your mix. There are thousands of ways
you can provide information to your customers through mobile
marketing platforms.
20x click through, 1c per click advertising
What has 20x click through and costs less than 1c per click
(and marginally decreasing?)
Twitter advertising.
Last week we promoted two of our blog posts on twitter using
socialoomph and twitreply. We made sure the posts were
linked to keywords that were very relevant, and we made sure
the tweets were enticing. According to Twitreply, our links
were clicked over 20,000 times. We were a little sceptical of
this, so we had a look in Google Analytics, and we found the
click through was more like 2000 times, which for 200 tweets,
at a cost of $2, is the most cost effective advertising we have
ever done.
You are justied in worrying about this becoming SPAM, we
had a few people unsub from our tweets and compain that we
were spamming the system. However we had HUNDREDS of
users say they loved our articles, and more started following
us. The net effect was probably greater than any other
marketing campaign we have run.
The main benet of twitreply has been that it allows us to keep
posting relevant tweets when we would not normally have the
time. The system is a little clunky, and it needs a few more
features like scheduling the tweets, or at least spacing them
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out so you dont post 500 tweets in a half hour period.
SocialOomph has allowed us to reply to people that post about
us and follow us. This is especially handy if you are planning a
social marketing campaign like this one. At one point we had
twenty or thirty people following us every minute, which was
way too fast for us to respond to normally. It also allows us
to track who is leaving us, and who is joining us, making it a
great analytical tool too.
Overall, if you were launching a new product, or you had some
great news on your blog, combining twitreply and socialoomph
is a good way to go.
Using Seduction in B2B Marketing
Good marketing is a lot like the art of seduction. Convincing a
new business to purchase your product or service is a lot like
trying to win over a potential suitor. All the pieces of the puzzle
are the same. There are two parties, one wants to convince
the other of their value. There is a goal in mind and there are
powerful emotions. To put it another way, seduction follows
the same process as marketing;
Make the prospect feel the need to buy the product or service
Make the offer attractive
Use emotions to engage the prospect
Make the prospect comfortable with buying the product or
service, reduce fears
Escalate the prospect towards a completed transaction.
In the world of professonal seduction, there are set patterns
and plays that have been accepted as the best ways to attract
a member of the opposite sex. One of the leaders in this world
is Neil Strauss, who wrote the bestseller The Game. Using
the main ideas behind his book, you can see how a business
can use the rules of attraction to pursuade a new customer to
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buy from them.
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Pre-Game
Like any good project, good preparation prevents poor
performance. Understanding what you are trying to sell, and
how you are going to sell it goes a long way to building a
marketing program that delivers results. In this stage of
the marketing process, an organisation would look at past
sales, the competition, the current market, their budget and
their current product or service to build an offer that will be
attractive to potential clients. In the book The Game, the
author went through a make-over process, shaving his head,
having his ears pinned back, and joining a gym. Businesses
could also follow this lead, but rebranding, or reinvigourating
their marketing programs.
Select a Target
Targeting is the most important step in the marketing process.
Finding and understanding your customer will allow you
to build a thorough picture of their mindset and desires. In
seduction terms this would mean a quick scan of the bar
or venue to nd the girl or boy you are going to target. In
marketing terms this means going through your customer
list, looking at lists of potential new customers and narrowing
down the eld. Targets can be selected by demographic, by
industry, by buying location, by budget etc. The main aim is
to narrow the eld to an acceptable number of targets that all
have something in common. You also want to be able to talk
to the target customer as if it is a face to face meeting.
Approach and Open
The seduction community says you have 3 seconds to
approach and start a conversation with a girl. This should
be no surprise, because rst impressions are the most
important. In order to attract their attention, PUAs (Pick Up
Artists) use peacocking, a method of wearing outrageous
or loud clothing to attract attention. In marketing, you have 3
seconds to grab and maintain the attention of the customer. A
businesses peacocking might be using outstanding design
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and original marketing. This also means using a headline
that will interest your customer. The best headlines are short,
punchy, use simple language and convey the most important
piece of value of the product or service.
Demonstrate Value
The best description of what constitutes good value, is adapted
from this website
1. There is a clear distinction between, and balance of,
customer benets and the offer.
2. Value involves the psychological and physiological
effects of both the benets and the offer.
3. Good value harnesses the difference between surface
attraction and deeper neurology based attraction.
4. Value includes practical applications and call to action
to increase the overall odds of converting.
In order to demonstrate clear value to your prospect, you
need to show what they will get, how it will improve their lives
and how they will feel by purchasing from you. Demonstrating
value is also showing that other people have bought from you
before, that you have delivered on your promise, and you are
not going to let the customer down. This might come in the
form of a testimonial, a review from a magazine, or just some
facts about how much of a difference your product makes to
people.
