Internet Marketing Magazine August 2012 by Internet Marketing Magazine

august 2012

THE GREAT PUPPY DOG AMBUSH

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RUSLAN KOGAN SUPPLY CHAIN & ECOMMERCE MASTER CLASS

>> THE ORIGINAL AND BEST INTERNET MARKETING MAGAZINE DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR THE IPAD, IPHONE, ANDROID AND THE WEB

INTERNET UPDATE

THE STATE OF THE INTERNET In this section of Internet Marketing Magazine we cover the low down on what are the big plays that have happened online in the last month and how they affect you. Google Penguin and You

How do you know if your SEO has taken a hit? Google has taken a more open approach to the Penguin update than they have with previous updates, sending notices to Google Webmaster Tools accounts warning site owners that Google had detected ‘unnatural links’ pointing to their site. Website owners are then asked to submit a reconsideration request once the links have been removed. SEO Moving Forwards

Google changes its algorithm about 500 times a year. Most changes are minor, but every couple of months, a major update happens that gets people talking because of the impact it has on ranking results. The two most recent algorithm changes are:

Many companies in the past have used cost effective offshore SEO services to build and buy links for them. Now much of this work needs to be undone or re-done. The entire SEO industry is in for a bit of a shakeup at the moment as Google tries to re-shuffle the deck and get the most genuine websites to the top, not the ones that have done the most SEO link building.

Panda: Officially rolled out in February 2011, but there have been about 13 data refreshes of it since Keep a regular eye on your Google Webmaster tools then. Now on Panda 3.7, it cracked down on sites as a direct communication with Google about your with thin, stolen or duplicate content, as well as site. sites with a high ad-to-content ratio. Penguin: Released April 2012, this algorithm put tighter guidelines on website optimization and adjusted a number of web spam factors, including keyword stuffing, cloaking, unnatural links and content spinning. Penguin is a change in how Google ranks against people trying to game the search system. The primary target was ‘unnatural links’ that were either bought or exchanged in order to artificially inflate a website’s authority. Other reported targets included keyword stuffing and comment spam, which Google also houses under the umbrella term ‘webspam’.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

Apple Wants To Buy Pinterest Rival, The Fancy Is The Fancy the next Pinterest? Or just another ‘also ran’ visual social network. Latest media reports that allegedly Apple is in talks to acquire The Fancy, a fast-growing social commerce site backed by cofounders of Twitter and Facebook. If these claims are true the real objective here would be to secure a role for Apple in the growing e-commerce market, putting the 400 million-plus users with credit cards on file with Apple’s iTunes Store to work shopping—with Apple getting a cut of the action.

While The Fancy is far smaller than archrival Pinterest, which similarly lets users make lists of things they find interesting, the Fancy is much farther along in linking its users to transactions. The Fancy takes a 10 percent cut of the reported $10k per day of purchases driven from the site.

tively buy the integration and analytics tools that Wildfire has built to connect into and mine data from Facebook. The other real reason behind the acquisition is to make it easier for many of the biggest brands in the world to build out bigger richer social media presences on the Google+ platform.

Social Media Startup Wildfire Bought By Google for $250 Mil- The 4 Dominant Internet Powerlion houses Wildfire is four-year old software company that has just been acquired by Google for a reported $250 million. Instead of placing ads triggered by keywords in search queries, Wildfire campaigns are targeted based on the personal and behavioral data contained within social media user profiles. Founded in 2008, Wildfire became one of the leading makers of software used to run contests, promotions and other marketing campaigns on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In the last two-anda-half years, the company has grown from five employees to 400. It now serves 16,000 businesses and counts 30 of the top Fortune 50 brands among its customers.

The Internet Marketing Magazine team believe that Google have made this acquisition to effec-

While there are many Internet Powerhouses on the modern Internet, there are 4 that pack more punch than the rest in their ability to shape the Internet as it currently stands. 1. Google: From slapping to banning to Panda’s and Penguins. When Google makes a change the Internet World listens. Is it because they are a wonderful really nice organisation that cares about your business? Not really, the banning of hundreds of thousands of Adwords accounts in recent years without any prior warning pretty much proves that one. The reason why Google is now like the unofficial governing body on the Internet is that they control the lions share of search, and most buying decisions online come from either organic or paid search. While ever the Bing / Yahoo Search alliance plays a distant second fiddle Google will remain the dominant powerhouse on the Internet. Google is effectively most people’s Internet home page where their online destination begins.

