Don’t Just Be Smart – Look Smart

Any Internet based business can take their website to the next level and give it the same tools as the expensive websites. I compiled a few tools that I’ve found effective to help business owners create a web presence that mimics the professionally made ones.

Even a professional who has solid creative and marketing expertise can waste time if their web platform lacks power. Several third-party tools are designed to help small business owners build a viable internet and print marketing campaign.

Constant Contact

This service helps small business build an email marketing campaign. The program uses online surveys to help small business build affordable marketing lists, based on their clients and consumers, not old email lists.

Quantum Digital

Quantum Digital offers one of the most cost effective method of managing all your marketing needs, from direct mail, to on demand printing, and emarketing. The cost of $9.95 a month is to access their services and manage your marketing campaign with their help.

InfoUSA.com

This company is a great place to create a mailing or telemarketing list. Their transparency is good. They will let you build a list, and see the price before signing up, but only if you add your information to their list. The cost is about $.11 cents per name, based on our test.

Spotrunner

This service will help business start an internet or television marketing campaign. There are webinars, and assistance to help small business’ start a serious local or national marketing campaign.

AdReady

This network is Spotrunner, but for flash/web internet ads.   They offer a full dashboard to track the click through rates, and costs. They have ‘templates’ to let you create your own professional style ad.

Facebook

Facebook advertising has proven for some businesses to be more effective than PPC, or search engine optimization. The cost is less than Pay Per Click, and lets business owners pre-sell their clients.

These methods of advertising will help business owners start advertising online, in print, and on television before they have a large advertising budget.

Basics of the Buyer to Conversion Ratio

The success of an online business is directly related to the website’s ability to convert web surfers into online shoppers. It with a typical click-through ratio of 1%, and Google doubling their adWord campaign, optimizing conversion has become as important as optimizing for the web.

Once a website attracts that coveted 1% click through, retailers learn the truth about online sales. Most web surfers take three visits before they make the decision to buy. There are very few impulse buyers on the web. However, before you quit, I have some statistics to share:

It took the:

1. Telephone 38 years to reach 50 million users
2. Television 13 years to reach 50 million users
3. Internet 4 years to reach 50 million users

This behavior didn’t start on the Internet. It started with the creation of malls and the lure of ‘something better’ down the hall. In today’s eMarketing consumer, the consumer has a value. Regular customers in the system cost less money to convert than new visitors.

How Online Buyers Convert

The typical eCommerce merchant will see the same visitor return two or three times, hovering around the same items each time. Ultimately, someone will get the sale. Some of the customers you pre-sold will go to other vendors. Their pre-sold visitors will come to yours.

The gurus will tell you that a website can increase their chances of retaining the conversion. Statistics claim that 87% of publishers are unsatisfied with their conversion rates. However, 60% do nothing about it. The rest believe that, if their first effort at e-tailing fails, it is the fault of the web designer, SEO pro, or web host.

Three Stages of Shopping online:

1. Flitting Around the Internet looking for free information and tools.
2. Realizing that DIY costs, or realizing they need a product.
3. Prowling the web looking for the ‘right’ product.

This is why many e-tailers create newsletters, mailing lists, forums, podcasts, free downloads, and chats to give visitors a reason to return.

Do not give up. UK shoppers spent 26 million on the Internet in the six weeks before

Tips to Improve Your Conversion

One way to improve your conversion is to mimic the colors, ad design, and ad styles that mimic those seen on television and print media. Familiarity breeds credibility.

A DIY website will not increase conversions. Many eCommerce businesses need to start with the DIY, but the first purchase should be a website made by a professional in advertising or marketing. They know the colors and text that will convert buyers. A SEO may be able to design a site that ‘speaks’ to the search engines, but it takes an advertiser who understands ‘buyer behavior trends’ to create a website which focuses on conversions.

Another way is to take part in a community frequented by shoppers, not other sellers. This is the #1 mistake most eCommerce business owners make, preaching to the crowd. These communities decrease start-up and increase conversions by keeping you in front of your consumer, no matter how many times they surf the net.

In the end, conversions are just a numbers game. Even the worst designed website can generate sales if they receive enough traffic.

7 Ways to Improve Ad Design

I recently gave a lecture with a colleague Eric Stucki, on Direct and Interactive, The Creative Process. The topic discussed the impact of Direct Response Marketing. The success often lies in the ad design.

A few aspects of direct marketing that most business owners overlook include the ad design, message, theoffer, and testing the results and consumer impact. There are several parts of an advertisement. Each one can have a dramatic impact to a marketing campaign’s success.

