Visibility Magainze Summer 2014 Edition

THE MAGAZINE FOR ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGIES

Visibility www.visibilitymagazine.com

The Be st y g e t a r t S O E S is to Ign ore Go ogle akov B y G e n o Pr u s s

tory Don’t Let These Regulailiate Issues Derail Your Affgram Pro

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Summer 2014 | $9.95

departments

06 Editor’s Note

Read all about the latest happening with this growing magazine.

08 CEO Spotlight: Mike Canarelli, Web Talent Marketing

Mike’s passion for leadership and his understanding of clients’ business goals has taken Web Talent Marketing to the forefront of strategic Internet marketing. He shares his story with us – from the beginning as a one-man design and development company to a multi-faceted growing organization.

21 Legal Corner

Have questions about the legal aspects of Internet marketing? Tune into this section to get your answers.

08

40 Product Review:

SEO Engine is a platform worth reading. Find out more about how this enterprise platform is packed with simplicity, yet has everything your heart desires.

20

48 Vendor Spotlight: JEBCommerce

JEBCommerce is here to help large and small advertisers with their affiliate programs. Explore how they may be able to help your organization’s marketing strategy.

60 Upcoming Conferences

A guide to upcoming internet marketing related conferences around the globe. At these conferences, you can listen to the insightful experiences of the leading names from the internet marketing industry.

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features

15 Don’t Let These Regulatory Issues Derail Your Affiliate Program Be sure to have a monitoring plan in place for your affiliate program.

Jaime Birch provides helpful tips to make sure you are FTC compliant.

24 The Best SEO Strategy is to Ignore Google

John Broadbent discusses the “play hard to get” strategy to gain momentum in your SEO initiative. The steps include to inform, advise, and instruct before solving or selling to your audience.

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42 How to Evaluate Affiliate Programs Before Joining Them

What should you consider when joining an affiliate program? Geno Prussakov suggests 15 intertwined and interdependent factors to keep in mind.

51 When Shoppers Buy for Others: A Powerful Marketing Opportunity in Gifting

24

Learn how to deliver the right product, for the right price, in the right place with the right promotion. Monika Kochhar discusses how to up-serve, not up-sell during the gifting process.

55 Walking the Fine Line Between Discovery and Disruption in Content Marketing

Neil Mody explores how content marketers can get their content to stand out and get noticed without disrupting the user’s experience.

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editor ’ s note

Visibility EDITOR Julie Lynn EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jeev Trika

Hello Readers, Hope everyone is enjoying the summertime! Wherever you may be, surely the past harsh winter is long forgotten and you are rejuvenated by the warmth of the sun. When it comes to the internet marketing world, it seems that all are trying to stay ahead of the curve even though “the curve” is never well defined. Companies wonder what the correct strategy is for their firm; SEO agencies continue to prove that they are better than all their competitors; Google strives to keep their methods secretive and all on their toes.

With all the constant stirring, it is nice to have Visibility Magazine to turn to for the latest ideas and trends from leading internet marketing firms. We compile many articles that hopefully assist you in making well-informed decisions. In this issue, focus is put towards affiliate programs, content marketing, and, of course, search engine optimization. Our CEO Spotlight, Mike Canarelli from Web Talent Marketing, shares his insight and outlook for the future with us. JEBCommerce, the Vendor Spotlight, focuses on helping organizations with their marketing strategies including affiliate programs.

So kick back and relax with Visibility.

SENIOR PROJECT EDITOR Neeraj Kumar ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR Cameron Kriss PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Juneyeta Mattix STAFF WRITER Sam Powers SENIOR DESIGNER Armando Rangel

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jamie Birch | JEB Commerce John Broadbent | Netmark Bill Dinan | Telmetrics Adam Heitzman | Higher Visibility Kim Ann King | SiteSpect Anna Korolekh | Promodo Tad Miller | Marketing Mojo

Enjoy!

Neil Mody | nRelate Tim Morral | Walker Sands Digital

Julie Lynn Editor Visibility Magazine

Mike Mothner | Wpromote Phil Penton | Social Integration Geno Prussakov | AM Navigator Shari Thurow | Omni Marketing Interactive Visit us at WWW.VISIBILITYMAGAZINE.COM Mailing Address: P.O Box 1073, Plymouth, IN 46563 Editorial Department Phone: 800-380-4165 Editorial Department Fax: 888-559-8909 Letters to the Editor: editor@visibilitymagazine.com

Visibility Magazine, LLC SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INDIRECT DAMAGES RESULTING FROM YOUR ACCESS TO, OR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE THE MAGAZINE AND THE MAGAZINE CONTENT, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE) OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY. Visibility Magazine, LLC WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY MISPRINTS.

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featured ceo

Mike Canarelli

CEO & Co-Founder of Web Talent Marketing

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billing, and the suite of tools needed to output exceptional quality work, I did not want the inevitable growth to be hindered by lack of processes and systems. After a solid infrastructure was in place we began leading and coaching our team to maintain quality, create innovative solutions, and most importantly foster results that would allow us to keep clients for 3 or more years.

ike Canarelli is the CEO & Co-Founder of Web Talent Marketing (http://www. webtalentmarketing.com), a Digital Marketing Agency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Mike’s passion for website design, development and Internet marketing dates back as far as high school, when he originally started designing and developing websites for a handful of clients. After graduating high school, and with about 10 active clients, Mike moved to Phoenix, Arizona where he pursued a degree in Web Development and Online Marketing. Years later, Mike moved back to Pennsylvania where he earned his B.S. in Business Administration from Temple University’s Fox School of Business & Management.

Mike had aspirations beyond web design and development, which was the driving force behind his choice to major in Entrepreneurship and minor in Management Information Systems.

Utilizing over a decade of experience in design, development, and digital marketing, Mike founded Axis Creative Group in 2007. Shortly thereafter, Mike merged with WebTalentSEO to create what would become a leading full-service Internet Marketing and Web Development agency – Web Talent Marketing.

Mike’s passion for leadership and strong analytical and problem solving skills are put to use daily. He excels at understanding clients’ unique business goals and then providing long-term, fully integrated omnichannel marketing tactics. Under Mike’s leadership, Web Talent Marketing has risen to the forefront of strategic Internet marketing, as well as web design & development.

Tell us about your background and your role within the company.

Starting out as a one-man design and development company, I quickly realized

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Unlike some CEOs, I enjoy being involved in the day-to-day business interactions. It is not uncommon for me to be found working with department managers to ensure client satisfaction, oversee strategy execution and business development, and various other marketing activities. Creating positive energy and motivating my team to strive for excellence is a daily occurrence.

What are your main services?

the need to build a talented team in order to fulfill my ultimate goal of growing into a full service digital marketing agency.

After several years of managing a domestic freelance team, I hired our first full-time employee. Two years later I reconnected with an old friend and colleague, Oliver Feakins. He and I, through numerous discussions, determined we had similar business philosophies and goals. We also had similar hurdles in taking our companies to the next level. In November of 2010, Oliver and I merged to form Web Talent Marketing – a full service digital marketing company.

Oliver and I quickly grew from 1 employee to 7 in our first year.

With the vision of growing into a nationally recognized agency, I began creating an infrastructure that would be sustainable and scalable. From employee retention programs to phone systems, servers, accounting and

Web Talent Marketing is a full service digital marketing agency, with a core goal of generating and converting leads for our clients. To do the “converting” part of this, we offer complete website design, development, and conversion rate optimization services. To do the “generating” part we offer Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, Social Media Services, and Content Strategy and Development Services.

What makes your firm different from other companies competing in your industry?

We really do care. And that may sound cliché, but we often hear how that is not the case with many of our competitors. Our team takes pride in their work and we will stand behind it, without excuse.

Tell us more about your firm’s success story.

Well, I can say that it did not happen overnight! It was, and continues to be, the culmination of hard work by many people on a daily basis. I once heard that if “you want to succeed you need to fail more frequently”, so we have continued to press forward not

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scared of potential failure. Not all hires work out well, but we continue to hire. Not all clients do what we ask, but we continue to ask. Not all tactics employed in a campaign work, but that does not mean we don’t employ them in a different campaign. Fear of failure is not an option at Web Talent.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like you?

1) Tell me about the quality and tenure of your staff and are they in-house? Many Internet marketing companies have untrained interns performing billable hours or are outsourcing work, which reduces quality control.

2) Can you show me case studies that demonstrate your ability to generate results in my particular area of interest?

And/or References? Great Internet marketing companies will have great brand advocates.

3) Describe your level and methods of communication? I know it has been said repeatedly, but communication is key!

What are some of the myths in your field?

SEO is dead! There was a significant article with this title that circulated about a year ago, and we are still hearing this from prospective clients. Many SEO tactics have died…this is true. Tactics such as article spinning and link networks can now be identified, and subsequently penalized, by search engines.

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These, however, have been replaced by other tactics as SEO, which can be defined as the process of getting a website more visible in the search engines, is still very much alive and well.

How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?

Search engines don’t provide “how-to guides” or manuals to Internet marketing companies.

We are, however, expected to know what it takes for our clients to gain top rankings.

In order to develop our skills, we invest a significant amount of time into internal and external training combined with hands-on application, testing, and then evaluation of our strategies. Internally, meetings and sharing of industry publications are had on a daily basis. Externally, we look to attend, participate, and speak at various industry conferences and trade shows.

What do you see as the future of the industry?

What will be the challenges? Do you anticipate any drastic changes?

The future of Internet marketing is strong! It is rare we find a company that cannot benefit from online advertising. The same cannot be said for other advertising channels such as radio, print, or television. In this regard, we are fortunate.

A major challenge we see coming is the competition for top Internet marketing talent.

We are seeing this currently…good people are hard to find and nearly as hard to develop.

Online marketers must be technically proficient in numerous areas while also having a wellrounded, omnichannel marketing knowledge.

Regarding drastic changes, I guess it depends on how “drastic” is defined. As mentioned earlier, change in Internet marketing occurs daily with some very drastic changes occurring in the last couple years (e.g. Google’s recent Hummingbird update was an entirely new algorithm).

Over the next few years, we think algorithm changes will decline, thus allowing companies to adjust to these recent changes.

The greatest changes will most likely occur in the technology used to access these search results (e.g. mobile devices).

Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?

While physically (and happily) still in Central Pennsylvania, I see Web Talent Marketing having a Global reach with National brand awareness. Being exceptional in all that we do is the constant message to my team. We expect to be a top destination point for job seekers and large brands alike. As for me, I will be right in the middle of all the excitement! I am passionate about my company and can’t see myself doing anything else. And, oh yeah, I will be married and, with any luck, will have a couple kids that can be groomed to someday work in Daddy’s company.

We will remain aggressive in our goal create content that powers business, and develop strategies that forge the road ahead. Using market research, we’ll ensure brand’s content aligns with what users are looking for in search and talking about in social n

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FREE SEO Analysis and Quote Call Now! 901-672-7243

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mobile marketing

A Few Paid Mobile Marketing Tools You Don’t Want to Miss

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ecause mobile marketing is always changing, mobile tools are also constantly changing, which can make finding good tools to help you overwhelming. Different marketing tools are coming out every week, and while some might not get very far or stick very well with the small business owner community, many of them do offer some great features—the key is just being able to sort through all of your choices to find what works for you.

If you’ve been using a mobile marketing tool that you like you don’t necessarily need to stop, but always check out some of your other options to see if something is either easier or can supplement your current tools.

Paid Mobile Marketing Tools to Help You Improve Your Mobile Strategy While there are quite a few free mobile marketing tools out there, paid tools typically offer companies more detailed information. If your company is growing, it might be a good idea to get started with a paid tool sooner rather than later so that you’re prepared to keep your business moving forward as your traffic and readership changes.

According to a Marin Software report, mobile devices will comprise 50 percent of all paid search clicks

by December 2015 at the current rate of growth. In other words, it’s clear that mobile marketing needs to be a priority of all types of businesses.

Below are some of the most popular mobile marketing tools out there today: 1. MailChimp. Cost typically works based on the number of subscribers you have. You can go with a $10, $15, or $20 per month plan.

This tool will allow you to view data regarding your email campaign, which

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makes it a great tool to help you analyze the content and other factors that may or may not be working. Aside from just that, you can use the desktop version of the tool to setup newsletters that will work well for mobile (and you’ll find a few other mobile templates as well!).

The tool is actually know to be one of the best free tools out there, but the paid version offers more features including autoresponders, spam filter diagnostics, email client testing, delivery by time zone, and a few social features.

2. ShortStack. The most popular package is $75/month, but depending on what features you want you can pay $30, $150, $300, or nothing at all.

