FEBRUARY 2012
Magazine InternetMarketingMag.net
RAISING VENTURE CAPITAL RE-MARKETING ADWORDS
5 WAYS TO BOOST SALES FACEBOOK LANDING PAGES
JONATHAN MIZEL: TRAFFIC MASTER
ADWORDS CAMPAIGN PERFORMANCE Facebook.com/InternetMarketingMagazine
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THE STATE OF THE INTERNET From the Desk of the Editor
Welcome to the February ‘State of the Internet’ address for 2012. The Internet is the fastest changing communications media in the history of mankind. It’s very hard to keep track of all this stuff yourself. In this section we will keep you up to date with the very latest of what is happening online from the big players in the marketplace. Here is your snapshot summary of the changes from the big movers and shakers online in January 2012.
on both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads). Thanks to the rapid growth in active smart mobile devices worldwide from an estimated 509 million last year to an estimated 914 million in 2012, Google’s mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012 (see chart).
The change will expose Google+ profiles, as well as posts and photographs uploaded to the network, to hundreds of millions of search users whether or not they have Google+ accounts. Google is calling the changes ‘search, plus your world’ and in theory it’s about giving more relevant results to you the searcher, but there certainly does seem to be an element of forcing people who want additional rankings on Google to start making Google+ listings so that their social network gets the user adoption that they are after.
Google Mobile Ad Revenues in the Billions Cowen and Company analyst Jim Friedland estimates that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet) in Mobile Advertising. This includes both search and display advertising in mobile apps
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Apple has made a massive play into the textbooks and book-publishing arena’s with a new tool called iBooks Author which will enable any Mac user to download the free iBooks Author App and create a book and publish it to the iBookstore. This amazing new app allows you as the content creator to create visually appealing Multi-touch books for the iPad without needing to be a developer.
Google Forcing the Adoption of Google+ Google made changes to their search algorithm this month to give results from their Google+ social network a whole lot more exposure in the search results.
iBooks Author
For content producers this provides another platform to get your message in front of anyone who has an iPad.
Google Mobile
As a percentage of Google’s total revenues, Friedland estimates that mobile grew from 3 percent in 2010 to 7 percent last year and will almost double again to 13 percent in 2012. By 2016, he expects mobile to be a $20 billion business for Google, and represent 26 percent of its total revenues.
Zappos.com Gets Hacked On Sunday the 15th of January Zappos CEO issued an email to his employees stating that the Zappos network had been hacked. The database that stores the customer credit card details was not affected or accessed. The next step was the big one of informing their 24+ million customers about the incident and asking them to set a new password for their accounts.
Measuring the Business Impact of Social Media Social media is not a once off investment, but rather a long term strategic channel that, when integrated with other marketing efforts, allows brands to connect with users over time. Results of a recent survey conducted by WildFireApp.com found social media efforts to be both valuable in their ability to grow brand awareness and increase dialogue with customers. Their November 2011 study of over 700 marketers from all around the world revealed the following: • 97% believe social media marketing benefits their business • 75% intend to increase social media spending this year • Brands move through a 3-phase approach with social media efforts. Firstly grow the Fan Base, then Engage the Fan Base, then Engage the Fan Base, then Monetize the Fan Base. Most have been focussed on the first 2 phases.
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The figure shows visually the main Social Media Benefits concluded from the survey.
Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.” “We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.
Social Media Benefits
Mobile Overtaking The Web More consumers will access the Internet by mobile devices than by desktop or laptop computers by 2013, projects analyst Mary Meeker of investment bank Morgan Stanley. She also projects that mobile commerce will account for nearly 2% of all US retail sales by late 2012 while web retail will account for 5-6%.
This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content abovethe-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.”
From the Desk of the Editor This is the second issue where we have changed releases from bi-monthly to monthly, so you can expect to get your Internet Marketing Magazine fix more regularly now as of roughly the 7th of each month. You will now find the new full Jonathan Mizel Traffic Master Interview audio in the ‘Audio Expert Interview’ section of the member’s area. Jonathan’s knowledge of traffic is amazing and he shared with us a heap of great resources he’s using for buying dirt-cheap traffic on enormous volumes. It’s free, so if you haven’t been sent your link to the member’s area please feel free to sign up for it today at http://internetmarketingmag.net/become-member/
Mobile Overtaking the Web
Too Many Ads ‘Above the Fold’ now Penalized by Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm From Google’s post on it’s Inside Search blog this month: “We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.