• Copy
• Art
• Ad Design
• Price Point
• Button format
• Link font color
• Long vs short
• Trail term
• Billing term
• Payment options
• Benefit order

One trick is to offer something big, with something very small, i.e. In the lecture we talked about offering 50% discount, with a $10 freebie. Once you have an idea that the following tips for ‘ad design’ are not magic formulas, then they can be used to generate a good marketing campaign.

1. Ugly works best
2. Long copy is better than short
3. One word or color can make a dramatic difference
4. Use paragraphs vs. bulleted copy
5. People click links, not pictures
6. Tell people what to do
7. Stay away from multiple page flows.

When marketing online, a 2% response rate is good. This does not reflect sales, just the response to the advertisement. This may seem low, but it is statistically on par, or much higher, than other marketing medium.

The first step is to determine who you are marketing to. This is not as difficult as you may think. Just look for people who have bought, or buy, your product. Look for how the competition is already selling to them.

Create a few samples. Do not expect your first campaign to work perfectly. It takes time to create and perfect a campaign. A 2% response will require about 10000 page views per test. However, finding that one ad creates a 2% response rate is not enough. It is important to experiment with different ads to see what works best.  One ad may result in 10% response, but the people who respond may not be ready to buy. A group of ads may result in a 2% response rate for each, but the actual ‘conversion to buy’ ratios may vary greatly.

This is a brief look at creating an online marketing campaign. Trial and error, and perseverance, will help most business owners create their own direct marketing campaign.

 

The Power of Search

I recently talked to someone who enjoyed the lecture “Search and Society” from Berkly’s online lecture series by Marti Hearst. It is comforting to know that even the big companies are as terrified of search as DIY webmasters are.

Search is an incredibly valuable tool. It isn’t surprising that a ‘real world’ advertising agency became the biggest online advertising company, Google. The power of search lies in the fact that it is ‘possible’ to track data. This is the basis of Web 3.0’s data mining-toolbars and PC based widgets.

The next generation of search and page rank will give the user the power they tried to usurp under Web 2.0.  In Web 3.0, everything done will be recorded, in theory.

Search Engine Search

One of the first cases of tracking people on the web was born in the Google Empire, 2002, with the introduction of paid search, also called Sponsored search. Google matched paid advertisements with the user’s search. Until then, the search engines were paid when a banner was displayed. Google changed the rules and only charged advertisers when users clicked the link.

This was the first expression of the ‘database of intention.’ This is only the first instance of the evolution of the ‘telling what we want’ as opposed to being told what to view.

The concept of society will have a major impact on how Web 3.0 will work. There was no privacy in the old world. We were farmers who stayed in one place for generations. We’ve built a public world on cyberspace.

The web has changed the economy of information. Information that was once ‘private’ will become worldwide news once the page is indexed. This will become part of the search databases, and in turn, part of the PPC schematics.

This type of search influence in the real world is already seen in the real world. Apply for a job and the PR representative will Google your name. This brings up a whole new aspect. “Who you are in the Index is who you are in the real world.”

This can be quite devastating, as today’s’ search is not sophisticated enough to manage the task.  One professional Googled her name to find out that someone else with the same name, and year of birth, had been charged with animal cruelty, violence, and landed in jail. This individual would not be called back for a second job interview, despite the fact that that Google mixed up the records of four different people in the search.

Consumer Search

Do you think that everyone uses search engines to find a website, product, or service? Think again. A growing number of people are using Social Networks and communities to build their searches.  A growing number of people are using the search bar at Stumbleupon.com, myspace.com, and facebook.com. They are looking for their friend’s recommendations, not the search engine’s recommendations.

This raises the question of whether webmasters should be focusing on link building campaigns, or writing reviews that can get posted to Stumbleupon.com. This is compounded when webmasters look at Facebook advertising as an alternative to Google’s Adwords.  Will the conversion rate vary? It is too soon to say.

Another question put on the floor by SEM professionals is whether businesses should hire 5 – 10 people to manage lenses, forum posting, and blogs, instead of placing banner ads.     It may take a couple years to figure out the best advertising methods for the next generation of search. The only thing that is certain, is search will continue to be the foundation of advertising for the next few years.

Five Overlooked Ways to Improve Search Engine Placement

Few people can rank high in today’s search engines without embarking on a link building campaign. The first thing that many webmasters do is try to cheat. They jump on the guru-secret bandwagon and follow all the free content, spammed across the net, secrets. In the end they waste hundreds of hours, and still lack any content in the top search engine positions.