ShortStack is actually a tool that helps you create apps for your Facebook page. In other words it’s not necessarily as versatile as some of the other tools out there, but it’s a great way to improve your Facebook presence for the mobile screen. I like this app because you don’t have to be a developer to use it. It’s incredibly important that your Facebook apps—contests, polls, data collection, analytics—are working properly so that those looking at your timeline on a mobile device are able to participate and won’t click away, so it was worth mentioning.

ShortStack does offer a free version of their tool, but their most popular version falls right in the middle.

The three packages that are the most expensive all offer all of the features, the only difference is your fan allowance, which jumps from 25,000 to 100,000 to 250,000 and then to the big one million.

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3. Mogreet Express. There is a free demo, otherwise you can have a Gold package with 2,500 messages for $89.99/month, a Platinum with 5,000 messages for $169.99/month, or a Super Platinum with 10,000 messages at $299.99/month.

This isn’t the most popular tool out there on the market, but it’s an incredibly interesting one that deserves a little bit of attention. The tool allows you to create a text message or a video message and send that out to subscribers, so it’s a slightly different variation of an email marketing campaign. You can keep up with analytics with this tool as well to track your texting activity and see what’s working and what’s not.

The biggest thing to keep in mind about this tool, or really just text messaging for marketing in general, is that it can get very annoying.

You have to make it easy for people to unsubscribe (usually he/she will just text you something), but ideally you just have to have the right message, the right frequency of those messages, and the right audience to get text message marketing to work. It might take some time, but in the end this is one of the best ways to market on a mobile device if you can make it work.

Extra Tips: Responsive web design is key when it comes to mobile marketing. Although this idea isn’t necessarily a tool, it’s a type of web design that you can use to help make sure that your content, images, etc. will adjust to fit the small screen. According to Scott Langdon, Managing Partner of HigherVisibility “responsive web design is really the key to mobile success for small business owners.

Even if you plan to create a custom mobile website in the future, make

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sure that you have a responsive web design in place so that you at least have something quality out there for the very large mobile user community—you never know how long your other idea could take to put into action. A responsive design should be your priority.”

Remember, almost every mobile marketing tool you may want to get involved with will offer you some sort of free trial or a free package. I highly recommend checking out the free version first before jumping into a paid version (even if it doesn’t have the exact features you want) because these packages have similar functionality and structure. It helps you get a feel for what you might expect out of a paid version.

Have you tried any mobile marketing tools that you can’t live without?

Any tools you would avoid? Let us know what works for you in the comments below. n

With over 10 years of experience in online marketing and development, Adam Heitzman has learned the many facets of the internet marketing world and the strategies it takes to succeed. Currently he writes for HigherVisibility, where he focuses on providing the latest news and tips to help the novice webmaster hone their online marketing skills. Before founding HigherVisibility in 2007, Adam worked as an Marketing Executive with several publicly traded companies.

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branding

Using Metrics and Analytics to Tell Better Brand Stories

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ompelling brand stories are the heart and soul of successful marketing strategies. But unfortunately, the brand stories in today’s marketplace often contain more fiction than fact.

Instead of accurately connecting targeted messages to granular audience segments, the content communicates vague or even wishful dimensions of the brand to an undifferentiated audience base.

visitors download case studies, white papers, infographics or other materials, it’s a sign that they are interested enough to provide contact information to the sales team. By connecting downloads to originating pageviews, you can take it a step further and create profiles of the types of people who are engaging with various aspects of your brand stories.

As marketing pros, we can do a better job telling brand stories. In fact, we have to do a better job if we’re going to have any chance of creating and distributing the kind of content that produces actual business outcomes for our clients and companies. And for most digital and content marketers, that means finding ways to incorporate underutilized metrics and analytics into our storytelling routines.

• Conversions (Leads) – Your ability to attach bottom line outcomes to brand storytelling can be improved by monitoring the number of conversions or leads that result from specific pieces of content. Although not every piece of content is designed to convert site visitors (some are designed to move the visitor to a different point on the conversion path), conversions and leads demonstrate the business impact of brand storytelling and can be critical in building a business case for content marketing investments.

Expanding the Use of Metrics and Analytics in Brand Storytelling Most marketers pay attention to basic measurements like site visits and pageviews. But let’s face it—simple measurements only go so far. Ideally, you need visibility to insights that inform the entire storytelling process, from the selection of topics to content strategies that increase leads and conversions.

By expanding the range of metrics and analytics that inform content creation, you can improve your ability to reach specific audience segments with specific dimensions of your brand story and increase your content’s ability to generate real world business outcomes.

• Time on Page – If you’re not looking at Time on Page, you’re missing a major piece of the brand storytelling puzzle. Visitors linger longer on pages that are useful and relevant, and quickly exit pages that offer no value. Similarly, Time on Site (combined with the number of pageviews) can show whether or not visitors were inspired to learn more about the brand and its products or services.

• Content Downloads – In the B2B sector, downloads are important because they represent a critical step on the conversion journey. When

• Social Reach – Great storytelling doesn’t just connect with site visitors—it inspires them to share brand stories with their social networks. From a content marketing angle, social shares indicate “stickiness”, since site visitors only share content they find interesting, useful and compelling.

• Click-Through Rates – Online advertising funnels traffic to content and creates opportunities for remarketing, sending display ads to site users after they have exited the website. By evaluating the click-through and conversion rates of content-promoting ads and remarketing ads, you can gain additional insights about content performance.

Metrics and analytics are often intimidating to content creators. But that’s not a good enough reason to avoid the use of measurements in your brand storytelling. With just a little extra effort, deeper engagement with metrics and analytics can dramatically improve your ability to tell the right stories to the right people—yielding big results for your brand. n

Tim Morral is a Senior Copywriter with Walker Sands Digital. With more than a decade of PR, web and marketing copy experience, Tim specializes in creating content that generates sales, builds brand reputation and drives strategic outcomes for Walker Sands clients. Based on his belief that good writing creates real value, Tim focuses on helping technology companies and other firms achieve clarity in their written communications, crafting copy that increases the volume of the company’s key messages in today’s crowded markets.

www.visibilitymagazine.com

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Don’t Let These Regulatory Issues Derail Your Affiliate Program

By Jamie Birch

E

commerce or affiliate managers may have several different things that keep them up at night: trademark infringement, channel cannibalization, fraudulent sales, cart sniping, and more. All of these are valid concerns for any online marketer. But there are two other items that give me nightmares, cold sweats, and keep my staff up at night – the affiliate nexus taxes in each state and FTC regulations that our affiliates need to comply with.

Quick disclosure: I am not a lawyer and I am not your lawyer. This information should not be taken as legal advice. If you feel one or both of the issues below pertain to you, you should contact your attorney.

Chances are that you are aware of the affiliate nexus tax issue (often called the Amazon Tax). According to PerformanceMarketingAssociation.com “… states are attempting to define their resident affiliates as having a sales presence or “nexus” for out of state merchants in order to collect sales tax for purchases made within that state.”

These taxes go against decades of Supreme Court precedent and do not collect the intended (hoped for) tax revenue. It forces merchants to cease working with affiliates in states that pass them and in most cases those affiliates actually move to nearby states that are not attempting to establish nexus for merchants through their affiliate partnerships. States end up losing tax revenue as income flees the state or simply dry up. They are starting to see this now and I predict we’ll see these laws overturned or repealed in 2014 and 2015. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore them. If you have affiliates in those states, you’ll need to develop a plan to deal with this to limit your liability. The

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good news is most (I believe all but two states) have ways to rebut or simply comply without incurring any liability.

California and New York for instance allow you to have your in-state affiliates sign a simple affidavit that says they are not targeting their in state consumers directly, but they are targeting all web consumers.

For more information visit the Performance Marketing Association’s website here: http:// thepma.org/internet-sales-tax-reform/.

Several advertisers have either removed affiliates from states that have not only passed this legislation but are considering it. And a few have simply closed their affiliate programs completely as compliance became too costly for them. I don’t recommend doing that. Complying with a majority of the states is not prohibitive.

The FTC guidelines, and the potential ramifications of remaining ignorant about

them, can be frightening. If you aren’t aware of what I’m referring to, please continue to read on.

In March of 2013, the FTC issued updated guidance on its advertising disclosure laws that clearly place affiliate activities under these regulations. In the past affiliates needed to provide clear and conspicuous disclosure that their content contains or is advertising.

These new clarifications outlined that this disclosure was no longer the case. Typically affiliates included a disclosure on a separate page with a link in their footer on each page.

That disclosure protected the affiliate and protected the advertiser. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. The FTC now requires disclosure at the top/front of the ad that it is an advertisement – on every single ad without needing to scroll down to view a disclosure.

Why should advertisers/merchants care? In 2011 Legacy Learning was the first casualty of these guidelines and received a fine of $250,000 from the FTC, plus the legal and attorney fees. And here is the kicker, they were not doing anything that most in our industry and most likely you are not doing. You need to have an auditing and enforcement process in place to protect you, your affiliates, and your affiliate manager.

The FTC said so – “Advertisers need to have reasonable programs in place to train and monitor members of their network. The scope of the program depends on the risk that deceptive practices by network participants could cause consumer harm – either physical injury or financial loss.” Read more at: http://business.ftc.gov/ documents/bus71-ftcsrevised-endorsementguideswhat-people-areasking.

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How could you possibly monitor every single ad for your company and products on every single website? The FTC understands that is not realistic and provided additional guidance: “It would be unrealistic to say you had to be aware of every single statement made by a member of your network. But it’s up to you to make an effort to know where your people are talking about your product. It’s unlikely that the activity of a rogue blogger would be the basis of a law enforcement action if your company has a reasonable training and monitoring program.”

So, you are covered if you have a monitoring and enforcement plan in place.

The FTC recommends that you have a process where you regularly monitor your affiliate partners on a reasonable basis and follow up with affiliates that may have questionable practices.

We recommend a few extra things: • Have a written plan on who you audit,

when you audit, and how you audit. In writing. Written down. Did I say you should have it written down? We audit our top performing affiliates and 20-30 random affiliate partners each month.

• Include language in your affiliate program’s terms and conditions that require affiliates to comply with these FTC guidelines.

• Keep track of your auditing process and your findings. We keep an electronic and physical copy. If the FTC comes-a-knockin’ we want them to see that our processes are tight and well tracked for each of our clients. I recommend you do the same.

Compliance is important, even vital, to the health of your affiliate program, and in fact your career. I wouldn’t want to face a client, let alone my boss or the CEO if the FTC fined my company for 250 million dollars. It’s scary. But, it’s also easy to comply. A good plan, executed regularly, that is tracked and enforced is going to provide you the protection you need.

Don’t let these two legislative and regulatory requirements (obstacles) get in the way of your online marketing growth. It only takes a few minutes to get familiar and have a plan in place to protect you, your company, your affiliates, and the channel’s revenue.

A special thanks goes out to Tricia Meyer, owner of SunshineRewards.com for her detailed analysis of this issue and bringing this to the forefront of the online marketing industry. n

Jamie Birch is the owner and principal of JEBCommerce. His 14 years of online marketing experience includes all facets of online marketing: email projects, paid search campaigns, customer retention programs, and much more. This wide range of disciplines has enabled Jamie to excel as a business leader and JEBCommerce to realize a great level of success for its clients, including winning the 2012 Rakuten Linkshare Affiliate Agency of the Year award.

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digital marketing

The Single Most Valuable Component of Any Digital Marketing Campaign

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ith robots and machines doing seemingly everything for us, we’re not far off from any 20th century science fiction movie predicting the future. While we don’t have flying cars or people living in space yet, we do have dependent relationships with robots. We live in an age the Jetsons would recognize.

Just like the Jetsons rely on Rosie to care for them, we’re becoming increasingly reliant on machines in all aspects of our lives. For our purposes here, let’s talk only about our reliance on machines when it comes to digital marketing. With so much data available to us, some digital marketers feel that it’s ok to set up keywords and leave the rest to algorithms. That leaves them without the single most valuable component of any marketing campaign: human intelligence.

Don’t get me wrong. Data is great! Where data becomes problematic is when people don’t think critically about the results. I call this approach “intuitive search intelligence.” It calls for holistic digital marketing campaigns that share insights and strategy across channels; the communication component is something only people can do. The combination of data-driven decisions and human marketing expertise is extremely powerful in digital marketing campaigns.

Now that I’ve convinced you that humans and robots make the perfect digital marketing combination, here are four steps to creating that perfect mix:

Launch a large-scale AdWords campaign The first step is setting a broad range of terms for an AdWords campaign.

This will help identify which keywords to use as data comes in. You can sift through and pick the best ones by volume, click-through rates and conversions. That doesn’t mean just the high-volume keywords; you want a mix of high- and low-volume terms at first to capture your entire audience.