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I am very excited to be getting conversion expert Bret Thomson on the next webinar sharing his exact formula for winning video sales letters. So for those who are members keep a look out for an email from me about that one. Until next time… Wishing you the best of success online
GregCassar
Greg Cassar
Internet Marketing Strategist & Editor Internet Marketing Magazine
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NON GOOGLE TRAFFIC MASTERY Jonathan Mizel is a traffic and conversion master, with his origins online back in 1993. He specialises in media buys of all sizes and all types, as well as publishing the online marketing newsletter. Jonathan also runs a successful marketing agency and information publishing business. Jonathan lives in Maui and has created a true Internet lifestyle for himself. areas - can you tell us a little bit about your story. Jonathan: Well, I was an insurance agent for many years and I had a friend who was an information technology guy, back in the early 90’s and he turned me on to bulletin boards. This was pre-internet and I thought to myself, this looks like an interesting new marketing channel, but at the time there just wasn’t a lot of commerce going on; things were very new.
Internet Traffic Greg: I’m very excited to have Jonathan Mizel with us today. Jonathan: Thank you. I am so incredibly honoured to be part of the magazine and also really just delighted at what you’re doing Greg. Greg: You’re living in Maui are you? Jonathan: That’s right. We live in up-country Maui. I moved here back right around 2001; came here and actually I was here on vacation before and my girlfriend at the time said, “Can we move to Maui?”. I think she was joking. And I said, “Sure”. You know, I thought about it and I thought why not? We can live wherever we want, we’re an Internet business and we do like it here - and we’ve been here for now going on 11 years. Greg: You’ve been successful online for many years and you’re well known, especially the traffic and conversion
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And then he took me to my very first Internet seminar in 1993 and we got a demonstration of something called an auto responder, which I had never seen before. Of course, we all know what an auto responder is now, but this was so revolutionary. And I said to myself, “Wow! We could put a sales letter on there.” And then the commercial Internet hit right around that time and I packed in my job by giving my notice and I started working with some small desktop publishers and other businesses. I started writing this newsletter for my friends and other people involved in the marketing and technology business, which ended up becoming ‘The Online Marketing Letter’. From there I went on the road and started training people. With a couple of friends of mine we went off and did almost 170 seminars, all over the United States, getting people involved with the internet, with marketing - with the whole digital universe and the digital advertising space. It was very exciting, but it was so new that of course we were really making up the rules as we went along - which most of them turned out to be OK.
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Greg: Many Internet marketers are purely focussed on both AdWords and Facebook, and pretty much everyone’s fishing in that same pond, but as we both know the number of places to buy traffic, especially display traffic, is virtually unlimited. What is your thoughts on other cost-effective traffic sources where smaller ‘up and coming marketers’ can buy traffic, especially on a pay per click basis? Jonathan: Well, I want to actually start with Google, and at least give them a few props - and that is, if you are in a category that Google does not hate, and you have never been kicked off of Google, and you are not in a restricted type of space, and you are not openly using squeeze pages, or any of the things that they really don’t like, you know their traffic really is some of the best. The problem occurs when people run up against them and the pricing either becomes ridiculously high and so you can’t make a profit, or pretty much everything that we teach people about getting more traffic and getting more conversion and actually creating a more cohesive experience - Google doesn’t like.
When I think about it this way, which is a much better way to think about it than the scarcity approach, every morning Ad reps and Ad Managers have to wake up and decide how they’re going to sell all their space that day. So, what they do is, they become part of networks. It’s really simple supply and demand, and supply has gone far larger than the demand, at least in the last few years, and I think that the real opportunities are out there in non-Google, and even non-Facebook traffic - especially for people looking to scale up. Some of the networks that I like to buy display ads on of a pay per click ad unit, are Pulse 360, which is really very open to going on a CPA basis. Although you are competing with a lot of smart advertisers, so in order to get into that realm with them you really have to have a good offer that really does convert. I really like a network called AdKnowledge.com. They have a tremendous amount of inventory, including non-US inventory, and they are willing to go on a performance basis. Certainly they can work within the CPC realm.
If you can use Google, I think it’s great. But a lot of people discover that it doesn’t quite work for them. What we’ve seen and especially over the last three or four years, is a huge explosion in display. One of the main reasons that that’s happened is the number of web pages that are available for advertising - it is huge. You take all the websites out there and all the YouTubes and all the small sites and medium sites and the video sites, and the gossip sites, and the lyric sites, and all the news sites, and you just have tremendous trillions and trillions of impressions every month, and every morning.
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tap into through Ad Buyer and then - even Google has a remnant ‘DoubleClick’ type of remnant inventory that you can tap into there as well.
adbuyer.com
AdBuyer, (which was recently purchased), has access to some of the exchange inventory, which is the excess remnant inventory. Yahoo has a network called, or an exchange called Right Media Exchange, which you can
adknowledge.com
Greg: If you’re using DoubleClick do the same rules apply as normal ‘Google rules’. I know some people steer away from DoubleClick for that reason, because all of a sudden they’re fishing back in the Google’s pond, and you are thinking ‘are they going to be a big brother to me and tell me what I can and can’t do’ - that sort of thing? Jonathan: They didn’t at first. In fact, the joke we used to make was, ‘if you get kicked out of Google just go to double-click and there’s some nice Ad Rep who will gladly take your money’. Now the Google culture has definitely gone downstream to the double-click team. If you’re banned from Google you might not get into double-click in terms of - you certainly wouldn’t be able to grow on an unlimited basis. But if you’ve got no issues with Google; you haven’t been banned, then I think that double-click is still a good way to go. Greg: I know you do a lot of display advertising. Do you have any good design rules that you always make sure that you include when designing banners so that you get a good response?
