How To Solve Your Most Difficult Marketing Questions

About a year or two ago I was sitting at my computer and started Google-ing to find an answer to a pretty difficult marketing question. Essentially I was looking for someone out there who was facing the exact same Internet marketing issue and had a quick response. 

After searching and searching, I found nothing. Because I'm so persistent, I took my search off line and started to tap into my network of marketing related colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. It took me quite a bit of time, but I got the answer I was looking for.

Then it dawned on me. Why wasn't it easier to find the answer I was looking for online? Surely someone somewhere must have asked the same question, engaged others, and shared their answer on a blog or web page! From that struggle, the Internet Marketing Forum, on my main web site MarketingScoop.com was born.

Earlier this year, I launched the forum to serve as a marketing community. As is the case with any marketing community, it's success is based on the interest of those who inhabit it to be there, engage, and interact with one another. Based on user feedback, I recently made investments in the forum to improve usability and cover additional topics for community members to share successes, failures, and experience.

I encourage each of you to get involved in the Internet Marketing Forum today. It costs nothing to join and will serve as a great resource for getting your most difficult marketing related questions answered. Please let me know what you think and how we can encourage others to learn about the forum. It is my goal to build a marketing community for us to learn, contribute, and grow.

Free Traffic Exists If You Know Where To Look!

Many web site owners spend a lot of time building the next great application, web portal, or informational web site only to discover that creating a great site is only the first step.  A fantastic web site that doesn’t have any visitors holds no value.  So how do you generate traffic to your web site?  There are a variety of ways to generate traffic but some of the best are free.

In this week’s video, I’ll show you how to generate free traffic to your web site using traffic exchanges.  Top exchanges like Traffic Swarm  and EasyHits4U are free to join and can easily generate thousands of targeted visitors to your website.

Traffic exchanges are exactly what the name infers.  You are essentially exchanging traffic.  Here’s how they work.  You sign up for an account and “visit” other web sites.  Each time you view a web site or squeeze page, you earn credits.  These credits can be used for traffic.  After you earn a certain number of credits, your web pages are shown throughout the traffic exchange network.  Each time these pages are viewed by other members, you are charged a certain number of credits.

It may sound a bit confusing but actually it’s quite simple.  You browse web pages and other members browse yours.  The most productive way to utilize traffic exchanges is with the help of high converting squeeze pages.  If all you want to do is drive traffic, then you can easily set your web sites home page as your main display URL.  If on the other hand you are looking to build a list, develop powerful squeeze pages with an offer that encourages individuals to click through or sign up.

Over time you can generate a significant number of views for your web site or web page. Set your browsing page as your start page each time you open your browser.  This takes less than a few seconds to set up and can generate additional credits for you.  Most exchanges, including Traffic Swarm provide benefits for specific actions like loading your start page.

Premium versions are also available on traffic exchanges, allowing you to earn credits even faster.  Once you’ve begun using traffic exchanges, and see the type of traffic they are delivering, consider premium options.  The quality of traffic you receive can vary greatly from exchange to exchange so make sure you’re tracking properly and focus not just on traffic but on conversions are well.

There are tons of additional tools to help generate traffic to your web site at little or no cost.  I’ll cover additional tactics in the future but suggest that you start using traffic exchanges today to get visitors to your website.

Customer Follow Up Is King!

Do you follow up with with your customers and affiliates on a regular basis?

Many companies do a poor job of communicating with customers and overlook one of their biggest sources of revenue. In fact, many companies believe that once a sale is made the follow up process should end. Unfortunately they are losing a significant opportunity to build additional customer satisfaction, establish better rapport, credibility, lower returns, and increase their knowledge of the user experience.

Follow up is for more than just prospects. In fact, following up with customers is just as important. Post purchase follow up is overlooked by many businesses but can be implemented easily. Consider applying a basic process that can benefit overall consumer satisfaction significantly. Your process may include:

- Training to teach a customer how to use a product.

- Answering commonly asked questions before they are asked.

- Teaching users about lesser known features.

- Providing support contact information.

Don’t stop with customers. Also reach out to your affiliates. This can improve relationships and prioritize your products over others being promoted. The reality is that in most affiliate or reseller programs over 90% of affiliates never do anything. By properly following up with new and existing affiliates you can help increase the percentage of those actively promoting your products and often see immediate results.

Here are some ideas to consider for engaging affiliates and improving outcomes:

- Provide promotional material.

- Teach effective promotional techniques.

- Share best practices from top affiliates.

- Product education.

- Reminders to get the affiliate to take action.

- Introduce contests and incentives.