Since it’s the beginning of baseball season, let’s use America’s favorite pastime as an example. If you’re a marketer for the Los Angeles Dodgers and want to sell game tickets online, in this step, you would set a broad range of keywords from “baseball” to “dodgers” to “dodgers stadium.” In this initial data, you find that “baseball” is too broad for your purposes, but “dodgers” performs well. In a strictly machine-operated program, Keyword Planner would drop “baseball” and focus on “dodgers.” That makes sense.

However, that scenario doesn’t consider an alternative, potentially better term. That’s the ISI difference. A human marketer can say “what about this alternative?” You, the individual, can consider “dodgers stadium” and “baseball la” as other keywords in this campaign.

great competitive advantage. By writing SEO copy based on PPC keywords, you’ll boost your organic search rankings for those terms.

To illustrate, you, as the Dodgers marketing manager, can develop web content from landing pages to blog posts with the language you know your audience is searching for. That’s powerful!

Adjust PPC based on SEO results As your keywords climb the organic search result ladder, you can tailor your paid search strategy accordingly. This continuous feedback loop between channels hits at the core of ISI. Machines do not have the capability to analyze and be creative; humans do. They should take the data from algorithms and make it meaningful.

Let’s say you write a blog post for the Dodgers. Since your SEO and PPC teammates have shared the top keywords for selling tickets, you know to incorporate those into your post to boost organic search results. If consumers are gravitating toward the team’s history page, for example, then you should make sure “dodgers history” is a search term in PPC. That language should also be included in a landing page for SEO purposes. Cross-channel communication enhances keyword relevance, allows ad copy to complement text in organic searches and optimizes digital marketing budgets.

Use results as you expand into other channels As I alluded to in the last step, PPC and SEO aren’t the only channels where ISI is useful. These same principles apply to every aspect of your digital marketing strategy: email marketing, social media and more.

Using social media as an example, when you wrote your blog post and the SEO team told you that “dodgers history” is a valuable term, you should share the news with the social media team as well. They can use it in their content and ad strategy on each social network. Likewise, if they find that posts surrounding giveaways generate higher than average engagement, they should share that information with the other digital marketing teams.

Sharing insights helps all marketers shape their brand’s perception across channels. The success of ISI relies on smart marketers questioning results and striving for excellence.

The Jetsons’ Rosie has her place, but we can’t leave all aspects of digital marketing up to her and the machines. It’s time to reintroduce people into the fold. With man and machine working side-by-side, digital marketers can produce better results. n

Apply PPC lessons to SEO The first step laid the ground work for this one since PPC and SEO work so closely together. Now that you have your top keywords for PPC, you can use those same words for search optimization. Not only can those terms improve website architecture and meta descriptions, they also give your content a

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Mike Mothner is the founder and CEO of Wpromote, an online marketing firm that runs SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns for companies worldwide. He is also the author of the new book, “Experts & Engines: ROI Focused Online Marketing Through Intuitive Search Intelligence.”

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social media marketing

5 Must-Have Features in Your Next Social Media Marketing Platform

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hether you’re a large brand or a mom-and-pop shop, social media has become an important tool for driving business success – but the key to success starts with a strong social media and reputation management platform.

For large brands, managing social media activities across multiple channels for several locations can be an overwhelming task, while small business owners often struggle to find the time to dedicate to perfecting their social strategy. On top of it all, businesses of all sizes should be concerned with what customers are saying about them online via review sites, and using separate tools to manage it all can be time consuming and complex.

Social media and online reputation management doesn’t have to be complicated, but it all starts with finding the right platform. There are a variety of social and reputation management tools out there to help manage your online presence, but consider looking for a solution that can manage both reputation and social media from a single platform. Also keep in mind that the best platforms are those that can effectively support marketing efforts whether the user is a marketing veteran or business owner wearing multiple hats. Here are some features to consider before choosing your next social media management platform.

1. Content Sourcing Imagine logging onto your social media marketing platform and being greeted by volumes of rich, relevant, fresh content, all pre-populated for your brand based on terms you’ve selected all the way down to your location.

Marketing managers need to quickly create and publish content to several social channels in just a few clicks, so look for a social management platform that helps shoulder the burden of sourcing content. Consider a system that utilizes RSS feeds to create a library full of content to engage your followers and fans. To manage content quickly and efficiently, look for a platform that allows you to customize these pre-generated posts with ease.

2. Easy Scheduling and Distribution Writing and executing an entire social calendar by hand is incredibly time consuming, and most marketers don’t have that kind of time, especially when managing multiple social media pages. The ability to schedule posts in advance across social networks should be a priority when selecting a social media marketing platform. Look for a platform with a user-friendly social content calendar that allows you to look ahead at what has already been scheduled, while also having visibility to previous posts and their performance.

3. Easy-to-Understand Analytics Without the capability to measure results, a social media marketing platform is worthless, but investing extra time and resources in understanding those analytics should

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not be an add-on requirement. How does the platform present social analytics? Are they simple to understand, and most importantly, are they actionable?

A strong social management platform should provide insight into when fans and followers are most likely to engage on specific networks, and what type of content they respond best to. Being able to make sense of every like, comment, retweet and +1 is crucial in increasing engagement and driving measurable results.

4. Reputation Management Social media management platforms integrated with reputation management capabilities create a huge advantage for marketers. By being notified when new reviews are posted across social networks and major review sites, you can quickly respond to negative reviews, taking the time to provide the necessary customer support or promote positive reviews and interact with satisfied customers. Having reputation management tools integrated into your social media marketing platform can also allow you to share your best reviews across social networks with a single click, further amplifying the reach of that good experience.

5. Scalability If you’re in the market for growth, consider a platform with the ability to scale with your business. If you have multiple locations and expect to expand further, managing all associated social media pages and review sites from a single platform is essential.

If you expect rapid growth, choose a platform that allows you to create posts for your brand’s many social pages and route them directly to those page owners for approval and posting. Additionally, make sure that platform has the capability of creating location-based posts to get the right content to the right people.

Choose a platform that allows all users to access each location’s social page via the platform. That way, no personal log-ins are required for social management, allowing you to prevent any mishaps with former employees.

With the right management platform, a business of any size can use social media to easily reach and engage its customers. Always look for tools that make social marketing simple and intuitive no matter what the user’s skill level. n

Phil Penton is the President of Social Integration, the leading end-to-end reputation and social media management platform. With over 12 years of experience in marketing technology and media, Phil works with a variety of businesses, from Fortune 500 to local business owners, to provide innovative solutions for social media and reputation management. Sign up for your 30-day free trial of Social Integration today.

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legal corner

Written by: Travis Crabtree

#SMH – Check your online promotion hashtag or face scrutiny from the FTC

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s we have reported before, the Federal Trade Commission requires the disclosure of any “material connection” connection offered in exchange for an online endorsement in their Online Endorsement Guidelines. Now, they are applying those rules to online promotions that require contestants to post or pin certain message to participate.

For those of you with short attention spans, this means that you should make all contestants post, pin, hashtag or in some other way indicate that whatever content the contestants are submitting is part of a contest. It could require the use of the word “contest” or “sweepstakes” in all hashtags or posts.

Otherwise, the FTC believes consumers are misled by your friend’s endorsement of a product if they don’t know you endorsed it to enter a contest or sweepstakes.

The guidance comes to us courtesy of the FTC Division of Advertising Practice’s recent investigation of Cole Haan. The shoe and fashion company conducted a Pinterest contest where contestants had to use the hashtag #WanderingSole. In addition, contestants had to pin five images on the board and to post their favorite places to wander. Cole Haan was giving away a $1,000 shopping spree to the most creative entries.

The FTC summarized its findings as follows: We believe that participants’ pins featuring Cole Haan products were endorsements of the Cole Haan products, and the fact that the pins were incentivized by the opportunity to win a $1000 shopping spree would not reasonably be expected by consumers who saw the pins. Moreover, we were concerned that Cole Haan did not instruct contestants to label their pins and Pinterest boards to make it clear that they had pinned Cole Haan products as part of a contest. We do not believe that the “#WanderingSole” hashtag adequately communicated the financial incentive- a material connection- between contestants and Cole Haan.

Despite these findings, the FTC closed its investigation and decided not to act against Cole Haan. The FTC indicated, however, future contest sponsors may not be so fortunate. Under Section 5 of the FTC Act, the FTC has the ability to pursue claims for “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”

By not disclosing a “material connection” between an online

Do you have a legal question you want answered in the next column?

Send your questions to legalcorner@visibilitymagazine.com.

endorsement and anything of value the brand may be offering, the FTC suggests you may be engaging in unfair or deceptive acts.

In the Cole Haan case, The FTC determined that each “pin” was an endorsement of the brand and the opportunity to win $1,000 in exchange for the pin was a material connection that should have been disclosed. Simply requiring “#WanderingSole” was not enough to inform other consumers the pins were part of a contest.

The FTC wrote: “First, we have not previously publicly addressed whether entry into a contest is a form of material connection, nor have we explicitly addressed whether a pin on Pinterest may constitute an endorsement. Second, the contest ran for a limited length of time and drew a relatively small number of contestants.

Finally, Cole Haan has since adopted a social media policy that adequately addresses our concerns. The FTC staff expects that Cole Haan will take reasonable steps to monitor social media influencers’ compliance with the obligation to disclose material connections when endorsing its products.”

You can therefore consider this the FTC’s warning. If you are doing a contest that requires posting, pinning, tweeting or something similar, then make sure the hashtag includes something that tells the market, this is a contest or sweepstakes. It could be as simple as “#WanderingSoleContest” or “#WanderingSoleSweeps” In addition, and as discussed in this column on the online archives, contest and sweepstakes rules should be prominently displayed so consumers know people are being asked to submit contest as part of the contest.

While this may be taking the Online Endorsement Guides a little too far, and the FTC may not ultimately prevail if it did bring an enforcement action, you are better off letting someone else fight that battle. This guidance is just one more thing to consider when engaging in online marketing and contests. If you are offering anyone, anything of value (which, apparently now includes the opportunity to win a prize, but was more traditionally free product) in exchange for content, then you need to consider including a disclosure of the connection.

You can read more about the Online Endorsement Guidelines and legally compliant online promotions in the Legal Corner archives. n

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Engage. Analyze. Grow.

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The Best SEO Strategy is to

Ignore Google

By John Broadbent

W

hen I was young and stupid (unlike now of course), a good friend of mine dared me to go on a date with at least 100 different girls between my 16th and 19th birthdays. It didn’t take too long to realize that there was an ironic phenomenon in dating - playing “hard to get” typically meant you got more attention.

Search engine optimization has become very similar to dating. If you want to get noticed by Google, work on your marketing strategy as though they don’t exist. Better yet, the best SEO strategy after Panda and Penguin is to work as though you’ll never get another website visitor from any search engine, ever again.

What would you do if the internet was exactly like it is today, only without search engines? How would you get your target customers to find you without paying to

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advertise? These are the types of questions that will spawn a winning SEO strategy that’s completely future proof. These are the questions internet marketers should have been asking from the beginning.

Somewhere along the way, SEOs mutated from marketers to gamers. We forgot the subtle art of luring in our target market through various steps of a sales funnel. Sure, we became experts at optimizing our conversion funnels; but in the process, we completely ignored the rest of the sales funnel as we focused all of our attention on gaming the system at the “zero moment of truth.”

Rather than manipulating ranking signals (such as links and social metrics), we need to persuade potential customers to move beyond brand awareness toward a future purchase. This is best done through something I’ve started calling “content funneling.”

The Art of Content Funneling The most popular battle cry these days is that content is king. While that is most certainly true, very few SEOs have a method to their marketing madness. For too many, there’s no rhyme or reason to content creation. Countless articles are being flung into the online arena under the assumption that more is always better. While many of these articles are just garbage, the ones that aren’t don’t lead an audience to action.

At the end of the day, all content should provoke some kind of action - even if the action

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is simply to consume more information. While some brands struggle to move their readers, others are hindered by an over-zealousness to close the sale. Persuasion is a balance. You need to find the sweet spot between being an encyclopedia and being a pushy salesperson.

Lead your audience gently and systematically down a path toward a website conversion.

Entice them to follow you through a content funnel that mirrors your sales funnel.

Step 2: Advise Once your audience sees your data suggesting that there is some underlying problem in an issue they care about, they are ripe to have the problem explicitly laid out in front of them. This is a great time for a brand like yours to offer advice on how the world should change. Successful advice content will help your audience

Most of the brands I work with are able to use the following content funnel to lure their target audience closer to a purchase decision. They work to inform, advise, and instruct their readers before they attempt to solve their problems and sell them a product or service.

One of my favorite sit-down hamburger restaurants is Red Robin. Their campfire sauce is awesome. A while back, a friend and I started scouring the web to make it ourselves. We found dozens of recipes, and tried nearly all of them.