Google’s Android play is also a stroke of genius as the mobile web is set to overtake the ‘traditional Internet’ as we know it with more people coming online every day browsing the web from mobile devices. Google has positioned themselves to control nearly all the ‘non-apple’ manufacturers customers’ user experience. 2. Facebook: There is one main reason that Facebook controls a lot of power on the Internet – eyeballs. They control the most eyeballs with over 900 million active user accounts and high user engagement times and frequencies that have never been seen online before. No other organisation in the world has the power to get a message to more people at one time than Facebook. Facebook is also a massive artificial intelligence engine. It learns and builds out your profile in the background as you develop, like and share content. If you love ballet dancing Facebook will know about it and build out your profile to present you as a prospect to anyone wishing to promote Ballet Dancing related products and services in your region. While ever Facebook holds the most eyeballs it will retain it’s power to dramatically effect and shape the Internet. It’s hard to think of anyone ever knocking Facebook off it’s perch now that it has such a large audience, although maybe the same could have been said for MySpace just a few short years back.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

3. Amazon: Whilst starting as run on their mobile devices is an online bookstore, Amazon is a prime example as it is effecnow far more than that. Amatively going to cause the death zon is like the digital version of of Flash online. a new and improved Walmart, with up to 1/3 of online retail transactions starting here. Traffic Sources that Result in Digital Sales online Up to 40% of Amazon’s revenue comes from its very clever mar- In a recent presentation Sucharita ket place, which allows other Mulpuru, Vice-President and Prinsellers to sell on the Amazon cipal Analyst at Forrester Research platform. This is a very profit- stated that search accounts for able area of the Amazon busi- more sales of hard goods online ness with no stock costs and globally than any other media. nearly 100% profit. It enables Amazon to build out an infinite According to her research paid stock library and pricing struc- search trumped natural search ture that no one yet has been with 32% of hard goods sales being able to compete head to head originated from paid search and with. 25% from natural organic search. Amazon continues to morph and evolve and now has a massive reach with its ability to effect things such as shipping efficiencies with it’s Amazon Prime initiative and also digital publishing with it’s Amazon Kindle. Amazon will be a dominant eCommerce player and market changer for many years to come.

Email marketing is still a big player with 20%, and Social is still the ugly duckling as far as direct online hard goods conversion goes with less than 1%.

The value of social for driving direct sales there may be deceiving. From our experience running a marketing agency we have seen that Social is often a way that consumers get exposure to a 4. Apple: Whilst going head brand. We think of this as referrer to head with Microsoft for many traffic, because the consumers years their strategy ultimately are more likely to then go on and won out with quality and end- do a direct search for the brands to-end control of hardware, name or recognise the brand in a software and the buying pro- search and end up on the site to cess. result in a sale.

Mobile Apps are great for burning time or saving time, meaning games etc or for repeat users like train timetables or efficiency tools. Mobile Apps have a big hurdle in front of them for most businesses in that you are dependant on the user downloading and installing the App.

Mobile Apps

Mobile sites are far more important for the average business with as much as 10 to 20% of site visits now being done from mobile devices. Mobile sites are now or are soon to be a necessity for business owners so as to maximise the user experience of their mobile site visitors and provide a faster easier to use mobile optimized site. It is only a question of time before search algorithms are altered so that if the searcher is searching from a mobile device then mobile optimized sites will be considered as a dominant ranking factor to rank your site above non-mobile optimized sites.

So the clear winner for most busiApple has revolutionised many nesses is the mobile optimized industries from computers to Mobile App or Mobile Site? site. If you have a large user base Smartphone’s, tablets, music, that does multiple repeat transgaming and the list goes on. There has been much debate in actions or interactions then comBecause of their reach across recent month about the benefits plimenting the mobile site with multiple devices and industries for business owners of mobile a mobile app once you have the Apple can and does make deci- apps versus mobile sites. Here it mobile site sorted can be a good sions that affect the rest of the is in a nutshell. move. Internet. Not allowing flash to

internet marketing magazine august 2012

From the Desk of the Editor Last month was a great month for Internet Marketing Magazine with the ‘Monetizing eBay’ with Matt Clarkson a real talking point.

getting good value from Internet Marketing Magazine I’d really appreciate it if you could spare 1 minute of your time and click this link to give us a quick honest review (click ‘view in iTunes’ then scroll down and click ‘write a review’, thanks :).