Whether you are focusing on improving the communication with your customers or affiliates (or both), consider what you do as being directly tied to increased revenue. Too often companies focus all of their energy on prospecting and not enough on nurturing existing relationships.

Look at your customer communication program today and ask, “how can I better communicate to my customers to improve loyalty, develop relationships, and generate more sales?”

Web 3.0 Is Here. Do You Know About It?

If you’re wondering what’s in store for the World Wide Web in 2010, you don’t have to think too hard.  I’ve been hearing a lot lately about what’s next for the Internet and it’s simply stated as Web 3.0.  Not sure what Web 3.0 is all about?  Simply stated, the concept of Web 3.0, the next iteration after Web 2.0, is about the sophistication of the web and the experience it’s going to create for each of us.

Web 3.0, also referred to as the Semantic web, uses artificial intelligence to improve your online experience.  It’s personalization taken to the next level.  Today when you visit a web site or browse the Web data is being collected about you, browsing behavior, and the sites you visit.  Imagine if all of this information was collected, processed, and built into a personal profile that would customize your online experiences?  Well, that’s what Web 3.0 promises to do.

Since the new Web will take past behavior like online purchases, browsing behavior, searches, etc. into consideration when building your personal profile, your experience online will be customized to you.  There are already concepts like a recommendation engine and a retail recommender that are in use today on some leading web sites.

Long gone will be the days of receiving promotional emails for stuff you don’t want – when you don’t want it.  In fact, chances are that interactions online and off will seem freakishly accurate.

For example, let’s say I only buy jeans once a year (I admit it… it’s true).  And let’s also say that I always buy them around the same time from the same online store – the GAP maybe.  Okay, now enter Web 3.0.  My interaction with the GAP online and offline will work very differently than it does today.  Not a week goes by now where I receive some type of promotion from GAP in my email and even my physical address.  And yes, I throw these things out and delete all of the email because I’m don’t buy scarves!  

In the future, the GAP is only going to contact me once, maybe two times each year to remind me about my annual jean buying day and the communication, web pages I visit, and checkout experience will all be customized based on my previous activities.  In fact, the non-response to emails and post cards should also yield less junk mail.  As my behaviors are recorded and fed into the latest artificial intelligence, I’m going to see less of what I don’t want and more of what I do want.

The best part of Web 3.0 from my perspective is that it not only works from a user’s perspective but also from a web site or retailer perspective.  You won’t be getting communication in any form that doesn’t work for you and your online experiences will be customized for you and you alone.  Trying to sell me on the “best selling products” or “top recommendations” may work today but won’t be necessary in the future.  Give me my top recommendations based on my buying behavior and preferences – not what the masses think.

Concerned about privacy?  I’ve got news for you.  If you knew what web sites are tracking today and the wealth of knowledge out there on the Internet, you’d probably have a heart attack.  I do believe that users should still have to give permission for this type of tracking and data aggregation to occur but my feeling is that you’re better off embracing it that throwing the concept to the wind.  Besides, Internet security continues to advance as well so one would think that additional protections are going to come with advances in Web technology.

So here we are.  The signs of Web 3.0 are here.  Keep your eyes and ears open for the continued evolution of the web. As marketers, we need to decide how we are going to leverage this information, technology, and improve the overall user experience.  That's our job and will be our focus in the months and years to come!

A Lesson On Email Marketing And Purchase Behavior

I recently started focusing again on email to help me spread the word and ultimately take my marketing to the next level.  I was introduced to a concept by an industry leader many years ago that I want to share with all of you in today’s post.  

The concept is called the “purchase decision process” and was taught to me by a leader in direct marketing.  Essentially the concept is simple, understand enough about your prospects buying behavior to map out the process they go through when making a purchase.  For example, where do your customers start the purchase process?  Research? Referrals? What happens next?
 
Email is a great way to learn about the purchase decision process of your niche as well as take advantage of it for the benefit of prospect and company.  What I mean is that if you can help consumers by laying out a process they are comfortable with and prefer, you will experience less resistance when attempting to make a sale.
 
Likewise, your prospect will actually enjoy the process of evaluating your offer and making a purchase.  This provides a win-win for both parties and can significantly influence conversion rates.  Some tips I can share with you are:

1.     Capture email information at the beginning of your online conversion process.  When individuals bail out of your funnel, auto send an email with an opportunity to contact you about their interrupted purchase and give them a way to easily return to where they left.
 
2.    Create a follow up communication plan that moves them through the purchase decision process one step at a time.  The follow up emails do not have to be numerous, just aligned to their purchase process.
 
3.    Test your creative, offers, purchase process communications, and so on.  Continually work to improve conversion rates.
 