Face it, we all want the #1 SERP for the most profitable keywords. Most of us will never see it. Even the largest SEO companies cannot promise 100% success, through every keyword, permanently, without including a few pages of small print in their contracts.

Ignore Page Rank (for a few minutes)

A website can receive top search engine placement (SERP) before it is ranked, before it is indexed. This is because the search engines use up to 100 different elements to place a web page at the top of ranks.

Too many webmasters focus on keyword density, meta information, and inbound links. They completely forget that the end user is also factored into a page’s rank.  Example, a page with 10% visitors remaining on the page, for more than 30 seconds, and clicking through to another page, receives a high ‘authority.’

Many webmasters suffer from BO (Backlink Obsession). They create pages with low conversion rates, no reader value, and poor navigation, all in the effort to get at those coveted top search engine placements.

Link Flow

Not all links have the same value. Google divides the value of a link by its position on a page, and by the number of links on a page. Many webmasters damage their promotion/marketing efforts by removing Social Networking links, cutting down navigation, and removing features such as Top-Posts, Most Comments, etc.

One of the easiest solutions is the most overlooked. We’d be rich if we had a nickel for the number of times people looked stunned when they learned how simple the solution was – just use <no-follow> links.  They are not necessary. The website’s robot.txt file and sitemap will take care of the problem.

Lowering the number of links on a page increases the ‘value’ Google passes to the pages that are listed. This is one reason why most blog owners have 200 inbound links and achieve PR3, but SEO experts can achieve PR5 with less than 30 links.

Robot.txt & SiteMap

Search engines look for this file. It gives them a foundation to rank the site. They are vital to search engine placement. There is no reason why any website on the web should

Deep or Wide?

The experts will argue forever over the debate, “Should a website be created deep, or wide?”  From the standpoint of ‘fast indexing’ the answer should be wide. Using sub-directories, can reduce the number of links on a page, and still generate usable navigation systems.

Update Pages

No one knows why Google dumps pages from the index. Everyone experiences. There are solutions. Every six months go over the website, go to a page, make some changes within the first 10% of the page. Google webmaster accounts have a tool that lets webmasters resubmit an individual page. This can be time consuming. Wait until Google re-crawls the site and then submit the pages that were missed.

The search engines thrive on new content. Updating pages is one way to keep ‘on top.’ However, beware of changing the URL. Broken links can lower a web page’s rank very quickly.

 

Optimize for Online Sales

One way to increase conversion is to create a website that focuses on shoppers, not search engines. Too many websites are designed to target search engines. There is nothing ‘active’ on the site for shoppers. Most consumers are impulse shoppers, the value comes from the act of shopping as much as acquiring the product.

Real-world retailers use human-motivations to sell: prestige, affluence, fun, entertainment, and social acceptance. Many ‘get rich quick’ sites convince the average person to part with their money on a daily basis by promising to make life easy, solve problems, and make us beautiful. Webmasters could learn a lesson here.

Many ecommerce websites are so focused on search engine placement, they overlook the subtle art of selling.

Ask For The Sale

One of the most overlooked aspects of ecommerce is ‘asking for the sale.’ This involves more than placing a ‘buy now’ button on the website. It involves asking for the sale, and then letting the consumer buy.

Most abandoned shopping carts are the result of using the shopping cart as a marketing tool, not a buy-now tool. Here are a few common shopping cart problems:

•Ask for personal information
•Include a form to fill out
•Ask for shipping information before the sale is in the final stage
•Try to up-sell, add extra products to the sale, ask consumer to complete a non-sale action.
•Have more than three clicks from the ‘buy now’ button and the end of the sale

Consumer Focused Optimization

The most important customer-optimizing feature is the SLL security logo. It needs to be placed in a prominent spot on every page of the website. Statistics have proven that a security logo can increase a conversion rate substantially.

Here are a few tools that increase the conversion rate:

• Write the PPC ‘click’ text so that it solves a problem, and then lead to a webpage that solves the problem. This eliminates the confusion. Too many PPC campaigns lead to an index page and force the consumer to click through the site looking for the information, product, or service, they want.
• Include a customer review/ranking system.
• Let shoppers write reviews, and reward them for the review.
• Focus on selling, not ‘product cataloguing’ on the item pages.

These changes should generate results, even for a DIY ecommerce owner. The task of optimizing will never end. It is a constant battle to stay ahead of the competition, but it is a quest that is well worth the rewards.