Disarm the Obstacles
There are many reasons for a customer to not buy from you.
In a B2B transaction this might be no previous business
relationship, that you are new to the market or that they are not
looking for your product right now. Having pre-prepared lines
to counter these situations are important in telemarketing and
face to face selling. In the PUA world, this would be equivilant
to being not really looking for a boyfriend. To translate this
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into a business context might be the prospect being happy
with their current provider. To counter this situation you dont
want to bash their current provider, you dont want to claim
to be better either. You want to put the seed of doubt in their
mind, and show you have value in your product. Something
like Does your current provider give you XYZ? Because if
when we work with our other clients, not only do we offer
ABC but also XYZ, where you ll in the blanks with your core
values.
Isolate the Target
Meeting face to face is an important part of the buying
process. We more easily buy from people than we do an
automated machine or a website. In the seduction community,
moving the target into a position where you are one on one
reduces the opportunities for the bond to be broken. In a sales
environment, this would mean trying to get a one on one with
the prospect, without the distraction of being in the ofce and
around other people. This also means isolating
Create an Emotional Connection
Again, here is paraphrasing from a pick up routine, applied to
a B2B transaction.
Find out if the prospect has any business problem or desire
in business they feel passionate about. Most likely, these
may be their sales team, not spending enough time with their
customers, cash ow, gaining new customers, anything they
would do even if they did it for free.
Ask them whats important to you in doing (activity)? What
do you feel about(activity/business)? At this point, you are
looking to recreate the feeling of doing that activity, and
moving them into the states they feel while doing the activity.
Then, feedback these nominalized feelings and link these
to your product. What would it be like if we could get you
feeling different? How would you feel if we could remove
that frustration?
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Emotional connections in business are rare, and hard to
achieve. However the goal of all marketing is to get the
prospect to recreate the feeling they would have when using
your product or service. If they can see themselves using your
product, and they can feel themselves in that position, you are
most of the way to completing the sale.
Blast Last-Minute Resistance
Most rational people know when they are being sold to.
Sometimes it is obvious when someone is trying to sell us
something, eg telemarketing, and other times it is less
obvious, word of mouth etc. Instinctively people will throw
up conscious and subconscious reasons to NOT buy from
you. In the case of the really desirable TV or car, the nagging
feeling that you cant afford the purchase is the subconscious
urge to not buy that product. It is the job of the marketing
professional to smooth the way through those rough waters.
In the seduction community, disarming the obstacles might
be dealing with a girl who wants to leave with her friends, or
getting the guy to move to a quieter location. In the marketing
process this would be focussing on the value of the product
to the customer, offering payment plans and guarantees to
reduce anxiety or giving them a money back guarantee.
In the pick up world, targets almost always go for the person
who isnt completely available to her. In the business world,
we always want to deal with partners who are busy with other
clients too, because it shows they are valuable. We all want
something we cant have. We want what there is a limited
supply of, because by the sheer fact theres limited supply of
it means it must be good. Many pick-up artists know this so
here are a few things they do that can be applied to marketing;
* Always be the rst one to end the conversation, if on the
phone
* Set a time constraint on any offer, or for the conversation
* Say the product will only be available after a certain date
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As you can see there are many ways good marketing is like
seduction. Going through the websites on seduction unearths
a great range of methods for breaking down a prospect and
turning them into a client.
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Advertising Ofine
Branding
Good branding is the key to good marketing. Think of it like
this; it is the SOUL or ESSENCE of the company. It is how
ALL stakeholders perceive you. I will keep this as brief as
possible for your enjoyment, but no doubt there will be more
on branding to come.
The key to any branding is anchoring the name in an emotion,
or emotions. A brand stretches beyond a logo, a name and
some pretty pictures. The full concept of a brand includes how
the customer feels about the company, and their experience.
Small businesses should have their brand closely associated
with the personality of the business owner. This is because as
the owner will be working in almost all aspects of the business,
his/her own likes, dislikes, characteristics etc should shine
through in the brand.
This means that when starting to launch a new brand, the
brand owners should think about what personality they want to
convey and what character the new brand will have. Is it going
to be fun, playful, serious, cutting edge. How will they want the
customer to feel, happy, satised, safe, trusting? All of these
emotions should go into the brief they would outline for the
designers/marketers that are developing their brand. Another
way to look at it would be, if the brand were a character in a
movie, who would it be?
A good logo is a start to a business, but it is not the be all
and end all of a business. People dont interact with a logo.
Once the personality of a brand is worked out, the next
step is building the narrative that accompanies any of the
marketing programs a company builds. Is the business taking
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on established players, or are they breaking new ground in
the industry? Is the value of the product/service cheap and
cheerful, good value for money or a premium? Is the product
something for everyone, or just a select few in the market? Is
the organisation a one man consultancy, or are there many
people working together?