If you think about the purchase decision process of your prospects, can you clearly identify each step?  If not, spend some time thinking about the process and how you can help consumers move through that process quickly.
 
Set up auto-responders that take advantage of your knowledge from the moment users abandon your site.  Capture email address up front in order to make this viable.  Follow these simple rules and you’ll see site conversions improve.

Direct Response: What Successful Entrepreneurs Can Teach You

I had a great opportunity this week to speak with an entrepreneur who owns a successful software company on the East Coast.  We spoke about a variety of topics but focused on direct response (DR).  I found our discussion so engaging (definite Kodak moment) that I thought I'd focus this post on the core aspects of a successful direct response campaign whether it's in print or online.

Test. Test. Test.  It might sound cliche but the fact of the matter is that there are lots and lots of web site owners and marketers out there who may test at first, but then leave it alone.  How do you expect to get any better if you're not constantly testing.  For example, if you are doing a standard online campaign with PPC, test multiple landing pages.  This is easy to do is you use Google Website Optimizer or some other split testing and multivariate testing tool.

The objective is to test everything.  Start with your headline which is the most important aspect of your landing page all the way down to the color of your buttons.  Don't assume anything.  In the world of direct response, a small lift in conversions can result in large revenue gains.

Measure, Measure, Measure. Getting started with your testing is where you need to begin. However, your testing is meaningless if you're not properly measuring each activity. Install Google Analytics on your web site and additional tracking if necessary. If you are focusing on affiliate marketing for example, you'll want to know which keywords are converting for you.  Consider tools like tracking 202 or redirect URLs to capture important data and information.

Scale. Scale. Scale.  Before you begin any direct response campaign, consider the concept of scale.  If you create a campaign and it's successful (aka profitable), do you have an opportunity to expand it?  If the answer is no or you think that future growth is limited, explore a different opportunity.  So often I see people who put in the work to make a promotion successful only to discover there aren't enough prospects or the niche is simply too small to make a reasonable return on.  Do this research before you begin.

Scaling campaigns, as noted by my discussion with the entrepreneur who founded a profitable software company, is often the most overlooked aspect of direct response marketing.  Don't get caught by surprise.  Focus on whether of not your campaign can scale before you begin.  Make sure to always test your campaigns and by all means necessary, measure your results!

Tweet This! A How To Guide On Installing A TweetMeMe Button

I've received a lot of questions in the last week about how to install a Retweet button on web pages, blogs, and article pages so I thought I'd take a few minutes to explain how easy this is to do. In this post, I'll show you where to find the proper code for placing the button on your website or blog.

Begin by visiting TweetMeMe.com. There you will find a listing of top retweeted articles and content. What you need to do is page down to the bottom where you will see an option that says, "Retweet Button" under the 'Have some fun' section. This will bring you to the code page.

Once you land there, you can choose from four different options. The first option, "web button" is the most common. By accessing this page, you'll find the code you need to add a button to your web pages (HTML, asp, etc.). The second section is for individuals looking to embed a button in an email. This is a great options if you have an email newsletter or like to send your content out via email.

The third option is to place the button within your RSS feed. This is a good idea if you have a lot of subscribers to your feed. The last option is to embed the retweet button in your blog template (WordPress users). So you can see that there a number of options with the retweet button.To begin, select the option that is appropriate for your application of a retweet button. As mentioned earlier, most people look to add the button to their web pages or blogs. A good place to start then is with the first option. Click on the web button option.

This will take you to a page that shows different blocks of code. At the most basic level, you want to place java script on your pages or in your post that will simply show the button. If the title of your page is short enough, when others retweet, it will include the title of your post.

On the other hand, if you have a very long title to your web page or post, the retweet only shows an abbreviated title or website name. When focusing on retweets keep titles short and to the point. The code for retweeting is (replace "[ and ]" with <>):

[script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"][/script]

Simply copy and paste this code into your HTML page or the code associated with your post. When you publish your pages, they will now contain the retweet button. If you want to style your button - placing it in a specific location, use div tags. For example, if you want your button to flow with the text and be right aligned, you may wrap the java script above with the following (Note: you must replace the [ and ] symbols with <> symbols for the code to actually work.)

[div style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 5px; float: right; display: block; width: 50px; height: 61px;"]

You can also find more advanced tutorials and information at the TweetMeMe website. There are a variety of retweet tools out there if you want others to post your information to Twitter (styles, layouts, etc) but Tweetmeme is the easiest to use. I have found Tweetmeme to have the best information, resources and support.

Best of luck with your retweet button.. and be sure to retweet this post!