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Jonathan: Well, the universal rule that we follow, which has been the case for many years, is your banners should either fit in, or stand out. And I don’t mean a little bit fit in, I mean absolutely look like part of the web page. And more and more sites are saying, “You cannot have a graphic that looks like a link. You cannot knowingly take the look of our website and design a banner so that it looks like a search box”, or something like that. But you still can on a lot of these B level sites where the sites are still open to this. And then in terms of things that stand out, I really want to explain what I mean by that. Banner advertising is by and large what we call ‘pattern interrupt based advertising’. In other words nobody voluntarily says “I’m going to go out and click on some banners today” and no one goes on the internet and says, “I wonder what kind of ads I’m going to see”.
Nerd Internet Surfer
Animated ads like the belly fat ad can work well because they stand out. A weird picture on the banner can work well. The weird picture makes the person look and then they look at the headline and then they say they’re interested, and then they click through, and that’s how you would really use these kind of pattern interrupt based banners to really get attention and get people clicking. Greg: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re pretty much on the same page there. We buy a lot of display for our clients and we test a lot of banners. We study the adult industry as far as what they’re doing, because they’re generally ahead of the game with the hand drawn and all that sort of stuff. Something that we’ve done recently that’s worked well is using Facebook’s colours and their look and feel on banner ads and we’ve found that that really has pulled well, because
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everyone has had exposure to that site and can associate with it. One thing we’ve found is it’s not just about getting a click. It’s really about the effectiveness of the offer. And we’ve even tested different traffic sources and tracked and measured, so, not just which traffic sources resulted in the most leads, but then watched it over a three or six month period and which traffic sources resulted in the most sales. Because sometimes we might have a traffic source that pulls insane amounts of leads, but then when we look over the three or six month period and find it didn’t really pay for itself, or it wasn’t really that special, but traffic source B over here, it was just incredible because that’s where the buyers are. Greg: Now for a little bit of traffic acronym bingo. One thing about traffic and media buys, there certainly is a lot of acronyms. So like many marketers are familiar with CPC, (Cost Per Click), where they only pay on when someone clicks on the ad. Are you able to share with the Internet Marketing Magazine community what CPM, CPA and CPS are and ultimately when you would use these different models? Jonathan: Here’s a simple way to look at it. On one end of the spectrum we have CPM, which means ‘Cost Per Thousand Impressions’. That’s what the networks want to sell you, because they have a lot of that, and so they are more than happy to sell you impressions. But there’s absolutely no performance basis with CPM at all. It is just - it’s like buying space in a magazine or buying space on a web page, or buying a billboard. It may work, but it may not work. It’s based on the number of impressions and absolutely has no performance matrix. On the other end of the spectrum you’ve got CPS, or ‘Cost Per Sale’, which is really just a straight affiliate program. On one hand you’re going to - I’m going to pay you for each impression and then on the other hand I’m actually going to give you a percentage of each sale. Maybe we’re selling a hundred dollar product and I might give you fifty or sixty dollars of that. The next model is CPA (Cost Per Action), and that is a where we pay every time a real person comes to a real website and fills out a form of some sort (the action). I think that as advertisers generally we want to be focused more on the end where’s there’s more performance. And then if you’re a media seller and you happening to be listening to this, well you want to be more focussed on the CPM. You want to sell what you’ve got. And if you’re an advertiser you want to pay only on performance.
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And another one that we’ve been using recently, very successfully as a matter of fact, is called SiteScout. They’re out of Canada and are a very much DSP with a tremendous amount of inventory available. Greg: What you’ve shared with us today Jonathan is just gold; your knowledge in this space is amazing. I personally have been a student of yours for roughly two years. I’ve got both your ‘Half Cent Clicks’ course, as well as your ‘Traffic Evolution’ course, and I really got a lot out of that one. How can our readers and our listeners, who really are pretty much all over the globe now - how can they find out more about you, but also your products and services so that they can buy this sort of traffic on these sort of scales at the sort of prices that you and I do?