The personality and narrative will then inuence the fonts and
colours used on the logo, (sans-serif tends to show modernity
and cleanliness, serif tends to be more amboyant and
classical).
A slogan should describe the personality, the brand and the
product offering in less than 10 words. In internet terms, it is
what the title of the business home page would be.
One the personality and narrative are worked out, then the
company can start thinking about launching a brand.
It should come from within. What is your special Story? This
is where the company begins, and all processes, procedures,
arms, legs and head should come from this. It covers a broad
range of the marketing process. From the three word slogan
you use on business cards, to the mission statement (if you
can be bothered, they are rather over rated), to the vision
statement.
It needs to be dened, denate, deliberate and a variety of
other d-words. You should be able to dene it in 20 words or
less. Use it as your log line.
Uniformity
Through everything, anything. This is the processes part.
When people talk about your company, they need to know
what you are about straight away. Cokes slogan is enjoy.
Which sums up the drinks brand, because it is lifestyle, fun,
refreshing and relatively light. Everyone knows this because
they spend bucketloads on branding.
Regular
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Day after day after day letterhead, website, sales
schpiel, packaging, quotes, receipts, invoices, your forehead,
clothing.. THIS IS WHO YOU ARE.
Cement
The one thing that a lot of businesses miss about branding. You
need to cement your brand in actions, feelings and emotions.
When you think of QANTAS you think of Australia, which is
meant to incite nationalistic sentement at home and make
foreigners think it is the only way to get to Australia (maybe.)
This is quite difcult in the scheme of thinks, but you need to
make the brand equate to a function within the customer.
Direct mail yers
Every week we receive up to 5 different yers from local
plumbing companies offering their services. Every week
different companies advertise and send out the same looking
yers expecting someone to give them a call back. Advertising
to us is a bad idea for two reasons;
We dont own our ofce and the building is full of other renters.
So even if we wanted to engage their services we couldnt
We are a marketing agency, we dont really have any need to
talk about or talk to a plumbing rm.
Direct mail can give returns of up to 5%, making it one of
the most effective methods of advertising. However not every
business can do it well. So how can some of these plumbing
companies and tradesman improve their direct marketing?
TARGET TARGET TARGET. We are renting. We work in an
area mostly full of renters. The direct marketing would be far
better executed if they targetted those areas that had higher
levels of homeowners. You could also go one better than that
still. Why not actually send a letter directly addressed to the
homeowners. There are lists available that list homeowners,
renovaters and small dwelling developers. One way to stand
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out from the rest of the crowd is to address the direct mail
piece to the homeowner directly.
Engage a designer. Do not rely on the graphic designers the
printing rm have. Actually engage a design house to create
your direct marketing. Not only will they use clever design to
make your marketing stand out, but they will also know how to
use the right stock and colours to make your direct mail look
different. The danger with just using a printing rms designers
is they will make your yer look and feel the same as all the
other yers out there.
Use non-standard stock. Dont print onto a 180GSM DL sized
yer. It will look and feel the same as all the other yers that
end up in the rubbish. Ask the printer for other stock options.
Look at other pieces of print material you recieve and see
which sizes and shapes you like. The plumbing marketing that
sticks, are the ones with magnets on one side and calendars
on the other. Or why not try a make a noteblock that people
can keep by the phone/in the kitchen.
Use client testimonials. Asking your current clients for
testimonials has two effects. One it will allow you to use, in
natural language, phrases that increase trust. Two it gives you
a good idea of why your current customers use you in the rst
place.
Test Test Test. Send out small batches of yers, and measure
the response on each batch. If you cant afford to print and
post batches of 500, then try to send different batches to
different areas. You should be aiming for groups of 1000 or
less, because this is manageable from a targeting point of
view and it is
Use a guarantee. Some plumbers do offer guarantees such
as on time or get $50 but we think those promises are empty.
Being on time should be a given. You could offer We will beat
all quotes but then you might nd your margins shrinking to
unmanageable levels. Stronger guarantees might be All work
is covered by a 30 day guarantee or we will x the problem
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on site, or your money back. Either way look at what other
plumbers are offering, and offer something different.
Include standard pricing. Dripping tap? $50, Knocking pipes,
$50 etc. Make it so the prospect knows what they are getting
themselves in for before they call you.
Claim to improve safety, time or money. The rst key motivator
for people to engage a service is safety. Are they going to be
safe using the service and will it improve their safety. Next
target time, either promise to save time, not to waste time
or to give people more time than they already have. Lastly
target money, either show you can save them money, you will
give them cash as an incentive or show them how you are
the best value for money. Looking at each of these, alter your
heading and offer so that you are targetting one of these key
motivators.