This month you will now find the new full ‘Supply Chain & eCommerce Masterclass’ Ruslan Kogan Interview audio in the ‘Audio Expert Interview’ sec- Until next time… Wishing you the best of success tion of the member’s area. Ruslan is a revolution- online ary thinker and Entrepreneur. His skillset is vast and deep and the full interview is not to be missed. It’s free; so if you haven’t been sent your link to the member’s area please feel free to register for it today at http://internetmarketingmag.net/become-member/ Important: We’re working on building the number of reviews we have on the Apple platforms so as to keep dominant rankings in the search. If you are

GregCassar

Greg Cassar Internet Marketing Strategist & Editor – Internet Marketing Magazine

internet marketing magazine august 2012

EXPERT INTERVIEW

SUPPLY CHAIN & ECOMMERCE MASTER CLASS An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar Ruslan Kogan is a product and industry innovator and an outstanding eCommerce success. Kogan Technologies is a manufacturer and retailer of consumer electronics devices. Founded in 2006 by Ruslan Kogan, it sells products direct from Asia to customers in Australia and the United Kingdom with plans for Global expansion. With projected revenue figures for 2012 of around $100m the business model is very much on the fast track to further success. Greg: Ruslan, it is my understanding that you - so essentially it is manufacturers direct to conwere an entrepreneur even as a child. Can you sumer. We are using advanced analytics in order tell us a bit about that? to determine what consumer electronics products are in demand and what consumers actually want. Ruslan: I’ve run about 20 businesses since the age A big part of that is Google searches, and knowof ten, so I’ve always been wheeling and dealing ing how many times certain words and terms are and trying out new things. I love the market place searched, based on what people are looking for and business and essentially for me that’s what an and what they want to buy. entrepreneur is – someone who looks at the market place as it currently is and tries to invent a Then we’ve got manufacturing capacity over in new way of doing things that creates extra value Asia. We get all the products manufactured in for the consumers. China and then sent to our distribution facilities in Australia and the UK, and then sent directly to So, for me as a ten year old I ran a business where the customer. So it cuts out all the middle men I was collecting and re-selling golf balls; then I ran and enables us to be a price leader in a very coma car wash business. Through high school I had a petitive market place. website design business and a mobile phone repair business and all of that sort of stuff. So, I’ve al- Greg: My take on it is that your business produces ways been active in the business world. products the same quality as Sony or Samsung etc with even much of the same componentry, but it Greg: I can really relate to that, because in high is branded as Kogan. Is that correct? school my school shut down the junk food in the canteen and within three days I’d hired out 11 Ruslan: Yes, agreed. We make a very good prodlockers and set up shop – I bought confectionary uct, but being an Internet business we leave that wholesale and set up a business that was doing 50 up to the consumer. So, if anyone asks us how dollars a day, which was quite good when I was 16. good is your product, we tell them, well, don’t So, I can very much relate to what you’re saying take our word for it, go online, read reviews, read there. what people are saying about Kogan, read what they are saying about our products, our customer The Kogan business model is different to most service and all of that sort of stuff. We think the electronic retail in that it has a whole bunch best opinions on any product are from the users more efficient supply chain. Can you please ex- who are actually using them. plain the Kogan business model for those who may not have had exposure to your brand? That said, the componentry in our products, like an LCD panel makes up the majority of the cost of Ruslan: We do things pretty differently at Kogan a TV. And we’re using panels from Samsung and LG

internet marketing magazine august 2012

and other big brands. So what a lot of people don’t know about LCD and LED TV’s is that, even though there are thousands of brands out there that essentially there’s only a handful of manufacturers of the core component - being the LCD panel, and no matter which brand you get, the panel, is made by one of those big brands.