Some came pretty close, but none were perfect. I’ve spent more money eating at Red Robin since I started trying to counterfeit their sauce than I ever did before I began my culinary escapades.

As you begin the ideation process for creating your informational content, consider the data that validates your brand’s existence.

What empirical evidence is there that you can eventually use to support your unique value propositions? Answering this question with hard data and supporting facts will set up the perfect opportunity to eventually address a problem that your product or service solves.

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Step 3: Instruct The natural tendency for people who recognize that they have a problem is to look for a solution. The meteoric rise of DIY proves that many consumers try to solve their problems on their own before they start looking for a product or service that will do the trick. This is where many brands have to take a leap of faith.

The desire for closely guarded trade secrets will get in the way of your SEO efforts if you’re not careful. I’m sure your secret sauce is something special.

It should be. By all means, guard the original recipe, but leak some close substitutes.

Step 1: Inform At the very top of your content funnel, your entire objective should be better brand awareness. This is your opportunity to attract new members to your audience without threatening their attention with sales materials.

Be careful not to present the problem or it’s solution in your informational content.

This step is simply to get people thinking about the world in the right way so they can make a purchase decision in the future. You should also make sure that your brand takes credit for the information. Make content that’s easy to share in a way that leads people back to you from wherever they found the information.

a bad taste in their mouths through clever advertainments. There are a lot of good examples of advice content toward the beginning of most animated intro videos.

Doing business online isn’t much different.

The more people you can get trying to duplicate your secret sauce, the longer your lines will be for new and returning customers. Don’t fight against the DIY movement. Use it to attract customers who will certainly get tired of trying to duplicate the amazing things your brand is doing. identify that the problem you set up in your information content affects them.

It can be really tough to engage your audience when all you want to do is tell them that they have a problem. This is where we can learn from traditional advertising tactics. You can clearly present a problem to your audience without leaving

Step 4: Solve After your audience has tried to get it right on their own, they’ll realize that they aren’t the experts you are. They’ll start comparing the available options for purchasing a solution rather than doing it themselves. If you’ve done your job up to this point, you’ll already be near the top of their list. Now all you have to do is show your audience why you’re the best.

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internet are forums and blog comments. Just make sure that your comments are useful and relevant to the original thread or post.

Expected Results If you create great content and integrate your other online efforts and strategies, you can begin seeing some results immediately.

Will those results be an immediate increase in organic traffic? Probably not. But you should start seeing your referral traffic and ranking signals increase. The sales you get from referral traffic increases shouldn’t have to foot the bill for ROI. Give it a few months and organic traffic will start carrying its own weight. I typically evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy by looking at referral traffic and ranking signals before I see organic results.

Referral Traffic If your content was produced well, published to be shared, and promoted effectively, you should see immediate traffic increases. You’ll have to tweak the timing of your publishing schedule so that each piece of content you create builds on the last.

The most common ways to show off your great value propositions is by comparing your product or service with the competition. Typically it’s best if praise for your brand doesn’t come directly from you. This is where a good post in a relevant publication by a reputable author would come in handy. If that can’t be arranged, you may be able to tastefully publish this content to your own site or blog. Golden Valley Natural did a great job with this for a while with their weekly “Snackdown.”

Don’t try to hide all your flaws in these “Top 10” and “Best ___” posts. If your audience thinks that your product or service is too good to be true, they may just back out at the last second. A conservative amount of honesty about minor flaws may actually help you make the sale.

Step 5: Sell This is usually the easiest step for many brands because most of the content they currently have on their website is purely promotional.

It’s all designed to sell something.

Typically, the biggest problem with sales pages are that they don’t get many natural links or social shares unless the product or service is truly amazing. This is why many

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SEOs are so quick to run out and hire a link building service - they see it as a silver bullet. That may have been true before April 2012, but it’s not anymore. If you want an SEO strategy that will last forever, you’ll need to do a good job sculpting PageRank from your upper-funnel content toward your sales pages.

Putting it All Together This SEO strategy gets all your marketing efforts working together for your brand.

Content at the top of the funnel typically belongs on your blog, and you should create a content schedule to publish new posts regularly.

You should take care to link your content together thoughtfully. I usually like to see links to the next step in the funnel and the final sales page in almost every post. For this reason, it’s usually good to build your content funnel backward (from the bottom up) - there’s no sense trying to send your audience to a page that doesn’t exist yet. That’s a good way to quickly burn bridge.

Promoting upper-funnel content is natural and acceptable on social networks. The better your content is, the more likely you will be to experience “mini-viral” effects. Always keep in mind that the oldest social networks on the

Keep in mind that the referral traffic you’re generating won’t stick around. It will taper off over time along with new links and social signals.

Ranking Signals For content near the bottom of your sales funnel, you should expect to see fewer natural links and social signals. It’s understandable that the closer your content is to making a final sale, the less people will share it.

I like to look closely at ranking signals by funnel step and industry to identify benchmarks for future posts. If you’re monitoring these metrics closely, you can predict future results fairly accurately.

Organic Traffic I’ve also noticed that while referral traffic is great, it doesn’t always have the best conversion rates. The real magic of this strategy is that it’s future-proof SEO. If you ignore Google and try to get as much referral traffic as you can, you’ll rank well for the topics and keywords that matter most to your brand. n

John Broadbent is the Chief Operating Officer at Netmark, an internet marketing agency. He consults with businesses of all sizes and assists them in integrating all of their marketing efforts into one cohesive strategy.

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facebook advertising

Facebook advertising statistics and 10 things that would improve your Facebook campaign performance greatly

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his is a very crucial question that should be put before starting any online marketing campaign. As a smart marketer or a business owner you don’t want to waste your money or pour them down the drain.

Facebook users also tend to go mobile, so keep it in mind, when building landing pages for your campaigns.

And when a tricky question such as this one arises it means that we need to turn to numbers and statistics for an answer.

What do we know about Facebook that would be of use for a business owner?

Facebook still firmly holds the position of the biggest and most active social network worldwide and the percentage of adults using this social media channel is constantly growing.

Some other Facebook statistics: • 1.26 billion people are on Facebook and the number is growing • 500 million people login daily • 350 million people browse Facebook from their mobile phones. (It means they might be checking in at your store or business and their friends are seeing this.)

• 100 million people “likes” something on Facebook daily. People are liking brands, stores, activities, foods, just about anything.

• 2 billion posts go online every day • The average person spends 7 hours and 34 minutes every month on Facebook • When a person likes a brand’s page they are 4 times more likely to buy • Facebook accounts for 60% of all social referrals to ecommerce sites • The average order size from a Facebook referral to ecommerce site is $85.87 • The country with the most active Facebook users is Canada That being said, we can conclude that Facebook advertising is definitely a good idea for e-commerce sites and in order not to repeat typical blunders of the advertisers new to Facebook, I suggest you go through these practical and important tips:

Top 10 tips for your Facebook ad campaign

1. Content always comes first, no matter how good and creative your ad is and how precise your targeting is, if your content sucks if it fails to cater to your target audience needs, the campaign will be underperforming. And the content should not be about your product or service it should be about your customers – what they like, what they

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think, what bothers them, what solves their problems, what entertains them. A good example of a piece that can be promoted:

5. Change the ads, even the best performing ones, as they tend to wear out pretty quickly, especially if you are targeting one and the same audience which is pretty narrow. Try to change the ads at least once in a week if they have the same targeting and you will see that the interest to them heats up every time you change your ad layout.

6. Use Facebook offers and call to action buttons to boost click through rates and conversions of your ads (you can also install a Facebook conversion pixel on your website). They are now available both in the usual interface and in Power Editor.

The post is timely, interesting, engaging and cross-promotes other social channel.

2. Make sure you eventually convert your page fans into leads and customers. Facebook, as any other channel of advertising has to pay off the money invested. So think through the whole storyline you want your fans to follow from your Facebook page to your landing page, website or maybe even Twitter lead generation card. Don’t scary them away too soon – don’t pitch, but collect their contact details offering them something nice and free.

7. Make sure that your ads are running in the newsfeed as a Sponsored story and never-ever use “Boost post” button in the left bottom corner – this is just a small trick by Facebook to pull some extra money out of you, as the temptation is really high to hit this button and launch a campaign in 2 seconds, but then you will have no flexibility – no sophisticated targeting options, no options to change anything about your campaign.

8. Think about good content that you might want to promote to the friends of your fans. The friends of fans promotions are usually the best-converting ones, as people are emotionally already much better set on buying from your brand and on trusting you brand. Think about yourself - would a recommendation from a friend be a strong incentive for you to think higher of a particular brand or product? It most certainly would be for me.

9. Be cautious with text on the images of your promoted posts and ads.

Facebook moderators have a limit of not more than 20% of text per an image. But they seem sometimes to let even lesser than that. So avoid big mottos and even just putting your product name or brand name in huge fonts, as 20% rule also applies to one word written in large letters.

3. Create 3-6 versions of each ad you promote – change call to actions, titles, images, choose the best performing variants only and keep them.

Besides, also experiment with targeting and make use of different ad sets to define which audience has higher engagement rates.

4. Use Custom audiences and Lookalike audiences. Here is how it works – you can upload to Facebook the list of email addresses of your existing customers, Facebook will match them with Facebook ID’s in their system. In B2C segment the match rate would be 70-80% and for B2B email lists & Facebook IDs match in 20-30% of cases. Then in Power Editor you have an option to choose the best performing audience and create a lookalike one, as it says on the screenshot.

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10. Remember the golden rule of all CPC advertising – the more granular your targeting is the easier it is to define best performing groups of audiences.

And the better engagement rates and click-through-rates your ads get the less you are the less you are to pay per click or per engagement. n

Anna Korolekh, marketing manager and, in past, an SEO consultant at Promodo.

Anna started her career in online marketing in 2007 from content-writing, later she was employed for the UK company Bullseyemedia as a link-building specialist and finally came to Promodo in 2011. As an SEO consultant Anna has worked with large sites of the following niche: gambling, dating, travel, ecommerce. Anna is a certified Google Analytics individual and a regular contributor to Promodo and external blogs, also a regular speaker at the webinars.

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digital marketing

The Value of a Phone Call for Digital Marketers

T

oday’s digital marketers are executing cross-platform ad campaigns with sophisticated multi-screen users in mind. While their ultimate goal is reaching these targeted audiences with relevant touch points and ultimately driving high-value leads, marketers must also effectively measure ad performance across multiple channels. As phone calls remain the go-to consumer response across all direct response ad channels, savvy marketers have found success by leveraging calls as the universal metric for accurately attributing leads for both local and national businesses.

This includes bridging the gap between mobile or online actions that result in offline conversions. In fact, our xAd/Telmetrics Mobile Path to Purchase Study showed that for the Insurance category, phone calls are the top way mobile searchers convert, whether by calling a local or national agent.

Measuring calls goes beyond tracking mere call counts to capturing deeper insights like call durations and caller location and demographics – all of which help digital marketers evaluate lead quality. By linking multiple forms of online and mobile advertising to offline actions, call tracking technologies can help marketers discover which ad investments are paying off and how to make strategic modifications to generate a stronger ROI.

Calls Help Solve Cross-Media Performance Attribution Puzzle Industry research confirms that consumers are engaging with multiple media platforms throughout the purchase process. For example, BIA/ Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor survey shows that consumers use an average of 6.8 different media sources when shopping for local products or services. While digital marketers look to capitalize on this trend by executing multi-screen, cross-platform ad campaigns, measuring integrated campaigns can be an apples-to-oranges debate due to limited universal metrics. However, phone calls serve as the one cross-media, universal metric for direct response advertising and provide digital marketers a comprehensive picture of advertising impact and proper attribution across all platforms.

in store visits resulting from online ad views or mobile searches. Utilizing a combination of call measurement and these in-store engagement technologies can provide an even more comprehensive view of the multimedia-driven purchase cycle, including which campaigns, digital assets, channels, and creatives are driving offline conversions.

Calls Help Integrate Mobile Ad Performance into Overall Digital Strategy Without fail, mobile has provided an easy and immediate means for consumers to connect with businesses and provides another pipeline for leads, especially those driven by calls. Per our Mobile Path to Purchase Study, mobile is a primary media resource during consumers’ research and buying process and calls play a strong engagement role. Accurately capturing mobile call-driven leads can be a challenge if marketers are only measuring the number of clicks on a click-to-call button, as these clicks do not confirm that calls were actually completed. Call tracking technologies, however, with the use of unique phone numbers, help marketers capture an accurate call-through rate through meaningful lead generation data. This actionable intelligence is critical for measuring mobile engagement, optimizing overall ad campaigns and understanding how mobile ads complement other digital ads.