sitescout.com
Greg: Re-marketing is something that’s sort of been around for around two to two and a half years now and really is a game changer. For those who don’t know, it’s re-marketing where someone visits your site and effectively you cookie them, and then as they travel around a particular display network your banners show up time and time again. We’ve had great return on investment for re-marketing and we certainly do implement it from a Google side for pretty much across all our clients. A lot of other display networks, where we talk to them about re-marketing, they want us to buy a display campaign and then they’ll put re-marketing in as part of it. They won’t just sell us a re-marketing campaign. Has that been your experience, or have you found ad networks with large connections that will just sell you effectively a remarketing cookie that you can then buy traffic on a pay per click basis? Jonathan: The most important thing is just to have networks that are large enough so that you can get the distribution that you need, because when you’re running a re-marketing campaign you’re only dealing with the people who’ve been cookied, based on having visited your site, or somehow visited one of your properties. And so I like to look at just the very - the biggest networks or the biggest exchanges and sources for getting re-marketing traffic. And outside of Google another one we have used is advertising.com, which is the AOL network. There’s a tremendous amount of inventory there. And then there are two really decent demand site platforms (DSP’s). The first one is AdBuyer, which I have mentioned before - it can give you access to both Google and also the right media exchange, and also some of the other network traffic. FEBRUARY 2012
advertising.com
Jonathan: I think probably the best thing to start with for most people who are interested in getting involved with media buying and non-Google traffic sources is traffic evolution and you can just go to TrafficEvolution.com. We’ve got 30, 40 I think maybe even more resources listed in there and you know, we have updated the course now two, three times. We try to keep it fairly evergreen and in the parts that do change we really do keep those updated. And then there’s Half Cent Clicks, which is really more of a junky traffic, but we’ve found that you can make pretty good money out of junky traffic, especially if you’re selling business opportunities or things that normal networks won’t take. And then you can go to cyberwavemedia.com, which is our agency site and just see what we’ve got there. Like I said we don’t really take on new clients; we haven’t for a while, but you never know.
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THE LOWDOWN AND DIRTY ON RAISING VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDS By Antony McAuslan you can do to ensure that you don’t come out battered and bruised from the experience. First of all, it’s important to consider what a VC firm is looking for when considering an investment. Here’s what I call their ‘Hot Buttons’ – • • • • • •
Raising Venture Capital
There usually comes a time in the life of every business, where organic growth does not provide enough critical mass to put your business on a trajectory course that will enable you to become a major player in your industry. This means you will inevitably require an injection of outside funds. If you require funding in the region of $25k - $100k, you’re probably better off looking for an ‘Angel’ investor. Which is usually defined as high net worth individual who is interested in buying in to a business with which he has some affinity, and wherein you will get an uplift from both his cash injection and his experience and contacts. However, if you are looking to seriously grow a business and are seeking somewhere from $1m - $5m, then you will most probably need to consider talking to a Venture Capital firm. Even with the current global financial crisis, there are still plenty of cashed up funds out there looking for good businesses – the trick is to put your business in the best possible shape in order to ensure that your business is of interest to them. Having had to deal with a variety of international venture capitalists, first as a business founder and CEO, and then later (having gone over to the dark side) and having actually worked for some of them, I can tell you that while there is no easy way to guarantee they will put money into you, there are a number of things you can do to ensure they will be attracted to your business, as well as a number of things
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Growth Sectors Killer Applications Relevant Market Experience Barriers to Entry (for potential competitors) A Global Market A Streamlined Business Model
I always tell clients upfront that if their business does not have most of the items on this list then they are basically wasting their time and money chasing VC funds. So just to break it down: Growth Sectors – They are looking for businesses that are already in hot topic markets or emerging areas. So if your idea is to create another version of Google, EBay, FaceBook, Youtube etc., you’re probably not going to get much interest, because all of these are considered mature markets already. Killer Applications – This means ideas or products that have the potential to turn a market on its head. Ideas that solve problems or save money are often of interest. Relevant Market Experience – It’s a well-known fact that VC’s will often invest in the people, as much as the idea, and therefore they usually look to what sort of relevant industry experience the key people in the business have. If you claim to have developed a killer application for dentists, but no one on the company is one or has ever worked for one, then you are going to have a hard time convincing them that you understand the industry you are trying to break in to. This can often be overcome by putting someone senior from within the industry on your Board or management team. Barriers To Entry – This means you are either so far ahead of anybody else in your idea development, or that another potential competitor would have to spend large amounts of time and money to ever catch up. But if your idea is to sell veggies online – I don’t like your chances of exciting anyone. Unless of course you have an online veggie business that already sells to 30% of Australian
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consumers – then you might be in with a shot. A Global Market – In the same vein, unless your business is ‘scalable’ – in other words it has an application world-wide, you are also unlikely to attract much attention. The VC model is to invest say $1m in 10 different businesses, fully expecting 8 of then to fail. But those other 2 that survive are expected to go on to become $100m + companies. And if your business is just aimed at say women looking for shoes in Toorak, or people who collect stubby holders, then it is unlikely that you are ever going to get that kind of valuation. Streamlined Business Model – In other words, how is the product or service delivered to the customer and (more importantly) how does the customer pay and how are the funds collected. A business model based on the current Apple iTunes App Store model is simple to understand. The customer logs in, gives a credit card number, the App is downloaded, Apple keep their 30%, and the developer gets the rest. Simple. But you’d be surprised at the convoluted business models I have seen put up. VC’s have a very short attention span, so your business model needs to be easy to understand and realistic. Okay. Assuming your business meets most of the above criteria, the next thing you need to do is to put together a short Information Memorandum (or I.M. for short). Your I.M. should be no more than about 25 pages and needs to contain the following information – Executive Summary / Market Snapshot/ Product Overview/ Key Staff/ Business Model/ Marketing Plan/ Competitor Analysis/ Budget with Revenue Projections for 1, 3 and 5 years. The Executive Summary is basically
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your ‘Pitch’. Which means it needs to grab them by the throat from the outset and keep ‘em reading. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the concept of the ‘elevator pitch’ – which means you have to be able to pitch your concept in its entirety in the time it takes a VC to take the elevator from the ground floor up to his office. A good pitch needs to be constantly refined, but here’s my blueprint for a simple attention grabbing pitch. I have used the term ‘Widget’ to denote your product.