Include many ways for them to contact you. Make the contact
easy. Give email, phone, web and a physical address. Make
sure your company name is clear, because they will probably
search for you online as well.
Make sure your website matches your direct mail. If people
are interested in talking to you, they will probably search for
you online. If you dont have a website or your website does
not match what is on the yer, that will turn off your prospects.
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Case Studies
Tough Mudder A Marketing Case Study
Tough Mudder is every action mans fantasy. It is a grueling
seven mile race through muddy hills, cold water and burning
bales of Hay. What started out as part of the Harvard Business
Schools Business Plan contest is swiftly becoming a rising
star of endurance races in America. During the Business Plan
contest, judges felt that getting 500 people to put themselves
through hell was a little optimistic. Will Dean, the founder of
the contest, will be expecting 20,000 contestants at four races
thoughout next year.
So why has this won so many fans? Why is it a great example
of good marketing?
The Purple Cow
The race is about as unique as they get, a combination of
triathlon, mad maldon racing and cross t. The race was
modeled on similar European races like the Grim Challenge
and in Germany the Strongman Run. It offers something that
competitors cant get anywhere else.
Fitness Craze
The race taps into the growing outdoor tness craze. With
people looking for the next fun tness x after personal training
and boot camps, Tough Mudder offers something unique
to those that are sick of pounding pavement in Triathlons
or Marathons. Everyone wants to prove they are capable of
achieving something, especially those that have a little bit of
a weekend warrior in them. This race offers something new
to the tness crowd.
Clever Social Marketing
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Potential contestants have been submitting to Facebook etc.
videos of themselves running up stairs in high heels. The
event is encouraging people to a) be creative b) think about
the contest in the lead up c) promote one of the core values
of the competition, extreme endurance. Contestants are
encouraged to spread the word and tell shaggy dog stories of
the monkey bars covered in butter, or the freezing cold lakes
they have to cross.
Outstanding Branding
The race has some very slick branding, compared to other
races around the world, such as the mad maldon race in
England. The marketing is as good as the major marathons
and as good as any corporate event. This has a two fold effect.
One it makes it easy for corporate sponsors to get involved,
because they can see the marketing capabilities. Two it makes
it easy for contestants to buy into the competition, because
they can see it is not a ash in the pan and they can easily
attach themselves to the brand.
Hidden Pizza Restaurant A Wasted
Opportunity
For those that have not followed the social media buzz, here
is a brief outline on what Hidden Pizza Restaurant was all
about. At the start of April, an alleged Tony Fazio started a
marketing campaign saying if you found his Hidden Pizza
Restaurant, you could get free pizza.
Who doesnt like FREE PIZZA?
Melbourne local news/bloggers started buzzing about how
great the place was and what a clever idea the free pizza
was. However, it turns out the Hidden Pizza Restaurant
campaign was a clever construct of Clemenger Proximity
+ Sensis + OMD. It appears some marketing directors got
together with a big budget and too much time on their hands
and created this campaign to promote Yellow Pages online.
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Did it work? Well that is hard to say, because it is nearly
impossible to tell whom the campaign targetted, what the
message was, and what the goal of the exercise was. We
can say, though, if our clients allowed us to give away free
pizza, we would certainly do a better marketing job than this
program did.
What was the aim of the campaign?
If it was purely a branding exersize for YellowPages.com.
au, then you could probably argue that it was a moderate
success. The campaign has certainly given the brand eyeballs
in the marketing community, as people are talking about the
Hidden Pizza Restaurant program, and there are marketing
magazines that are discussing the merits of the exersize.
However I would say that more has been done for the Hidden
Pizza brand than Yellow Pages, as most people are talking
about how great the restaurant was and not how they found
out about it.
Social marketing is also a double edged sword. Most social
marketing commentators are actually saying the exercise
showed how yellowpages.com.au is a poor way to spend
your marketing dollars if you are looking for a high position
in search. Even now, after the campaign has ended, the front
page of the website and other bloggers are optimised better
for the front page of Google. To further embarrassment, the
Yellow Pages entry for the Hidden Pizza Restaurant is now
returning a dead link, so there is no way to see how well
optimised the page is.
Maybe it was all about the promotion and buzz? 3756 fans
on Facebook is hardly a groundswell, especially when you
consider other restaurants with less marketing dollars have
a greater following. I also wonder how many of the fans
are employees of the three companies involved? Again there
are people talking about the program, and no doubt hidden
pizza was probably a trending search for a while. However,
how much of that will generate interest in advertising on Yellow
Pages?

Building A Business Online

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Building A Business Online

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A Complete Guide to Building a Business Online

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