As digital marketers strive to capture consumer market share through targeted ad programs, gaining clear visibility into multi-platform ad performance is critical for making smart digital ad decisions. Calls help provide this intelligence by serving as a universal metric, effectively complementing other media- and category-specific metrics and helping marketers determine which digital ad investments are truly paying off. It also enables them to test different creatives or evaluate whether certain promotions are better suited for mobile vs. online, and ultimately helps them determine the best strategy for delivering high-value leads and increased ROI. By providing ad-specific call response data regarding the volume and quality of offline leads, call tracking offers marketers a complete picture of their integrated ad campaign performance. n

Calls Bridge Online and Offline Engagement Another common digital marketing challenge is how to effectively close the online-offline attribution gap. While SEM campaigns provide relevant click-through data, they provide little insight into activity beyond a click.

Dynamic call tracking technologies can bridge the divide by revealing which paid search campaigns, websites or landing pages prompted a consumer’s call. Some mobile technologies are helping marketers capture

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As President of Telmetrics, a leading call measurement technology provider, Bill Dinan has played an integral role in establishing Telmetrics’ brand leadership in the local search industry and driving innovations in mobile call measurement, crossmedia ROI reporting and pay per call performance measurement solutions. Dinan is chairman of the Local Search Association board of directors and a regular speaker and contributor to local search thought leadership forums and events.

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seo

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the User Experience – Part 1 of links pointing to it does not mean that all site visitors had a positive user experience.

All facets of the user experience can be measured…and can be measured in the right context. What follows are the 7 facets of a positive user experience and how search engine optimizers and other web professionals can measure them.

UX Facet 1: Usability Usability professionals typically analyze, test and measure the following items on a website: • Effectiveness: Can users achieve their objectives on your website?

• Efficiency: How quickly can users achieve their objectives on your website?

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish simple tasks the first time they encounter your website?

• Memorability: How quickly and easily can repeat visitors remember how to use your website in order to accomplish their goals?

• Error handling: How does the website help users recover from errors?

• User satisfaction: Do users like using your website and recommend it to others (word-of-mouth, social media recommendations, etc.)?

O

n the web, user experience (commonly abbreviated as UX or UE) is a term used to describe the overall perception, experience, and satisfaction that people have as a result of their interactions with a website.

Unlike traditional SEO, which tends to focus more on meeting the needs of technology (search engines) than meeting the needs of Web searchers, user experience design puts special emphasis on the human side of human-computer interaction.

In other words: users first, technology second. Not: technology first, users second. Always architect, design, and program your website for users first. But also make sure your website accommodates common technologies your target audience uses.

Web professionals commonly mistake user experience for personal opinion. For example, if a customer mentions that he thinks an ecommerce website is cool, does that automatically mean that he had a positive user experience? Did the customer Add to Cart? Did the customer return to the website to make more purchases? Did he tell his friends and colleagues about how cool the website is?

The “coolness” factor should not be mistaken for a positive user experience. Similarly, with SEO, just because a website has thousands

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Website usability’s main focus is not on user satisfaction. Its main focus is on task completion. Can people who fit your target audience complete their desired goals on your website?

And if site visitors are unable to reach their goals or have and difficult time reaching their goals, what roadblocks prevented them from reaching their goals?

User satisfaction is dependent on task completion. If site visitors are able to reach their goals easily, they generally report high satisfaction. If they do not or cannot reach their goals, they generally report low satisfaction.

For example, I have observed users on the 1800flowers.com website since the 90s. The site has outstanding usability and user satisfaction.

Year after year, especially around Mother’s Day, I observe the same users order flowers or gifts. Users find it easy to locate special gifts for special occasions, even if they need a gift delivered the next day.

The high satisfaction rate has nothing to do with the flavor-of-the-month design obsession. Site visitors get exactly what they want: the specific type of flower arrangement (that they see on the website) or gift delivered at the right time.

Usability is measured via usability tests and supporting data gathering methods (A/B and multivariate tests, web analytics data, diary studies, etc.) One main benefit of usability testing is that it puts all of that Big Data in the proper context.

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UX Facet 2: Findability As information architecture guru Peter Morville stated years ago, people can’t use what they can’t find. In fact, many usability professionals, academics, and information architects continue to dismiss SEO professionals as “snake-oil salesmen” when, they would benefit by learning the importance of keywords and labels.

Keywords (or keyphrases or keyword phrases) are not dead. They are critical for communicating aboutness, a sense of place, and information scent to both humans and technology. They are essential for findability – for searching, browsing, and asking.

Here is an example from the health website, Mayo Clinic:

Google found the right section of the site both in the advertising section and the organic (unpaid) section.

A more advanced search is: [keyword phrase] site: www.domain.com If the right pages are not showing up in search results, then your website probably was not constructed using the proper terminology.

This is a page about allergy symptoms. How can users tell?

1. Navigation labels are highlighted to indicate what section of the site that humans and technology are viewing.

2. Content labels (headings and subheadings) also indicate what page content is about.

3. Document labels (titles and URLs) also communicate aboutness and sense of place to humans and technology.

This page’s title is: Allergies Symptoms – Diseases and Conditions – Mayo Clinic.

The page’s URL is: http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/allergies/ basics/symptoms/con-20034030 Does your website communicate aboutness, sense of place, and information scent to both humans and technology? Here’s one way to find out.

In Google search box, type in your domain name. Let’s use the 1800flowers.com website as an example. Then type some important keywords after that. In this example, I will just use the word daisies.

Here is the result:

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Finally, how do UX professionals measure findability after users arrive at a website? Qualified UX professionals do what information architects do: they use two usability tests -- card sort tests and tree tests.

Now, imagine a website that can be easily found via searching, browsing, and asking. And the content on the same website can be easily located after users arrive. THAT is a website that delivers a positive user experience.

UX Facet 3 - Usefulness Remember, I am talking about the user experience, not the website owner’s experience. Site visitors should find the products, services, and information that you offer on your website to be useful.

In fact, a website with useful content encourages link development and social media mentions. As a search engine optimizer, I call this useful content a linkable asset. Does your website have linkable assets that: (a) help people reach their goals, and (b) encourage people to return to your site.

For example, a location finder is a tool that helps prospects and customers determine where they can purchase and pick up a product. Walgreen’s has a store locator section that helps their site visitors locate where they can pick up a product or prescription filled after other pharmacies are typically closed.

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• • • • • •

• • • • • •

Checklists Coupons Fact sheets Guides How-to articles Infographics

Podcasts Quiz/Test Reference Slideshows Tutorials Videos

Usefulness can be measured in multiple ways. The first way is to review your web analytics data. Are site visitors actually using your tool or printing out your checklist?

Another way to see if site visitors find your content useful is if they link to it and/or cite it via social media. Usefulness is not a flash-in-the-pan concept. Over time, actual usage and citations should increase.

This site did a particularly good job because it also accommodates all three aspects of findability: search, browse, and ask.

For Part 2 of this article, I will review the four other facets of a positive user experience: Value, Credibility and Trust, Desirability, and Accessibility. n

1. Users can type in their address and zip code and use the search functionality (FIND A STORE).

2. Users can also browse by state.

3. This page is easy to bookmark and share.

Granted, not all websites need to have a store locator, but all websites can have multiple link assets that their target audience might find useful.

Shari Thurow is the Founder and SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive, a full-service SEO, website usability, information architecture, and web design firm. She authored the books Search Engine Visibility and When Search Meets Web Usability, and is a board member of the Information Architecture Institute.

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“The content was insightful and covered key topics. The speakers were thought-provoking, and the mix of formats kept folks engaged. There was also a lot of good networking. I definitely feel it was time well spent.”

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online marketing

The Best B2B Online Lead Generator You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

O

nline lead generation is hard. The math is against online B2B lead generators in a lot of ways. When people think about online lead generation, they naturally first think about focusing on searchers, and then focus mostly on pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising or SEO. A few years ago, it would have been easy to achieve desired results just by focusing on search, but there’s a new reality that B2B lead generators have to face.

Competition in B2B Search Is Brutal I’ve been using the term “Ham-Fisted Bidders” to describe what the competition in many B2B search sectors has devolved into for a couple of years now. These PPC advertisers bid based on visibility rather than the results of their keyword buys. The last measurements they care about are cost per lead or conversion rate. High tech keyword areas like “server monitoring software,” “marketing automation,” or “managed hosting” can see costs per click in the $30 to $50 range.

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In part, this is simple supply and demand. These are often enterpriselevel products or services for which there is a limited audience. They tend to be very expensive and have long term commitments that have to be considered when buying them.

Keywords Can Mean Different Things to Different People Context is something that search marketers can’t always determine when utilizing keyword advertising, and this can be a problem when it comes to B2B lead generation. A few years ago, in his book Quality Score in High Resolution, Craig Danuloff coined the term “Horizontal Relevance” to describe situations where keywords can have different meanings to different groups of people. For example, when someone searches for a “Green Vacuum” are they looking for a vacuum cleaner colored green, or are they looking for an environmentally-friendly vacuum cleaner that’s energy efficient and made from bio-degradable parts?

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LinkedIn. In fact, we have an over 14% conversion rate on our white paper campaigns across all of our many B2B clients using the platform.

We have had some white paper campaigns achieve a conversion rate of over 20%! These campaigns were thousands of times more likely to convert than the search advertising-based campaigns we ran at the same time on the identical white paper.

Even the Failures Can Be Recycled Even with those incredible 14% conversion rates, you have to look at your campaigns objectively. If 14% converted, that means that 86% did NOT convert. But just because you didn’t win over that potential lead with your LinkedIn ad doesn’t mean you have to be finished with that perfect audience.

If you create custom remarketing lists for the specific audiences that click through on your LinkedIn ads, you can then continue to deliver advertising to that audience B2B advertisers often have similar problems with Horizontal Relevance from the perspective of trying to use keywords to target only B2B prospects instead of consumers.

They especially see these kinds of problems when trying to sell highend, enterprise-level products or services that have hefty price tags and time commitments. For example, we represented a client that sold enterprise-level social media software. The problem with them advertising on a word like “Social Media Software” was that both their target audience and the mass of both consumers and small businesses that needed a similar, but much lower cost solution also searched on that keyword and clicked on our client’s ads. This drove cost per lead through the roof on that keyword and a low close rate.

The Solution was Still Online, But Outside the Realm of Search Advertising Our solution to achieve targeted advertising to the exact B2B segments that needed our client’s products or services was to move their online advertising to a completely different platform than Google AdWords or Bing Ads. We moved those advertising budgets to LinkedIn Self-Serve Ads (LinkedIn Ads).

LinkedIn has over 277 million members worldwide, and over 93 million of them are in the US. Over 2.1 million of those LinkedIn members are active participants in LinkedIn Groups. LinkedIn’s advertising platform is very primitive when compared to Google AdWords, but it does what PPC search advertising can’t do, because it allows you to target your advertising to the perfect B2B audience based on their job titles, the company they work for, their job skills and their membership in LinkedIn Groups. Having these targeting options avoids the problems of horizontal relevance seen with search and allows for unparalleled ad targeting to even the most niche B2B audiences at a level of scale.

Adding Value With Content Superior targeting is an advancement over search advertising, but in many cases it’s not enough to get B2B decision makers to “raise their hand” and fill out a form on a lead generation landing page. We have found that old standby content marketing tactics like white papers and webinars work amazingly well when presented to the ideal audience on

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through the Google Display Network, or with remarketing ads on Facebook. This is a perfect way to achieve scale of advertising to just the audience to whom you want to advertise. If your product has a long sales cycle from lead to close, you can keep circulating new content assets like new white papers, new webinars, case studies or custom ad copy specifically to the audience that initially clicked on your LinkedIn ad in the first place.

Take the Do It Yourself Approach If you contact LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to talk about these opportunities it’s quite possible they will say that “yes it is great” and that they charge a quarterly minimum for a quarterly financial commitment for guaranteed ad impressions on LinkedIn. This isn’t the approach we chose to take and it’s not the approach you should take to try the platform. It’s an expensive option based more on ad impressions and not end results. Instead, utilize LinkedIn’s self-serve ad platform and track conversions with your analytics package. n

Tad Miller is Vice President of Accounts at digital marketing agency Marketing Mojo, helping clients to manage and execute their search engine optimization, PPC advertising and online marketing strategies. Tad has a broad spectrum of search marketing experience in working with a variety of enterprise-level clients in the technology, insurance, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing industries. Tad has also managed over $40 million dollars of digital advertising budgets for Marketing Mojo’s clients with a proven record in conversion optimization with strategy, diligence and testing.

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product review

Social Q&A EDITOR RATING

Very Good

S

ocial gatherings can be a highly beneficial way to learn from those just as passionate as yourself. Conference events are a gathering of minds searching for answers to questions they themselves may not even know they want to ask. The power of a Q&A session is one that has often been underestimated over the years as one of the best parts of a social event.