gence on their behalf, with the result being them offering you a Term Sheet, which sets out the term of the investment, proposed share holdings, obligations of all parties etc. And with that serious cash injection, your business will be off on a course to becoming a serious global business. In the next issue of Internet Marketing Magazine I will share with you about dealing with VC’s to ensure you got the best possible deal.
“Widgets are one of the hottest products/ market segments on the planet right now. In fact, the worldwide market for widgets in 2015 is tipped to be $X Billion, and by 2020 is expected to grow to $XX billion. Up until now, the biggest obstacle to obtaining/ using/ servicing/ producing/ disposing of widgets is Y. Through my background in widgets, I have developed a revolutionary method / product/ service/ that addresses this problem. I believe that using my method / product / service would be a ‘Game Changer’ to the widget industry, and given the appropriate funding – we could capture a large slice of this market over the next 5 years. The attached I.M. provides more information about this exciting industry development.” I guarantee you that a simple pitch – either verbal or in writing – that includes the above information, will garner enough interest for the VC to want to read your I.M. Once they’ve read it (and hopefully decided that they want to know more), you will be subjected to an endless round of meetings wherein they will try to get a sense of the founder’s management style , the business, and the skills of the key staff. With a bit of luck this will lead to some serious due dili-
Tony McAuslan is the epitome of a modern day ‘Entrepreneur’. After working for some of the world’s largest companies in Advertising and then Gaming, Tony launched his own startup business in 2001. Starting from a base of only 3 staff, Tony raised over $25m in venture capital and grew his company to over 80 staff with offices in Sydney, Los Angeles and London. After exiting the company in 2005, Tony went on to work as a Business Development Manager for one of Europe’s largest private VC firms, where he helped raise over US$80m for a wide range of startup ventures. He now splits his time between mentoring various start-up firms, and consulting for clients who are seeking venture capital funds. He is based in Sydney and can be contacted by email at tmcauslan@hotmail.com
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7. Always provide an affiliate program for any product or service you sell online. Without affiliates and JV partners (higher paid affiliates), I wouldn’t be where I am today.
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HOW TO USE RE-MARKETING WITH GOOGLE ADWORDS
by Mike Rhodes
Remarketing has existed in the online advertising world for a while now. However the feature is fairly new to Google AdWords & still causes a fair bit of confusion among AdWords users. In its simplest form, it’s a way to show ads to people browsing the web – but only to those people who have already visited a particular page on your website. The benefits are improved ROI & more powerful search marketing strategies for your business. How does remarketing work? To use Remarketing in AdWords, you first need to ‘tag’ visitors to your site. Then you’re able to show ads (on Google’s Display Network) to those people & only those people. This gives you a number of strategies. The type of visitor you tag is entirely up to you. For example you may choose to tag some or all of the following types: • all visitors regardless of which pages on your site they visit • visitors that view a ‘category’ of pages within your site (eg mens, womens & childrens; or, luxury, business & budget) • only visitors that successfully performed an action on your site (eg opted-in, bought, downloaded a pdf etc) • only visitors that placed an item in the shopping cart but then abandoned the cart & left the site without buying Each type of visitor is then stored in its own remarketing list. You’re then able to market to individual lists, or even combine lists for more advanced strategies. You can even combine your Remarketing lists with other AdWords features such as Geo-targeting, frequency capping, image ads and more.