Overcoming Abandoned Shopping Cart Problems

Ecommerce business owners have several options when it comes to generating traffic. They don’t have many options to help them reduce the number of people who leave their shopping cart half way through the ‘buy now’ process. It can be difficult to understand why a person would start the shopping process, add 2 or 3 things to their shopping cart, and then leave without buying.

Here are some tips to streamline a shopping cart and improve sales.

Shopping Cart Platform

Most mistakes are made with the selection of the software. Cost does not imply that the shopping cart will perform as expected. Some free, open source shopping carts are more ‘user friendly’ and easier to navigate than hosted ones that cost several hundred dollars a month. However, buying a shopping cart without service and maintenance is dangerous.

Structure

There are several stages to a shopping cart. The most common reported reason for abandoned shopping cart is not letting a consumer know how long the process is, how many pages are involved, and where they are in the process. Many people leave the shopping cart because they are frustrated with all the pages involved.

Make sure there is a step-by-step tool that lets shoppers know when they are nearing the end of the buy-now process.

Up Selling and Cross Selling

The shopping cart is not the place to tell people they are only buying half the product. Many people are new to shopping online. Even with the amount spent online reaching the trillions a year, a large number of internet users have not started shopping online.

They abandon their shopping cart feeling confusion, feeling they have somehow ‘lost’ the shopping cart and returned to the catalogue section of the website, and feeling frustration at being told they must buy more to receive full value.

Collecting Personal Information

The fear of phishing websites has forced the issue of privacy. Most people do not feel comfortable filling out long pages of personal information just so they can make a purchase. There is no reason for a website to collect a person’s address, their income level, or whether they own their house.

Keep the shopping cart focused. It has one purpose to create a quick and easy method for people to buy a product. If you need to know where people live for marketing purposes, then retrieve the information form the shipping section of the website.

“Add To Cart”

The Add-To-Cart button is vital to a successful shopping cart experience. A good shopping cart will focus on one purpose, making the sale. It will not ask people to join a newsletter or become members.

The Add-to-Cart button must stand out, a bright color, and placed on the catalogue page, all review pages, and any other page associated with the product.

A “Buy Now” button should be on every page of the website. It should give shoppers the opportunity to jump straight to the payment gateway so shoppers can escape the whole process and complete their transaction.

Credibility

There are several ways to build credibility. The most common is the use of SEALS. These are the small icons at the bottom of the shopping cart that promise the shopper their private information is safe, that the shopping cart is SLL safe, and others that verify the shopping cart’s legitimate status.

Fixing these elements will set the stage to decrease the number of abandoned shopping carts on your website and help to increase sales.

 

Research The Competition: SPYFU

The easy way to find your niche on the net is to pay someone to spy on the competition, analyze the data, and provide a report that helps you optimize your website and shopping cart.

Doing your own research is possible.

Prepare for a long journey. The big e-tailers invest thousands of dollars into eMarketing reports that tell them who their potential customer is, and what they want. The eMarketers research the competition, learns who is selling, who is not. If you’d like to do a little of your own research then visit www.spyfu.com.

Here is the stats for www.entrepreneur.com

There is a lot to learn. The first thing you will notice is that they do not run a continuous ad campaign. You don’t need a subscription. You just need to understand a few of the stats.

Next, go to www.alexa.com and look at the amount of traffic these websites receive. Last, check their Google Page Rank.

Organic

These keyword phrases currently bring people to your website. They are called ‘referrals.’ Most web stats count referrals, a number that is only accurate if the person visiting has cookies enabled.

Advertisements

This is a list of your website’s advertisements – not the competitions. It will show the ads that Google showed on your website. This can be a good reason to put Google on a blog, at least for the short term. But, if you don’t want to do that, then go to the competition and look at their ads.

The ads that show on a website are a good indication of your SEO value. If the ads are relevant, then the web page is optimized. They have good descriptions, good keywords, good content. View their site, harvest their knowledge.

Take a good look at the Top Ad Competitors. These are the companies who got it right. They are making enough money to promote and advertise.

Top Organic Competitors

This is the #1 tool you’ll find on this site. In a perfect world, every one of the competitors will match your SEO efforts. Look past the search engine optimization. You want to look at how these companies sell their product, and more important, whether they are selling well.

Write your own report based on these 10 questions:

• Am I marketing to the top demographic?
• Do the sites have a high Google Page Rank?
• What is the Alexa traffic?
• Do they have money to advertise?
• Can you offer a competitive product and a comparable price?
• Do the keyword phrases used on your site appear on spyfu?

It is common to learn that you are marketing to the wrong audience. Organic, means that these visitors found you in a search. The competition listed is the companies that will appear on the search page alongside your website.