TV’s and our business will ramp up over time. They laughed at me and they weren’t interested in the order at all. Because the way China works is it’s all about mass production, you need to do things in huge scale in order to gain that efficiency and also in order to make it worthwhile for them to set up a production run and a production line for you. So initially Greg: The manufacturing of they didn’t want to work with me. your own product range is very much one of the keys to your But the way that I view business success. What strategies did you is that it’s all about creating a use to get the factories in China win/win situation. So, I lost a bit to take you seriously when you of sleep over the factory knockwere just a start-up? ing back my order and I thought “how can I ensure that this is a Ruslan: That is a very good ques- win/win situation for both of us?” tion because you are a hundred So, the idea I came up with was percent spot on. The only way to pretty simple actually, because I be really competitive in the con- don’t know if you’ve dealt with sumer electronic space at the mo- China before but even the bigment is to be the manufacturer gest factories in the world, these direct to consumer. It’s such a multi-billion dollar organisations, competitive market place that they still don’t know how to deal that’s the only way to make a sus- with the western world. All of tainable margin, whilst offering their marketing material is in Chyour customers the sort of value inglish - none of it makes sense. that will keep driving them back They’ll use images that are differto your business. ent sizes and model lines are not in proportion. When Kogan was starting out I had zero dollars start up capital. Their pricing spreadsheets will I had no money in the bank, and have 12 different fonts in it. Nothmy initial production run was for ing is aligned, numbers will be one container - I wanted to pro- centred rather than right aligned duce 80 TV’s. Now once I picked and all of that. So, I stayed up for the massive factory to cooperate a couple of days and re-did all of with, initially I had told them that this for the factory that I had chowe’d planned to place an order sen to work with and made all of for a hundred thousand TV’s. So their product brochures look realthey were pretty interested in the ly professional. I made all of their business and we’d discussed the user manuals very detailed and order and I put it out for tender made them make sense. I re-did and then I picked the best factory all of their pricing spreadsheets. and wanted to work with them - Then I emailed the factory back then when I told them the order and I said to them, “I know that was actually for a trial order of 80 there is no profit for you to be

internet marketing magazine august 2012

made in the fact that my order is so small and it is inefficient for you, but there’s other ways that I can help you in order to make this a win/win situation.” So I sent them all of the marketing material and pricing stuff that I had re-done for them and I got a reply from them within hours saying, “Mr Kogan, thank you very much for all of this. We accept your order and we can produce it at an even better price than we had previously agreed on”. What happened after that was a week later they emailed me and they said, “Mr Kogan thank you very much for what you had done for us. Because of this we have just won a massive customer in the US”. So it had helped them significantly.

Kogan TV’s

Greg: That is very clever. You were able to engineer a win, win there. I know that you’re also stocking other brands now, like Apple, Samsung, HTC etc. And often you’re able to sell for far cheaper than much of your traditional competition. What do you think you’re doing right to buy so well from major brands that others may be are not?

Ruslan: Our business is all about efficiency. So, what we have done with the other brands stock now is we’ve created a business model that positions us as a global price leader. Our prices on Canon and Nikon cameras and Apple iPads is even cheaper than customers in America get from Amazon. And the way that we set all of that up is we’ve now got a Hong Kong office, which deals with the biggest distributors and suppliers of these products around the world. Now, on every single order that we get we’ve got these massive distributors bidding on who can provide the order at a better price. So, we’ve got the worlds biggest distributors competing against one another to win every single customer order. And that creates a free market for these products and ensures that we’re a price leader for these products. Typically, the way that these big retailers work is they will have a supply arrangement with a certain distributor for a certain product. Usually they will be exclusive arrangements and things like that. With us, we don’t believe in things like that. We believe in free markets and creating as much competition as possible surrounding every area of our business. So, through this business model that we created it ensures that we are the best price in the world on iPads, Canon DSLR’s, Nikon DSLR’s, Samsung Smart Phones and all of those sort of products. So it has been a massive addition to our business and really boosted things for us.

budget. And what we saw very quickly is that our traffic grew exponentially because someone would find our website, look at our TV’s then go and tell ten friends about it. And the ten friends would look at it and tell all their friends about it. So organic growth has been exponential based on that price leadership position, and it has really been helped along by the whole eCommerce phase, and the fact that more and more people shop online these days. Because information like this propagates through the internet very, very quickly. A perfect example of it would be the time we had a glitch on our website about a year ago where one of our products – it was a product that was worth about a 100 dollars and there was a glitch on our website that made the product available for nine dollars. The glitch had only been active for about 15 minutes before we’d sold thousands of these. So, it shows that it made it on to a few of those forums and websites, and all of a sudden sales of that product took off, because it was at a crazy price.

Now, it was an interesting learning experience for us, because on one hand – look, we could have hid behind our terms and conditions and refunded all those people and said “We’re not accepting the orders”. But instead, what we chose to do was said, “Look, we are fully accountable for everything that we do. The glitch was our mistake. We will honour all of those orders”. And yes, we lost a bit of money Greg: Kogan has a massive online customer base on honouring those orders, but we became a multiin 2012, but like any business obviously it wasn’t million dollar better business because of it. We always smooth sailing. What were your main chal- looked at the root cause of the problem, we optilenges in that first year of E-commerce? mised a lot of internal processes and a problem like that will never happen again. Ruslan: From an E-commerce point of view I guess there are not that many challenges. One thing that we’ve done very well is we’ve kept our blinkers on, in terms of really being focussed on what our business is about, and our business is all about efficiency and creating as much efficiency surrounding our supply chain and business processes that results in the best prices for consumers. What we learned from day one is that there is no better marketing than the world’s best price. When we launched Kogan we had the best-priced TV’s in the country. We did not have a marketing

Kogan Email Opt-in Popup

internet marketing magazine august 2012

“

We’ve got an internal mantra at Kogan and that is “there is always a better way”. We know that however we do things right now, that is the best way we’ve come up with until today, and tomorrow there may be a better way.