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A popular remarketing strategy One of the more popular remarketing strategies is targeting users who left your site without purchasing anything. Since one of the most common reasons for not making a purchase is price, why not target these people with a special offer & either add value, offer a better bonus or discount the sale price? To set this up create two remarketing lists. The first is for all your site’s visitors & the second is for your ‘buyers’. Google will give you two different code snippets – one for each list. Install the code on your site (eg snippet 1 on all pages, snippet 2 only on the thank you page). Now target the ‘audience’ that consists of all visitors but not buyers. Customise your creative As with anything in marketing, you’re only as good as your offer. So try different creatives for your remarketing campaigns. You already know which parts of your site they were interested, so try cross-selling or up-selling related products & services. Once you find an offer that works, you can quickly roll out new text ads with variations on that theme & even add new image ads if your budget allows. Another great feature is that you have control over the length of time that users see the ads. Google’s default time is 30 days, but you can always adjust this to the timeframe you think is reasonable. Mike Rhodes is WebSavvy’s founder and is a popular international speaker, best-selling author & consultant. With over seven years’ experience of managing & running Google AdWords campaigns; he’s considered by many to be an innovative leader in Australian Pay Per Click marketing. He’s also a coach for the global leader in PPC training: Perry Marshall. Formally a qualified E-Myth Consultant he’s been building small businesses for over ten years & considers online marketing a tool to grow businesses, not just to drive traffic to a website. Visit WebSavvy.com.au for your free 30 minute PPC Strategy Session consultation. INTERNET MARKETING MAGAZINE
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5 WAYS TO BOOST SALES BY PROVIDING PROOF TO AN UNTRUSTING MARKET
By Steve Plummer
It’s the most distrusted of media, is the internet. Many of the prospects you’re selling to have been burnt before or know someone who has. And as crude as the saying is, it’s pretty darn accurate... “You aren’t selling to virgins!”
Unsure
Question then is, how do you build trust in an untrusting marketplace?
One of the greats of the advertising world, Victor Schwab, in his outstanding book ‘How to Write a Good Advertisement’ gives some clues. He says, “... (the way to sell is) to stress appeals to the emotions and instincts, the primary motivating forces. But this is not enough. The body of a sale comprises both flesh and bone, the flesh of an emotional response and the hard bone of ...(proof)... To support it.” So you need to prove the RESULT of what it is you’re selling. No easy task, granted... so to help you here are 5 ways you can make deposits in the trust account of your customers and prospects so you “prove” your product or service works and you EARN the right to the sale. Here they are: Showing Proof #1 – Use Market Data Market data refers to facts/figures/trends RELEVANT to the people you are selling to.
So what you do is present them with data over time which shows trends. For example if you’re in the real estate market you would show property growth over time. Or if you’re in the business improvement niche you might show the upward trend in the number of bankruptcies over the last few years. Both sets of data offer “proof” that a solution (yours!) is needed. But without actually saying it. What this does is change the sales dynamic because it’s not just you “selling” them. The data is leading them to the logical conclusion that they “need” what you’re offering! It’s “cool psychology in action”, a form of “social proof” and leads prospect to thinking outside themselves “yes I can see I need it, like many other people”. So get trends occurring over time and tell your market about them... let the data do the selling for you! Showing Proof #2 – Use “Real” Proof Might be stating the obvious but include any credibility you’ve accumulated. This includes awards you’ve won, approval by experts or industry groups, proof of your popularity (eg “1,583 policy holders can’t be wrong”), an “As Seen on TV” graphic or a “freeze” of the newspaper article about you. Can be done directly in your copy or via a graphic or banner. Advanced tip: implied approval... let them know where you’ve been seen, whether an article or where you advertise by using the lead in “As featured in” and then the logos of the places you’ve been “seen” in., like this example that Greg Cassar designed for the Real Wealth Australia site...
We’re not talking here about product data (eg product measures 8cm x 5cm and does XYZ). But rather information which shows or “proves” to your prospects WHY the need your product or service. FEBRUARY 2012
A really cool way to make you “look” good!
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Showing Proof #3 – Specificity Be as specific as you can. As the great ad man John Caples says, “A specific claim is more believable than a general one.”
But there is a distinction... Use graphics which show the RESULT your customers will get, rather than just the “product”.
So make sure you use numbers eg Large Vs Has 23% more space… Well established Vs Our 52nd year… Cooks quickly Vs Cooks in 5 minutes… Light weight vs Weighs only 1.5 kg…
There you have it... 5 ways to overcome the distrust rampant in society today and rampant in any online selling niche. Use all of the 5 “proof builders” outlined above and you have a much better chance of making the sale.
See, specifics offer much stronger proof. Showing Proof #4 – Trust Testimonials Yes, you need your before and after testimonials (eg “I was 130 kilos now I’m a size 8” kind of thing). Here’s the thing... EVERYONE is doing these. Try to stand out and use a TRUST or INTEGRITY testimonial. The before/after proves the product works but the trust testimonial proves YOU work and can be trusted. Almost NO ONE is using trust testimonials. Try it out and watch your results! Showing Proof #5 – Product in Action Humans are visual beings so it’s important they see what they are getting. Showing them “proof” of what they will get is therefore a subtle but vital part of the sales process.
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Final thought: Just remember the old copywriting chestnut... NEVER MAKE YOUR CLAIMS BIGGER THAN YOUR PROOF.