The hardest part for organizers is finding the right questions to ask. While a traditional Q&A gathering involves attendees asking questions through hand-raising. Often times the wrong questions are asked. Or simply put, there are questions being asked that others find to be off-topic or simply unwarranted for the discussion at hand. It can be frustrating for both the audience looking for the answers to the tough questions and for those answering the questions when it’s hard to get the right questions out there.

With the rise of online services, Social Q&A offers a neatly built solution to the problem that plagues many live events the same. Social Q&A is a powerful tool allowing organizers to gather questions from their audience while simultaneously allowing them to figure out which questions are the most important to have answered.

Social Q&A functions as an online service allowing for organizers to put together events in which the attendees can ask questions and vote on questions directly from their smart phone or other mobile device. This concept allows for organizers to gather the correct questions in a quick and efficient manner without having to resort to the hand-raising strategy that often wastes time in events that are already tightly scheduled. It is a modern day solution to an old-age problem that has plagued conference organizers, attendees, and presenters all the same.

The solution functions as a paid online service for conference organizers and presenters to be able to present an online portal for attendees to ask the questions that are of interest to them. Through the tried and tested method of online voting each question is given the opportunity for others to read them and decide which ones are of the utmost importance. This allows for presenters and organizers to ensure the correct questions are being answered.

The software-as-a-service platform allows attendees to access the service through any web-based application on an internet enabled device. This includes using a smart phone, tablet, laptop, or any other internet-connected device to be able to communicate with the service. Through providing an online interface Social Q&A ensures that attendees will not be excluded from the discussion due to their choice of smart phone OS.

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Pros • Simple, Intuitive Interface • Able to gather contact information of attendees.

• Moderation Features

Cons • Lack of Analytical Features

Presenters using the software are given control over the discussion by providing them with various moderation tools. This includes the ability to turn in a filter where questions are only visible after they have been approved, allowing for safe and moderated discussions to take place. Additionally, questions can be asked by anonymous individuals or by real life individuals identified via their name and email address.

Social Q&A is a very simple tool complete with online video tutorials showing presenters and audiences how to utilize various features. Every feature that can be accessed through the software can be accessed via a tutorial directly through the website, making the software easy to use and easy to understand. In addition, there is a free trial available to new users allowing them to use the features to help them understand the true benefit of this innovative social platform for Q&A. Social Q&A is certainly an innovative next step for conference organizers and presenters. It provides a simple and intuitive interface allowing for attendees to voice their opinions. n

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How to Evaluate

Affiliate Programs

Before Joining Them

By Geno Prussakov

I

n order to not get burnt, especially as a new affiliate, you want to choose affiliate programs wisely.

While some say the choice is as simple as “promoting those who pay more,” I strongly disagree with this simplistic approach. Higher percentages as commissions or impressive flat amount payouts do not mean anything unless the program converts. It can cost you a lot of money and time spent on a wrong program before you realize it was a bad fit in the first place.

Therefore, it is useful to look at every new/ prospective affiliate program (or merchant/ advertiser) through a prism of 15 factors, keeping also in mind that not any one of them exists in isolation.

They are always intertwined and interdependent, and your performance with any affiliate program will always depend on a variety of these variables.

1. Website Start right from the merchant’s website. Look at it from two angles: as a consumer and as an affiliate. As a consumer, pay attention to its load time, easeof-use (both overall and the checkout process, in particular), professionalism, compelling copy and calls to action, and other related factors. As an affiliate, make sure to critically check it for any “leaks,” or ways for the end consumer to take a route that does not lead to commissions. Most commonly, leaks come in forms of toll free phone numbers, online chat assistants that

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also take orders, links to other merchants, and even AdSense units and affiliate links of their own.

2. Reputation/Reliability Check the reputation of the merchant you’re planning to partner with. Once again, approach the question both as a consumer and as an affiliate. As a consumer you want to go to independent review sites (these will vary from industry to industry); as an affiliate go to affiliate forums and blogs. If there is something you should be aware of, it should be easy enough to find.

3. Prices/Competitiveness I have seen merchants create replicas of their websites, only with higher prices, to make an affiliate program with high payouts possible. I have also seen merchants increase prices on their main website -- again, to allow for a handsome affiliate commission. Techniques like these do not help you sell. Consumers, especially in our age of easy shopping comparisons, are becoming more and more savvy. They won’t buy unless the merchant is truly competitive. This applies to pricing, product selection, and even the merchant’s brand.

4. Market Saturation Some niches are already too crowded and unless you have something of truly unique value to add into the pre-purchase process, look for a less saturated niche. Newer affiliates will find it especially hard to compete in heavily saturated niches. Take hosting, for example. It’s an interesting niche with plenty of good players (and, unfortunately, quite a few less-than-kosher ones too). But it is way too saturated for a new affiliate.

5. Payouts When you put together a comparative table, which I hope you will do, this will be one of the factors you will obviously list.

However, don’t be too hung up on this one. There are many other variables (see the following points) that go into the final formula, which you want to study as well.

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6. Commission Recurrence Some merchants pay commission on new and unique customers only. I do not believe this to be a good practice. In the survey conducted for my Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes book, I asked consumers: “When shopping for products requiring ongoing replenishing (e.g., grocery, ink, bank checks, etc.) and receiving satisfactory service, would you still compare your retailer’s offer to other offers next time you need their product?” Close to 72% replied “yes.” Therefore, it is my belief that merchants that run affiliate programs should compensate every sale equally, or even offer an additional bonus for new customers. However, some limit affiliate commissions to new customers only.

Therefore, the need for you to check on this prior to signing up.

7. Terms of Service In an anonymous poll I asked affiliates if they actually read affiliate program agreements prior to applying into programs.

The largest group (38%) said “rarely,” 14% replied “sometimes,” 19% “often,” and only 29% replied “always.” Sobering statistics!

Yet elements like commission recurrence, promotion restrictions (e.g., no direct linking from paid search ads, or no use of trademarked terms in URL paths) may be found right in the merchant’s TOS and shouldn’t come to you as a surprise when they start cancelling your commission on “invalid” or ”unqualified” sales/leads.

8. Cookie Life This is the period of time within which the merchant agrees to compensate you for the referred customer. If it is set at 24 hours and a visitor you refer purchases 25 hours past the initial referral, you will get no commission on that sale.

In the Winter 2013 issue of the Visibility Magazine, I pointed to a short cookie life as one of the mistakes to avoid. However, do not shy away from affiliate programs with cookie life set at 23-24 hours (like Enterprise Rent-ACar, Amazon, iTunes, Sephora, etc). The first affiliate reaction may be: “Why even bother?!”

However, if you dig deeper, you’ll find out that between 85% and 91% of purchases occur within 24 hours of the end-customer’s click on an affiliate link. Combining this reality with the fact that the above-quoted brands, generally, yield higher-than-average conversion rates makes them worth your try, anyway.

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Don’t get me wrong, I do not support short cookie life (quite the contrary, actually). I am just saying that some of these programs may still be worth your effort.

9. Conversion Rate This is one of the most important metrics, which helps you answer a part of the “how much will I be able to earn” question. For instance, if we take a smaller merchant who is paying a 10% commission on all sales and has a 1.5% conversion, and Amazon, which is paying only 4% but has a conversion rate (CR) of some 6% (see http://prussakov.com/AvsW for the basis of this assumption), we will see the following happen on 1,000 referrals (assuming an equal average order value of $10): Smaller merchant: 1,000 visitors * 1.5% CR = 15 sales 15 * ($10 AOV * 10%) = $15.00 commission Amazon.com 1,000 visitors * 6% CR = 60 sales 60 * ($10 AOV * 4%) = $24.00 commission As you can see, conversion plays an extremely important role in the affiliate earnings.

10. EPC EPC stands for Earnings per Click, and most affiliate networks disclose this metric even before you join a network-based affiliate program. Keep in mind that in many cases the EPC figure you see will be tied to 100 clicks sent from an average affiliate in the program to the merchant. So if you see an EPC of $27.49, know that this is the average of how much affiliates of this merchant earn on every 100 clicks they refer.

11. Reversal Rate Very few affiliate networks (AvantLink, for example, is one of those few) disclose this information upfront, and needless to say in-house programs do not either.

Therefore, most frequently affiliates have to find this metric out from their own experience with the merchant. Either way, keep a close eye on this one. Basically, every 1% of the reversal rate implies 1 reversed order per each batch of 100.

12. Tracking/Reporting Platform Do your homework here and ensure that you’re comfortable with the tracking

and reporting platform (be it an affiliate network or their in-house software) that the merchant uses. Not all platforms are created equal, have the same operating terms, and not all “affiliate networks” stand for the same ethical principles.

13. Management & Approachability Contact the merchant and affiliate program manager. See how quickly they get back with you and how detailed/to-the-point their response is. You want to partner with someone who cares about your partnership.

You’ll see that some merchants do not, or at least don’t appear like they do.

14. Creatives Whether you are relying heavily on banner creatives, deep-linked text links, or product feed, check whether the merchant is providing adequate support here as well.

Their creatives must also be 100% affiliatefriendly (remember “leaks”? there is no place for them here either), professional, and effective.

15. Tools Some merchants offer you a good set of basic links and banners, others offer just a homepage link and a couple of banners, while yet others offer both some basic links and a way for you to create your own (deep-linking to specific URLs). Some would also offer widgets, video creatives, easy product feed import, and APIs. If any of the latter are of importance to you, check if they offer these.

Ultimately, remember that time spent on the preliminary due diligence will pay off in the long-term, safeguarding you from wasted time, money, and nerve cells (which cannot be reproduced). n

Award-winning affiliate marketing expert Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov is the founder of AM Navigator affiliate management agency, and chair of Affiliate Management Days conference -the first and only professional forum on affiliate program management. He authored bestselling A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing (2007), Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day (2011), and Quick Start Guide to Affiliate Marketing (2013) and is an internationallyacclaimed speaker, consultant, and affiliate marketing evangelist.

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It’s Time to Dust Off Your Testing Strategy: 7 Fresh Testing Ideas to Maximize Optimization

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very once in a while it pays off to “test outside the lines.” Don’t get stuck in a testing rut and run the same old tests on copy and layout to increase clicks and conversions. It’s high time to shake up your site testing plan, and start testing new elements such as form length, shipping prices, location, mobile display, and more. Here are seven ways to freshen up your testing strategy this summer:

#1 – Test the Ideal Form Length Many optimization experts believe that the shorter the form, the higher the conversion rate. But that’s not always the case. Case in point: a SiteSpect client recently tested a longer version of its signup process. Test results proved that the longer form actually resulted in higher engagement and signups. Another client tested multiple variations of its address collection form to determine which length was optimal, leading to an increase in form completion rates of 8.75%. The winner? The one with an additional, optional address field.

Bottom line: Shake up your form testing initiatives by trying longer form lengths with more form fields or additional form pages, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. Don’t let predisposed assumptions be a block to higher conversions.

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#2 – Test How to Best Personalize Location-based Content Multivariate testing and targeting allows you to optimize content based on your customer’s location and customize the checkout and registration process accordingly. For example, if a site visitor from London is looking for an item to purchase, test displaying the UK flag, showing prices in pounds instead of dollars, and giving relevant international shipping estimates. In this instance, your site and checkout form can also be customized for British English, versus American English, helping to increase the likelihood the visitor will complete the checkout process.

Bottom line: Test information relevant to the visitor’s location and customize your registration and checkout process accordingly. You’ll be surprised at what a difference it makes!

#3 Use Location to Test What Weather-related Content to Display A visitor’s location can also play an important role in what they are searching or shopping for. For example, winter visitors from Vail, Colorado, which receives significant yearly snowfall, should be far more interested in snow-related items (such as shovels, ski boots, or winter jackets) than visitors from Florida.

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Bottom line: A visitor’s location can play an important role in what they’re searching for. Test showing relevant weather-related offers and merchandise to visitors based on their location.

#4 Test Checkout Experiences for Known Versus Unknown Visitors Try testing two different checkout flows, one for visitors who are already logged in, and another for new or returning visitors who are not logged in. Ideally, you can direct the logged-in visitor to a single checkout form to complete a purchase, whereas new visitors may have to enter their name, address, and payment information.

Bottom line: This simple idea can help drive repeat customers to purchase more, increase their average order value, and drive additional business metrics.

#5 Test Optimal Free Shipping Thresholds Free shipping can be one of the best incentives to convert browsers into buyers. But this benefit should be tested until an optimal threshold for increased conversion rates has been found. What works for one organization may not work for another.

A small increase in threshold, such as from $30 to $35, could increase average order values and thus increase bottom-line revenue — but it could also have an opposite effect and cause fewer visitors to convert.

Look at your own internal pricing data and the current free shipping threshold to determine the cost to achieve free shipping within your test, and then iteratively roll out the test to your audience.