“

internet marketing magazine august 2012

On the other front what it taught us was, look how effective price marketing is. When you have the best price you don’t even have to do anything, people will learn about it - and in the age of transparency created by the Internet it is bound to bring thousands of customers. That has been the core to Kogan’s marketing. Greg: Ruslan, you are very much a master of PR these days with press features on all major networks across all different media’s. Has PR been part of the strategy from day 1?

If you look at Apple, they’re not being written about because they do PR really well, they’re being written about because they’re breaking through on so many grounds when it comes to awesome products. Nobody has caught up to the iPad 1 yet, let alone the iPad 3 that they’re up to. So that’s what is causing the media to write about them.

So, we’re doing a similar thing when it comes to online retail and how a retailer should operate in 2012. And not only how a retailer should operate, but how a manufacturer should operate. Because Ruslan: PR is not a point of strat- 20 years ago it was not possible egy. We do get a lot of coverage for a manufacturer to communiall over the world, in terms of cate with the end consumer. But what we do, but nothing we ever with this awesome communicado is actually about PR. My view tion tool we’ve got called the on business is that, I think that Internet you no longer need this the stat is something like 98 per- whole set of middle men in order cent of businesses fail in their first for a manufacturer to sell directly year. So, if your business is still in to consumer. business it means it is there for a reason. It has got a story to tell. Greg: You have very dominant And we’re just really good at tell- rankings in Google PPC, product ing our story. search, re-marketing and organic as well as Yahoo and Bing PPC. Consumer electronics is such a Are there any traffic sources massive industry and it influences that you have found to be more everyone’s lives, because every- effective than others over time one buys consumer electronics for your brand in terms of conproducts and they’re buying more versions? and more of them every day. The impact we have had on the mar- Ruslan: Yes. Nothing converts betket place is what has resulted in ter than a customer who got to us getting a lot of attention. It is our site by typing Kogan TV into sort of like, if you look at Face- Google. Obviously the converbook, they’re been written about sion rate on a search like that is by every single media outlet in insane. They already know about the world - not because they our brand and they know what have an excellent PR department, they’re looking for and they want they’re being written about by a Kogan TV. every publication in the world because they’re changing the world, Greg: They are predisposed to buy they’re changing the way we com- when they do the search. municate.

They’re going there with the intent in mind. Ruslan: Exactly. Other than that, Search Marketing is a great tool for us. A big part of our marketing spend is with Google Adwords, because they’re the people that are actually searching for our products. So someone goes to Google and types in “Digital radio, or coffee machine, or iPad, or Canon 600B camera” they see our ad. Nobody is searching those things unless they’re really looking to buy that sort of product. So it is very targeted and it reaches the right audience. Because we’re a price leader in the space we’ve got very high conversion rates. All of that targeted marketing works really well.

Kogan Multiple Ad Placements on Google Search

Ruslan: Other than that, Search Marketing is a great tool for us. A big part of our marketing spend is with Google Adwords, because they’re the people that are actually searching for our products. So someone goes to Google and types in “Digital radio, or coffee machine, or iPad, or Canon 600B camera” they see our ad. Nobody is searching those things unless they’re really looking to buy that sort of product. So it is

internet marketing magazine august 2012

Kogan.com

very targeted and it reaches the right audience. Because we’re a price leader in the space we’ve got very high conversion rates. All of that targeted marketing works really well.

We’ve become immune to all of this advertising that interrupts our experience and we want advertising that enhances our experience. And that’s exactly what digital and search marketing is all about.

All the traditional marketing we don’t find to be as effective as all the targeted stuff. That could explain why Google has something like a hundred billion dollars spare cash in their bank accounts and why they’re such a successful organisation, because their product really works. It is an excellent product.

Greg: The Weekly Deals opt-in is a very prominent feature on your new site, even with a popup. Email Marketing is obviously a bit part of your online strategy. Are there any key lessons you’ve been able to learn over the years for delivering effective email campaigns?