Steve Plummer is one of Australia’s highest paid and in-demand copywriters and is the personal copywriter for Australia’s “Millionaire Maker” Mal Emery. Steve’s marketing and writing savvy have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra sales for many happy clients. Read StevePlummerOnline.com
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CUSTOM FACEBOOK LANDING PAGES THAT CONVERT By Leigh Kostiainen Facebook marketing in just 2 short years has gone from being some hoodoo voodoo thing that only teenagers should use, to being an essential business marketing tool. Business owners are experiencing varying degrees of success, and there are a number of simple to implement strategies that will help you increase your Facebook marketing success. The most important one is your fan page customization; a branded wall banner and landing page incentivised for likes and mailing list conversions.
Facebook pages for as it is possible for anyone to become the celebrity in their industry or niche. The more of a celebrity you become the more interest you attract to yourself and your business, which means more online traffic and potentially more (many more) sales. This type of purpose is about attracting fans/ likers to increase the viral influence you have. In this instance producing content for your page is very important. More quantity, but quality is very important.
Let’s take a look at the key principles you need to consider while creating your custom fan page; Purpose The purpose of your page spells out what it is you want to achieve from your Facebook marketing, if you don’t know what you want to achieve then you cannot know if you are successful. Your page can be used for a number of different purposes; you just need to choose the one that is right for you; • Branding is a popular purpose for large businesses like Coca Cola and Starbucks who already have established businesses with a widely recognised brand and products, who want to keep their brand in the forefront of the markets mind. This type of purpose is about providing loyal customers with a place to support their favourite products and services, these pages naturally build large numbers of fans yet are not ‘usually’ used for generating sales from their pages. Quantity over Quality. • Positioning is one of the most unique purposes people are using
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Facebook Like
• List Building is easily the most common purpose for Facebook page owners, with the purpose being to incentivise likers or new visitors to join their mailing list. This type of purpose is about encouraging the ‘right’ type of people into your marketing funnel so you have the ongoing opportunities of marketing your products and services to them. Quality over Quantity. • Customer Service is another purpose for a Facebook page, not the most common purpose but one that allows businesses to provide their existing customers a place to communicate with the
business in real time for support and technical issues. This type of purpose is not focused on fan building strategies rather on highly responsive engagement. Quality over Quantity. People This is one factor that most people don’t put enough effort into is who you are trying to attract to your page. Often when I ask a new client who it is they want to attract to their page they respond with either “everyone” or eg: “women aged 25 to 55”; there is a very big difference between a woman who is 25 years old and a woman who is 55 years old. Therefore is it very important to know who you are targeting in as much details as you can manage. Use your Facebook Insights data and sites like Quantcast.com for information about who you are already attracting to your page. When you know who you are going to be attracting and what you want them to do when they get to your page, producing content becomes easier and more strategic. Incentive Offer Given that List Building is the most popular purpose for your Facebook marketing, some key elements of your page you need to incorporate into your landing page design is an email opt-in form and an incentive offer to encourage fans/likers to join your list. Think about what you already have of great value, and preferably digital, that can be used to give away. Some ideas for offers are; eBooks, mind maps, blueprints, video tutorials, top ten tips or free physical products also work well but require physical delivery and often incur a cost.
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Design and Graphics The key areas of your Facebook page that can be branded are your wall banner, the long image down the left hand side of your page, and also your landing page. Take full advantage of the areas you can use for advertising, normally you would pay up to hundreds or thousands of dollars to get that sort of banner advertising on a website that doesn’t even have as much traffic as Facebook gets. The wall banner should have a logo and tag line to represent your brand and a picture of yourself if that is relevant to your business. The reason you should have a picture of yourself on your wall banner is so that when you are using Facebook as your page (not as your personal profile) You Like This Shirt your face will be on the avatar along with the link to your page; the real key here is that when you post on other people pages you look like a real person and other page owners will be more receptive to you. The landing page design is all about your purpose, so if your purpose is list building then of course you will have an opt-in form and an offer, if your purpose is branding then a promotional video will be very helpful. The actual design should reflect your other online properties, primarily your website, so that new visitors to your page know they have found the right you! If you don’t have the design skills yourself there are lots of businesses out there who can quickly and cost effectively do the work for you. You can have a static design that has little to no html coding involved, dynamic designs with cool features like; video, optins, links to website and other social media or even built in navigation menus. Call to Action No matter what your purpose is, your landing page must have a call to action - a call to action is asking someone to do something for you, such as ‘Click Like’. Remember that everything we are doing is about marketing our business so ‘always be strategic’ even if you are only asking them to like your page it is important to ask them to do something for you. Often just by asking for the like or for them to opt-in will increase your conversion by as much as approx 43%. Also using web 2.0 style arrows to point to your call to action helps increase conversions.