Be sure to measure these free shipping cost changes thoroughly so you have as much data as possible to make informed shipping cost decisions.

Bottom line: Free shipping can be one of the best incentives to convert browsers into buyers.

#6 Test Checkout Plug-ins Throughout the checkout or registration process, there are numerous areas where a visitor can just give up out of frustration and exit. That’s why most e-commerce sites feature plug-ins designed to alleviate anxiety. For example, many sites include an option to chat with a representative when making a purchase.

In this new testing idea, you can run a simple A/B test by using your testing tool to turn off chat for half of your audience in order to validate that the plug-in is helping increase conversions for the other half.

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Bottom line: It’s worth testing plug-ins are performing the way

whether these you expect.

#7 Test Mobile Display for Both Tablets and Smartphones Many marketers treat tablets the same as smartphones and group them under a general heading of “mobile.” The truth is, mobile visitors have vastly different behavior when using a tablet versus a smartphone.

According to IBM Benchmark Hub reports from Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2013, tablet visitors actually spent double the amount of time on e-commerce sites, and converted 50% more often than smartphone visitors.

With this in mind, consider your overall mobile experience and what that looks like on both a smartphone and a tablet. Ensure you are taking advantage of the increased screen real estate afforded by tablets and the time that tablet users are spending on your site to make the most of the mobile shopping experience.

If you do not have a site that is optimized for the screen size of tablets, consider a test that sends site visitors to the full desktop version of your site instead of a smartphone-optimized version.

However, in the best case scenario, you should have a unique experience designed for smartphone, tablet, and desktop visitors that optimally utilizes the screen size for each device.

Bottom line: Mobile visitors have vastly different behavior when using a tablet versus a smartphone.

Summary These are just some ideas to put new life into your web and mobile testing initiatives. Just about anything on a website can be tested, from how it looks to how it works. Companies can test and optimize both front-end content and back-end functionality, while creating relevant experiences for every site visitor. Going into any test without preconceived notions can deliver results and increased conversions beyond expectations.

Not convinced? Test it! n

Kim Ann King is an award-winning marketing executive and has been a B2B software marketer for more than two decades. She currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer of web and mobile optimization firm SiteSpect.

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vendor spotlight

JEB Commerce

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ffiliate marketing, great affiliate marketing, isn’t just about attributing sales to the affiliate channel. It’s about driving new customers, incremental sales, and profitability through performance marketing. It’s about achieving your revenue goals through an efficient deployment of internal and external resources, identifying great partners, and optimizing those partners to drive revenue that meets your specific goals, and doing so with a high margin of profit and not at the expense of your other channels. Coordination of the affiliate channel within an omni-channel environment should be a priority with every affiliate program. And it is at JEBCommerce.

Our doors opened in 2004 and our team has well over 75 years of combined online marketing experience. Our founder, Jamie Birch, cut his “affiliate marketing teeth” managing affiliate programs for many well known companies before spending several years at Coldwater Creek, a Top 5 nationwide women’s clothing retailer. While at Coldwater Creek, Jamie established and managed affiliate campaigns, email campaigns, and SEO campaigns – an opportunity that allowed him to develop many of the proven processes JEBCommerce successfully employs today.

That multi channel exposure allowed JEBCommerce to become the premier affiliate management agency and the most effective agency at delivering truly incremental sales to both multi-channel retailers as well as lead generation and b2b merchants. Channel attribution and profitability are two key aspects to affiliate programs managed by JEBCommerce. Delivering incredible new customer acquisition percentages have become a hallmark of JEBCommerce managed programs.

Over 300 individual processes, combined with the smallest client to employee ratio in our industry, allow JEBCommerce to provide significant growth within our clients’ affiliate programs, while operating a program that truly cooperates with our client’s other marketing vehicles.

JEBCommerce employs these processes, as well as our proprietary SaaS system, to contact, analyze, and report on thousands of affiliate relationships each and every week. Our system, we call Chloe, allows our entire team of managers to manage and communicate with more affiliates than any other agency. It also provides unparalleled access for our clients into the daily conversations that have occurred and tasks completed on their behalf. No more wondering about what is being done on your account, who your agency is talking to, and how those conversations are going. Complete access is provided through weekly reports, multi-network reporting, and a 24/7 web dashboard.

And affiliate marketing does truly come down to relationships. And we have some of the best! In 2012 we were recognized as the Rakuten LinkShare Agency of the Year and our staff has been recognized as finalists for Affiliate Manager of the Year and Blogger of the Year on multiple occasions. Those accolades only come through industry support because of our strong investment and commitment to our clients and to our affiliate partners. n

Contact Information

www.jebcommerce.com blog.jebcommerce.com Jamie Birch, Jamie@jebcommerce.com Sales@jebcommerce.com 1800-208-6215 x101

Mission Statement

To drive incremental sales through efficient and high producing affiliate marketing campaigns, to ensure profitable utilization of the performance marketing channel and an omni-channel cooperative revenue stream.

Customer Profile

Large and small retail, b2b, and lead generation advertisers. We have divisions dedicated to domestic advertisers as well as global marketing campaigns. We have proven success in the travel, retail, clothing and apparel, software, beauty and skincare, and more.

Clients List

Charlotte Russe, philosophy, Inc, CityPASS, Johnston and Murphy, Shinola.com, Bodybuilding.com, CountryOutfitter.com, Ouidad.com.

Company Executives

• Jamie Birch, Chief Executive Officer • Joanna Culbertson, VP Global Performance Marketing • Jon Goodwin and Brian Secrist, Directors of Accounts

Service Offered

Affiliate Marketing Management Affiliate Manager Training Affiliate Program Evaluation

Recognitions

• 2012 Rakuten LinkShare Affiliate Agency of the Year • 2011 Best Agency Finalist, Affiliate Marketing Awards • 2009 Best Blog Finalist, Affiliate Summit

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Market Research Mobile World in the

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A Comprehensive Conference Showcase for the Entire NFC Value Chain, Presented by the Industry Leaders The leading American showcase for the burgeoning technology of Near Field Communications arrives in Austin this June with an expanded look at developments in new NFC devices and add-ons, the status of the growing NFC ecosystem, the growing world of NFC-enabled payments and other applications, NFC security and other implementations, and American and international market forecasts.

With millions of new NFC smart phone handsets in place, the market is poised for the introduction of new applications and services enabling quick transactions, ticketing, digital content exchange, adverting and marketing services, secure identification, physical and logical access, social networking and communication between electronic devices. The authoritative expertise of the Smart Card Alliance, NFC Forum, and NFC World Congress brings together a broad base of industry players in a conference event that features leaders from every relevant sector for an interactive, instructive forum on the NFC business issues, implementation milestones, and technology advancements.

Hosted by Austin, Texas – A Regional Leader in Emerging Technologies With more than 91,000 people employed by over 3,700 technology firms, Austin is the second-fastest growing city in the United States with a young and highly educated population drawn by nine institutions of higher education. With major investments in semiconductors, telecommunications, energy, biotech, medical, software, nanotech, and digital media, Austin’s technology firms comprise about 25 percent or $8.3 billion of the regional payroll. Austin was selected as the pilot city for the Isis Mobile Wallet joint venture, making quick, secure NFC transactions a reality at local retailers.

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Conference Agenda Built on a Broad Base of Association Expertise The conference presentations will leverage the extensive experience and resources of Smart Card Alliance and NFC Forum, both widely regarded as leading voices for the application of this technology. Conference content will include: Standards and Technology: Smart Phones and Devices, NFC System Architectures, Standards for Trusted Service Manager (TSM), and NFC Forum Specifications Security and Applications Management: Security Architectures for NFC, Bank Card Payments Application Security, Identity Credentials Storage in NFC Devices, NFC Secure Element Architectures, NFC Application Download and Management Implementation and Applications Topics: Financial Service Applications, Identity and Security Applications, Ticketing and Fare Collection Applications, Retail Applications Market and Business Model Topics: Challenges and Opportunities for Financial Institutions, NFC Business Partnership Opportunities and Challenges, Use Cases for NFC, Reports on Commercial Services and Pilots

Exhibit and Sponsorship Opportunities Available.

Contact Bill Rutledge at +1-212-866-2169 | bill@cnxtd.com

When Shoppers Buy for Others: A Powerful Marketing Opportunity in Gifting

By Monika Kochhar

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he retail landscape is transforming like never before, driven by a convergence of brand innovation, consumer preferences and emerging technologies. Retailers are rapidly expanding their online vocabulary and pushing new boundaries to deliver a more relevant and contextual experience to their customers. It is now necessitous to integrate behavioral insights and customer data into online stores and marketing strategies.

The time when ecommerce served simply to enhance and support the traditional methods of retail are by now carbon dated.

The shoppers of today judge online stores as they do a brick-and-mortar store—from its furnishings, colors, smells, and background music, all the way down to how sales people approach, interact and serve them.

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While retailing and shopping have evolved fundamentally, our reasons to shop are still rooted in the ancient necessity of human consumption and exchange. There are only two types of transactions: buying for oneself and buying for others. The latter (gifting) is a self-perpetuating system of balanced reciprocity that drives billions of dollars in annual sales.

The gifting transaction is an emotional exchange that creates an authentic marketing opportunity to e-meet, e-greet and e-sell to not only the shoppers but also the people they shop for.

‘Up-serving’ By its inherent nature, gifting creates a unique scenario that automatically produces two

customers, a gifter and a recipient.

How well do you currently know your recipient? The science of gifting shows that gift recipients are a happy bunch who have just received something for free and are very likely to continue shopping. Are you creating a multiplier effect to win this new customer? By thinking outside of the lines, you can: 1. Provide mechanisms that bring recipients into the gifting transaction and decision making process before they receive the physical gift 2. Up-serving (not up-selling) as an integral part of the gifting process

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We have all experienced pushy marketing tactics. Upselling is shopping cart centric and focuses on the short-term goal of increasing the current cart value. Up-serving on the other hand is customer-centric and focuses on the long-term goal of creating the kind of satisfied shopper most likely to become a repeat customer and brand advocate over time. The New York Times Bestseller To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, author Daniel H. Pink advises: “Anytime you’re tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you’re doing and up-serve instead.”

An individual who receives a gift (an item for free from someone they know and trust) is immediately put in a state of mind that creates a prime opportunity for strategic up-serving. When someone receives an apparel or jewelry item as a gift online, she is more inclined to purchase an additional item to ‘complete the look’ than if she were spending all of her own money in the first place. She will also be more willing to open her wallet to pay the difference for a more expensive item if she prefers it.

The recommendation has to be marketed appropriately by real time profiling and tap into her needs and desires at that moment, not pushed as a hard sale. Retailers can amplify this effect by also offering recipients sales promotions/discounts for same-day shopping to give them further exposure to their brands and convert them into new customers right away.

Converting ‘Uncertain’ Customers Buying gifts can be stressful due to our human need for approval and psychological desire to send the gift recipient the right social signal.

While the ubiquitous nature of ecommerce has made it a snap to find any gift online, it has also made it increasingly difficult to find the right gift online. Too many choices and marketing messages breed shopper uncertainty.

When it comes to gifting, many unknowns can contribute to this problem that leaves potential sales on the table.

• What is the recipient’s clothing or jewelry size?

• What color, style or material does the recipient prefer?

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• Will the recipient actually like the gift and think highly of me?

• What is the recipient’s preferred shipping address?

• Is the product shown online match what the recipient gets?

• Will it be hard for the recipient to return the gift if necessary?

A lack of gifting confidence coupled with the uncertainties that accompany Internet shopping in general translates into lost sales from customers that are ‘on the fence’ about buying a gift online for someone they care about and psychologically want to make a good impression on. By integrating and marketing gifting options that alleviate these concerns, put recipients in control and present opportunities for omnichannel engagement such as pick up in-store for same day wear, retailers can open up their online and physical stores. They can effectively reach a whole new segment of both male and female shoppers who were previously hesitant, confused about recipient preferences, to gift confidently—thereby generating increased sales.

Harnessing Word-of-Mouth Marketing Brands that understand WOM create strong advocates that promote their businesses organically. Nielsen research estimates that 92% of consumers trust WOM recommendations over all other forms of marketing. Gifting is stronger than a word of mouth endorsement; it’s money over mouth marketing. The unspoken message from a gifter is telling the recipient: “I bought you this product that I think/know you would enjoy from a brand that I and/or you know, like and trust.”

Online retailer needs to think about how to build and leverage the relationship with the gift recipient. This includes everything from targeted outbound initiatives with emails by having studied the recipients’ taste preferences,

just as a master salesperson would, while she completes her gifting journey before having her preferred gift shipped.