If I see a friend reading a newspaper, I’ll come up to them and they’ll be on like page 30 and I’ll close the newspaper and take it away from them and I’ll ask them, “Can you please tell me what ads you just saw?” And you’ll be amazed how many people can get to page 30 of a newspaper. It means they have on average they’ve probably seen a hundred ads by the time they’re got to page 30, and cannot recall a single ad.

Ruslan: Email marketing is an important part of our marketing mix because we’re all about the Kogan community. We’ve now got a lot of people in the Kogan community and our promise to them is that they’re always the first to hear about new products, and special offers. We’ve really built a very loyal following surrounding that sort of stuff.

Email marketing has tremendous return on investment as it’s all people that have opted in; it’s all people that want to hear about us; it’s all people So, it just shows that we’ve become immuned to that have already got a connection to the Kogan all of this advertising that is interruption based. All brand, and that’s what we see as one of the major the traditional advertising is all about interrupting advantages of being a leading player in the online the consumer. You’ll be watching a TV show, they’ll community - that customer base that you get to interrupt you and scream a message at you. You’ll build. be reading an article, it’ll interrupt you and show you an ad you’re not interested in.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

Because for instance, if you walk in to a major traditional retailer like Harvey Norman and you buy an iPad, you will walk out of the Harvey Norman, they’ve got no way of ever contacting you again. Whereas the moment you plug your iPad in to your computer, Apple has you registered as a customer. So they will market to you for eternity from that point forward. Whereas Harvey Norman, who has spent all that marketing dollar trying to get you in to the store has no way to contact you again.

We are in our sixth year and we saw about a 600 percent growth in our business this year. You don’t hear of too many businesses with that sort of growth, but we’re not taking any of that for granted so we’re working harder than ever to keep all of our customers happy. We’re still on an ongoing basis working to make our processes more and more efficient.

We’ve got an internal mantra at Kogan and that is “there is always a better way”. We know that however we do things right It costs 12 times more to find now, that is the best way we’ve a new customer than it does come up with until today, and to keep an existing one. So the tomorrow there may be a betwhole strategy surrounding the ter way. Every process is up online community is a very im- for scrutiny and questioning, portant one to us - and we look because we know that in order at it as two-way communica- to evolve with the business and tion. We don’t just want to pump survive as a business, you must deals out to our customers; we embrace change and keep the want to hear what they’ve got to improvement cycle going. say as well. What we aim to do at Kogan is If you look at our Facebook, half constantly expand our product of it is us engaging in conversa- range and target more and more tions, asking our fan base what geographies. Over a year ago they think. We’re giving them now we expanded into the UK poles. It is a market research and we plan to be in more geogtool for us. We don’t want to just raphies by the end of this year as scream at them in one direction, well. Our goal is to make Kogan a we want to engage our com- world wide household brand very munity and really find out what soon. they’re thinking and feeling and that’s the sort of stuff that makes Greg: Very clever, and the way more and more people want to you’re going, it definitely looks be part of our community. like you’ll achieve that. So, I encourage all our listeners and Greg: The rate that your busi- readers to visit Kogan.com and ness has grown and continues have a shop around the site and to grow is phenomenal. What’s see how great an ecommerce next on the horizon for the Ko- store that Ruslan and his team gan brand? have built there. You may also be able to pick up a bargain while Ruslan: Yes, the growth has been you are there. pretty spectacular up until now.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

COPYWRITING

THE GREAT PUPPY DOG AMBUSH AND ITS DEVIOUS LESSONS FOR YOUR WEB CONVERSIONS By Steve Plummer It was an ambush.

I ignored it.

There I was in Brisbane at a seminar and... it happened.

2 minutes later another text. Second oldest child with same cute puppy. Not good.

Like all good ambushes it was deviously planned, cunningly created and implemented with military-like precision.

All up I received 4 such pics... one for each kid holding this little white ball of fluff.

The first inkling I got was when Ok Poindexter, I’ve heard enough my iphone vibrated (naturally on about your family issues, tell me silent because of the seminar!) in- what’s in it for me. dicating a text message. Stick with me here... because the I looked at it under the table. The process used in this ambush could text contained 6 words which are be worth a motza for you. enough to send a shiver down the spine of any man with a wife and Back to the story... children. We had no contact again until I arAll it said was... rived home at about 7 that night to be greeted at the door by a sea “we r @ the pet store”. of excited expectant faces. OMG.