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Default Landing Setting Once you have your wonderful new landing page tab designed and uploaded you will need to do one little administrative task. In the admin area of your page on the ‘Manage Permissions’ tab you will see the field where you can set the default landing page; choose your new tab from the drop down menu and when new visitors, who have not clicked like yet, come to your page they will go directly to your custom landing tab. Changing It Up It is great idea to change your banners and landing tabs for seasonal or company promotional events. There is no reason why your image can’t change regularly, just keep the overall brand consistent so you don’t confuse your community. Top 5 Pic Menu The area above your wall can be used as a pseudo navigation menu, so it is a good idea to have some great graphics made that you can upload to this area that have your brand and are promoting your products or services. If you can’t see any images at the top of your wall then simple upload an image to your wall and the area will automatically appear. Each of these images can have a description or ‘call to action’ including a link, so when someone clicks on any of those images they will see the link and can take action to purchase from you. If you would like a free template for the image layout to create your own menu go to www.TheFanPageCoach.com/ Template-Giveaway and download it. No matter what stage you are at with your Facebook page you can always make changes and improvements to your page to help with your conversions. Taking time out to outline your page purpose, target market and offer as well as other key principles such as your policies and content calendar will ensure you always have success with your Facebook marketing. Leigh Kostiainen is an Australian Facebook Marketing pioneer, having taught hundreds of businesses how to gain the Facebook marketing advantage for their business pages. Leigh owns Facebook’s largest page promotion fan page – Promote My Fan Page with over 35,000 fans, speaks at corporate events, provides Facebook customization services, and runs workshops teaching business owners how to use their viral influence for real business profits. Connect with Leigh@leighkostiainen or http:// facebook.com/TheFanPageCoach
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4 WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR GOOGLE ADWORDS SEARCH CAMPAIGN PERFORMANCE by Greg Cassar 1. Connect keywords to sales with Conversion Tracking Google advises that the number of top e-commerce sites using Conversion Tracking has nearly doubled in the last year. Conversion tracking is a piece of code that Google will give you from your Adwords account to put on the ‘thankyou pages’ or your website so that you can accurately track lead and sale conversions.
Search Engine Results
Your Google Adwords campaign’s health can make a massive difference to the number of qualified leads and sales for your business. In some cases we’ve increased businesses revenues multiple millions of dollars a year in sales just through Google Adwords Campaign Optimization and website design conversion optimization changes. Your Google Adwords Campaign should not remain static. In effect it is like a living organism that changes and learns and evolves over time, so it needs management and attention to keep it running at it’s very best. We find that there are a virtually unlimited number of features and changes to tweak to get the business results you are after. Here are 4 of those ways that you can utilise to improve your Google Adwords campaign’s performance.
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Conversion Tracking gives you access to valuable data on which keywords are bringing in sales or leads, not just clicks, allowing you to make more informed bids. The reality is you need Conversion Tracking turned on to get a clearer look at the return on investment of your existing Google Adwords Spend. The real game here is to find out which keywords are turning clicks in to customers so you can make smarter bids. 2. Give your best performing keywords a raise With customer search behaviour and keyword performance constantly changing, staying on top of keyword bids can help make sure you get a good return on investment. You can get the most out of your budget by raising bids on keywords that are bringing in leads and customers and lowering bids on keywords that are not. Achieving higher ad positions and getting more clicks doesn’t have to mean increasing budget. Raise bids on top-
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4. Give customers a direct line when you add Call Extensions.
performing keywords and lower bids on less relevant ones so your ads can appear in higher positions on search results pages.
Google advises that based on their statistics 59% of smartphone users visit a business and more than 40% purchase after looking for local information using their devices.
A great way of figuring out which keywords to give more ad spend and focus is to sort your campaigns by Conversions. The keywords that rise to the top there are are bringing in the most conversions and should get the most spent on them so that they are in dominant positions in the rankings as required. 3. Pull the anchor out of the water by culling the under performers Adwords Conversions
Applying the 80/20 principle for your adwords campaign makes great sense. In the step above we focussed on the top 20% of keywords, but equally the same can be said for keywords that are not performing. Although in this case they should be paused so that the campaign becomes healthier as a general rule. Sorting your keywords by Quality Score or By Conversions are both great ways to go. Pause any of your keywords with a Quality Score of 3 or less and pause any keywords that are not resulting in conversions over time. Both of these changes will have the effect of pulling the anchor out of the water and improving the health of the campaign so that your adwords ‘ship’ in this example can run faster and smoother.
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You can now get local and relevant clicks that connect customers directly to your business by adding a Call Extensions phone number to ads that are being served to mobile devices.
Low performing adwords keywords
You should see up to a 6-8% increase in clickthrough rate when you add a clickable phone number to your ads.
The great thing about this strategy is that customers who call are closer to converting, and since the cost of a call is the same as the cost of a click, Call Extensions can help you get more qualified leads at great value, without added expense.
Greg Cassar is Australia’s leading Internet Marketing Strategist. With InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com he provides traffic and conversion optimization services for medium to large businesses and enterprises. You can follow Greg’s latest updates by subscribing to Internet Marketing Magazine at InternetMarketingMag.net for the new members area and the latest issue updates.
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