Marketers know that it is almost impossible to create the same level of credibility that comes with a personal endorsement from family and friends. These relationships also account for most of the gifts exchanged. Translate the warm, fuzzy, positive feeling of gifting and receiving into social outlets. Make it easy for gifters and recipients to share their gifts, love and excitement publically and become your social advocates.

Final Thoughts Online technologies are the catalysts that enable retailers to deliver the right product at the right price, in the right place with the right promotion.

These technologies push the frontiers and go way beyond the four P’s of traditional marketing. The gifting transaction provides a compelling and sincere marketing opportunity to converse with your customers when they are the least confident of a purchase decision.

Marketing tactics rooted in gifting should include carefully crafted processes from discovery to checkout that provide both gifting customers a seamless and emotionally enjoyable journey. In fact, the more elegant a marketing technique, the less it should feel like ‘marketing’ within the entire brand experience.

As with all marketing, the best engagement with both gifters and recipients should be functionally present behind the scenes. In that lies the pursuit of aesthetics and success in this new ecommerce age. n

Monika Kochhar is the founder and CEO of Smartgift.

By applying the science and psychology of gifting behavior, Smartgift’s technology has become the new standard in online gifting for brands and retailers.

Monika is a successful technology entrepreneur and business leader. She has advised winning e-commerce startups into strong exits and spent a decade on Wall Street structuring investment opportunities.

www.visibilitymagazine.com

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By Neil Mody

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profitable customer action. Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.

It is non-interruption marketing.”

As with all media platforms (print, radio, TV) that came before, advertisers leapt at the Internet’s opportunity to instantly reach millions within a broad demographic of ‘people ready to consume.’

However, they soon struggled to gain positive returns as consumers turned a blind eye to the new, digital bombardment of ads, namely banners, disruptive pop-ups and screen takeovers.

So, we all dive head first into the digital sea of content marketing… and everything goes swimmingly, right? Not exactly. In an effort to grab attention, without being disruptive, advertisers began to promote content that felt like an organic part of the content landscape… blending in with what audiences were already consuming on news, ecommerce, and social media sites. However, publishers, brands and social networks were soon negotiating the fine line between content discovery and disruption with this ‘native’ approach to advertising.

his past March, we celebrated the World Wide Web’s 25th birthday. Or rather, some of us quietly consumed a few articles on the topic and promptly moved on.

While some folks debate the official Internet ‘birthdate,’ we can all agree it fundamentally changed — and continues to change — the way we create, market, distribute and discover content.

Enter content marketing — a buzz term rivaled perhaps only by ‘big data.’ While content marketing predates the Internet by decades, if not centuries, its objective remains constant.

The Content Marketing Institute defines it as: “…a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving

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Let’s look at what some major companies did to place relevant and targeted content in front of consumers, and the potential lessons for content marketers.

Facebook Video Ads As of January 1, 2014, Facebook had an estimated 1.3 billion active monthly users.

Despite some 81 million fake profiles, that’s a boatload of potential customers. And why shouldn’t brands salivate at the chance to advertise in this channel? Nearly 50 percent of 18 to 34 year-olds check Facebook when they wake up. * As part of the social network’s efforts to monetize its massive user base, Facebook began testing video ads last winter and officially kicked things off in spring. A March 13 Facebook for Business blog post reads: Premium Video Ads are designed for advertisers who want to reach a large audience with high-quality sight, sound and motion.

Each 15-second video ad will start playing without sound as it appears on screen and stop if people scroll past. If people tap the video, it will expand into a full-screen view and sound will start.

Only time will tell exactly how Facebook users respond to video ads in their news feed, but it seems that Facebook is striking a decent balance between discovery and disruption. By its nature, interactive

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content like videos are more likely to grab attention than static content. If you’re scrolling through your news feed, isn’t a moving picture likely to at least catch your eye?

Facebook makes only the motion part of the video automatic so as to not disrupt the user with instant sound, which could be distracting or plain annoying. Herein lies the genius. This tactic they’ve employed to minimize disruption effectively makes the content more enticing. People can see the video ad… but what’s actually going on? It’s hard to resist clicking to find out.

All content marketers want their content to stand out and get noticed. However, both brands marketing their own content, and platforms distributing and promoting sponsored content, should do so in a manner that doesn’t completely disrupt and take over the user’s content journey. Give users some control over the experience and allow them to opt in to content discovery. Like pop-up and screen takeover ads, providing an opt-out approach after disrupting the consumer is more likely to have a negative effect.

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Google Plus ‘Explore’ Google+ has been a wild card of sorts.

Previously, some wrote off the network as a ghost town, while others predict that social sharing on Google+ will overtake Facebook by 2016. In October of 2013, USA Today reported that Google+ had 300 million monthly active users, up from 190 million in May. At the time, Google also reported it was uploading 1.5 billion photos per week to its social network.

In December 2013, the king of search pushed further into content discovery, outside of pure search. With the Google+ Explore section, which replaced the What’s Hot Stream, users can discover new and relevant content from people and pages outside of their Google circles, as well as view a list of recommended Google+ pages to follow based on personal interests. Users can mute posts they don’t find interesting and view diagrams that show how certain posts spread organically through Google+.

The Next Web reported on Explore and noted: The change is subtle, but it puts a renewed emphasis on content discovery within Google+.

What’s Hot was an admirable attempt at

highlighting popular content, but in the navigation menu it’s always been tucked away, out of sight.

Bringing the new Explore tab to the top of the page, where it’s always visible, should increase user engagement and as a result, improve the experience and general usefulness of Google+.

Think like a consumer when you’re promoting content. While content marketing shouldn’t be disruptive, it also shouldn’t be invisible or hard to find. Content should be optimized and in a place where people can easily discover and share it seamlessly from content they’re already consuming. Where is your audience? Desktop? Mobile? Remember, no matter how compelling, valuable, relevant and consistent your content is, if people can’t find it, it’s not very useful.

Apple and Matcha.tv Delivering smarter content recommendations is the holy grail for advertisers looking to narrow down that demographic of ‘people ready to consume’ to ‘people ready to consume your product or content in the right place at just the right time.’

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Brands, retailers, publishers and technology companies are all scrambling to serve up relevant content and product recommendations online.

Bought these pants? We think you’d like this shirt. Read this article? You might be interested in this one too. Books, movies, music, TV shows… the list goes on. This is so important because people are naturally less likely to feel disrupted when the content you put in front of them is stuff they actually like and are interested in. Seems obvious, but getting contextual relevancy right isn’t so simple.

Content recommendation is based on a mix of complex algorithms and human curation depending on the platform. In fall of 2013, Apple acquired a company called Matcha that created an app to help consumers discover videos on Netflix, iTunes and Amazon based on data from their social networks. Apparently, their ‘secret sauce’ was pretty good, as it was reported that Apple scooped up the company just for its proprietary algorithm. Citing a close source, TechCrunch reported:

It was Matcha’s user acquisition and user engagement strategy that Apple was interested in, according to one of our sources, since the acquisition happened just after Matcha had completed a round of vigorous A/B testing and had “found the answer” to rapid user growth and time spent in app. Matcha’s pairing algorithms that drove the right content to the right users simply worked best of any other apps competing in that space, the source affirms.

Again, the algorithms behind the technologies that brands and publishers are using are complex. If you’re a content marketer, you don’t need to be and expert in computer science.

What you do need to know is that contextual relevance is the key to success. Content marketing isn’t an exact or perfect science. It’s all about considering the context in which your audience is most likely to click your ad, read your article, sign up for your demo, download your whitepaper, or buy your album.

To succeed, content marketers must have (among other things):

• A general understanding of human behavior and psychology; • A willingness to test which content consumers are easily discovering and engaging with, and to adjust accordingly over time; • The correct technologies that boost content relevancy and reduce the chance audiences will ignore — or worse yet — publicly complain about content.

Are you embracing these principles to shift the scales of your content from disruption to discovery? n

As CEO of nRelate, Neil Mody oversees all business operations, working around the clock to ensure nRelate’s products continue to push the technological envelope and deliver publishers the results they’re looking for. Prior to nRelate, Neil spent several years as an independent software consultant and was a part of the technology group at McKinsey & Company. He holds master’s degrees from Columbia University and New York University.

Strive for Success. Live for Super.

Super Mobility Week is North America’s largest forum for the mobile innovations to power your connected life — Business. Home. Health.

Money. Auto. Retail. Media. M2M. Networks.

Only CTIA can convene the most influential mobile marketplace, bringing together, for the first time ever, the leading authorities on the connected life.

September 9, 10 & 11, 2014 Sands Expo & Convention Center Las Vegas

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How Digital Marketing Works O CTO B E R 19 - 2 2 , 2 0 14 | T H E U S G R A NT | S A N D I EG O, CA

Learn how to increase performance, leverage resources & generate measurable returns As a digital marketing leader, you know that technology now drives every aspect of marketing, and that you need to stay on the cutting edge to succeed. The Marketing Operations and Technology Summit is a unique opportunity to find solutions to today’s most important marketing challenges.

www.marketingopstechsummit.com

Delivering on the promise of

big data

October 5-9, 2014

BOSTON CO-LOCATED WITH

Eric Siegel Author, Founding Chair Predictive Analytics World

www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com

PRODUCED BY

upcoming conferences Refer to this guide for upcoming internet marketing conferences from across the globe.

With the 2 day conference specially tailored in line with the trends in the marketplace, ad:tech asean 2014 is the must-attend event of the year.

June 17 - 18, 2014 | Six Degrees Events Ltd London, United Kingdom

Enterprise Apps Conference & Event: Enterprise Apps World will be a two day show that will look at all the implication of going mobile in the workplace, and how enterprise apps can help. With BYOD an increasing challenge in terms of privacy, security and manageability BYOD is set to be a big theme of the show as CIOs struggle with the challenges that a move from a previously strongly controlled, locked down IT environment to one where they often have limited, if any, control or knowledge of. Management of this environment can be a tough enough job since the mobile user may be using anything from a corporate owned device, a BYOD device or a smart phone or tablet personal to the user and therefore completely out of the knowledge field of the CIO. The building of enterprise apps store is increasingly a focus for businesses looking to regain this level of control. Couple this with the challenge of building enterprise applications that work cohesively across such a range of varying devices, environments and operating systems and it’s no surprise that a show like Enterprise Apps World is needed to make sense of it all.

July 16th - 17, 2014 | SMi Group Ltd London, United Kingdom

SMi is launching its inaugural Social Media in the Telecoms Sector Conference, taking place in London, on the 16th and 17th of July 2014. This unique event will gather together experts from international telecom companies, mobile network operators, digital agencies and media consultants who are shaping the presence of telecom sector in the online world.

September 1 -3, 2014 | S&S Media Group NHOW Hotel Berlin

The Internet of Things is becoming the main driver of innovation for the economy, society and culture. Intelligent, networked devices populating soon everyday and business life: smart homes, connected cars or Industry 4.0 but are only the tip of the iceberg IoT!The conference combines technical know-how with the creative potential of startups and designers, because with the Internet of Things creates...

June 17 - 19, 2014 | Internet World London, United Kingdom

At Internet World 2014, thousands of IT, technology and digital marketing professionals will discover the most cutting-edge technology innovations and strategies to drive their organisation’s success. This flagship event of London Technology Week will bring together business leaders, IT specialists, developers, technical experts, digital marketing and business development professionals with leading technology innovators and solution providers. Register today and gain access to hands-on learning dedicated to each of these different professions, plus seminars on how departments can work closer together to maximise business-wide opportunitie.

September 08 - 11, 2014 | Z Squared Media, LLC Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing event on the planet, is coming back to the United States for a fourth year. Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing event on the planet, is the one event where you can learn and network with the best and the brightest in the content marketing industry.

July 08 - 09, 2014 | ad:tech Suntec, Singapore

Over the years, ad:tech has become a true melting pot of industry thought leadership, well-known to be the most successful marketplace which gathers brand advertisers, traditional & interactive agencies, portals, on-line publishers and service providers. In this seventh instalment, ad:tech will continue to be the preeminent digital marketing event with top industry leaders as speakers, delving into the up and coming industry trends and insights. Aside from the plentiful thought-provoking sessions, expect to network and connect with the projected 3000 - 3500 attendees.

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October 03 - 04, 2014 | Smile Expo Russia, Moscow

Every year affiliate programs are getting increasingly popular. Being one of the most effective marketing tools, affiliate programs have long been used in the West, and only since recently - in Russia.

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ClickZ award winning email software. www.cooleremail.com Email - Trips & Tricks Info & recommendations on how to manage & organize email and inbox. www.organize-email.info E-mail Marketing Advertise to 2 mill opt-ins daily. $29.95/month. www.WebTrafficMarketing.com

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Press Release Distribution Industry leading wire service. From only $169 & a 2-for-1 deal. www.PRWebDirect.com

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