You see they knew I didn’t want a puppy. With a (by today’s stanThe training was really good, high dards) big family, last thing I quality but my day had taken a wanted was another mouth to turn for the worst. feed, medical bill to pay, “kid” to buy toys for. My response: “we’ll talk when i get home”. Luckily for me I arrived home prepared. The hour drive had given It happened again. Text vibration me time to get my objections went off. sorted in my mind and as I walked in the front door I was loading my This time a picture. “gun” with these well-thought out bullets. Youngest child holding a cute little puppy. Then THE question came...

Tilly

“Dad she’s so cute, can we PLEEEEEAAAASSSSE get her?” No way. I was prepared. And quite happy to wear “the world’s biggest bastard” tag for a week or 2... they’d come round. We’re not getting a dog. “Why not?” Ok, time to click the safety switch off, work the bolt and get ready to fire... Because when you have a dog you can’t go on holidays, you can’t get away even for a weekend. No!

internet marketing magazine august 2012

“The shop where the puppy is has a puppy motel... only $95 a week and they feed it and love it and look after it very well!” Bugger. Dogs are expensive. No!

My name wasn’t there. “See dad, we’ve got it sorted, you won’t have to do a thing!” This was not going well.

I was in deep trouble. Ok time to bring out the “Dad, it’s such a good deal. The dog comes wormed, heavy artillery. You see I love my lawn. My neighvaccinated, vet checked. You get a free microchip, bours are jealous. Passersby comment. It’s darn free puppy school AND... free doggy hydro bath for sexy. LIFE. You won’t even have to wash her!” So I let them have it. Damn. This pet store knows a thing or two about marketing. They’d taken my love-struck kids’ eyes What about my lawn! There’s no way any dog is off the price. going to dig it up. I wasn’t giving up without a fight... I’m not getting up in the middle of the night to a puppy. I’ve done that with you kids. Not doing it again. And I’m not picking up dog poo. No! “It’s ok, you won’t have to we will do it all.” Yeah right. For the first week until the novelty wears off. Then second oldest daughter grabs me by the hand and takes me to the lounge. She points to a piece of paper blu-tacked to the wall under the light switch.

“She won’t dad, she’s only little and she’s soooo cute!” World’s biggest bastard was deeper in trouble. Last chance... If we get a dog, you kids will just fight over who’s playing with it. Heck we won’t even get it home without an argument over whose lap it’s sitting on in the car! Second eldest says nothing but disappears and returns with my old fishing hat. It contained 4 pieces of paper. “We’ve even thought of that. Our names are in here and whichever one gets chosen gets to nurse the dog on the way home. We all agree. There’ll be no fights.” Then she says...

The roster for looking after the dog... they’d thought of everything!

A quick tour of the house revealed all bedrooms with this same darn piece of paper on the wall. They’d thought of EVERYTHING. The paper was a roster. Day by day. Job by job. Each kid’s responsibilities for looking after it laid out for all to see.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

“And you even get to pick the name out of the hat!” Lucky me. I was defeated. Her name is Tilly and yes, she’s very cute. Ok, because you’ve read this far... here are the BIG marketing lessons...

Marketing lesson #1: What you offer visitors to your website IS vital. Seems like stating the obvious but you really need to put thought into it. It’s a concept I drum into the copywriters I coach... “GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT”. Just like the pet store does when it sells a dog. What do prospective dog owners want? Healthy puppy which is low maintenance... so that’s what they give you. Vet checked, vaccinated, micro-chipped, wormed, puppy school, free doggy wash for life... the offer covers ALL bases. So should your offers. There is massive perceived value built in here. Your mind is on all these “extras” and the cute ball of fluff. It makes it easy to buy and easy to ignore or justify in your mind the asking price. Can you say the same about your offers? If you answer “NO”... maybe it’s time to give the market what they want with a “puppy dog” type offer. Marketing Lesson #2: People buy on emotion and justify with logic. Does your copy make it easy for them to do this? That little “war” between me and

my kids (me throwing up objections, the kids answering them) is the same “war” which goes on in everyone’s mind BEFORE they buy. Your copy must point out the value and the result they will get so the “war” in their minds is easy for them to win. When there is emotional connection there... when they can logically justify why they should buy... then BINGO... you’ve made the sale. Remember, think of all the reasons they won’t buy and then overcome them in your copy. Just like my kids did to me. Ok, I’m off to play with little Tilly and take care of my sexy lawn... Steve Plummer 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. Follow Steve’s blog at steveplummeronline.com

internet marketing magazine august 2012

E-MAIL MARKETING

EMAIL DELIVERABILITY 101 By Heather Seitz

logged and don’t go out or, worse, they leave the funnel but get rejected by the ISPs at the point of entry. For example, let’s say that Hotmail has blocked your IP address (either a dedicated IP if you have that option or an IP through which you are sending using an email service provider). That means Hotmail is rejecting your message because of an issue with the IP address. So… if you do not have a dedicated IP address, and someone else does something that causes that IP to be blocked by Hotmail, then your email messages Email deliverability is constantly changing and, as will be blocked as well. a result, small business owners and Internet Marketers are always struggling to stay ahead of the There’s no “gray” area when you’re talking about game. an IP block. The problem is that much of the information out there is of little use to the average marketer. Plus, for marketers using 3rd party email providers (ESPs), chances are, the information is simply not available. Essentially, there are 3 main types of “blocks”. In other words… 3 main reasons why your emails aren’t getting through. These include: 1. IP-related issues 2. Domain name/URL-related issues 3. Email content Let’s take a look at each of these and how it impacts you. 1. IP-related Email Block Think of a funnel, if you will… All of your emails dump into the funnel at the top and then have to filter through the spout. That ‘spout’ is like your IP address. So, all of the email dumps into the funnel and then has to go out through that opening. If the funnel gets clogged, then your messages get back-

internet marketing magazine august 2012

NOTE: Even if you’re using an Email Service Provider that claims to rotate IPs, any email that is already in queue when the block occurs is affected. Because of this, it’s strongly recommended that you use a dedicated IP address that you have control over. This is the only way to maintain total control over your IP reputation. The other benefit of having everything set up on a dedicated IP on your own servers is that you have access to all the information including mail queues (to see if the mail is leaving the server or getting blocked before it ever goes out), send logs, bounce reports, and more. NOTE: This is not the same as having a dedicated IP address for your domain. You need a dedicated IP for sending EMAIL. This may or may not be the same IP address depending on how your server is set up.

2. URL/Domain-Related Email Block The next type of block is related to a URL, or domain, present in the actual email message itself somewhere. These could be affiliate links, order links, membership sites, corporate websites, virtually any link (URL) in the email. To explain… there are 3rd party providers that maintain information on domains. If a domain in the email message happens to be on one of these “blacklists”, then there’s a good chance the message will be blocked by at least some ISPs, especially the smaller ISPs and hosting companies who often subscribe to such services. One of the more common domain blacklists to check against is Uribl. When a message is blocked (aka it bounces back) due to a domain related issue, the simple solution is to pause the campaign, change the URL and continue to send the email.

cellaneous. But, you don’t know WHY the messages bounced and there’s no way to reset a soft bounce to active subscriber. 3. Message Content The final reason that a message is rejected – or bounces – is due to the actual content of the message, unrelated to a domain in the message or the IP address. This could be virtually anything that triggers the ISPs spam filters. It’s not enough to scan against Spam Assassin or other databases as each ISP has their own internal filtering. Certainly, that’s not to say that Spam Assassin is bad or should not be used as a tool. It’s just that there are lots of other filters that are proprietary to the ISPs, which could result in an occasional message getting returned.

This is another reason why hosting your own email is so important. Email service providers do not give this data. But even worse than that is what happens to your list when you’re NOT getting this information. For example, let’s say you’re participating in a joint venture promotion or an affiliate contest. And over the course of 7 days, you send out a 5-email sequence in which the domain for the promotion is on a blacklist (or gets added to a blacklist DURING the promotion, which happens all the time).

This is really nothing to worry about and, in fact, As a result, any subscribers that are affected by the you should always write for your audience and NOT block will “bounce”. After X number of bounces, the spam filters. Just know that an occasional conthe subscribers will be removed from the list. (X tent block or the occasional spam folder is not the depends on the email service provider and/or email end. client. This number is generally either 3 or 5). That means that you lose those subscribers from all fu- Where this IS a problem, however, is when you’re ture emails. sending through an email service provider. The reason being is that these messages come as a “soft In other words, they are removed from your list and bounce”. Once a subscriber has reached the threshwill never be sent another email. old of soft bounces (again, this is generally either 3 or 5 for the life of the customer), that subscriber And you are none the wiser. The ESPs don’t provide is then removed from your mailings (similar to #2). bounce metrics or in depth information for you to take action on. You get hard bounces, soft bounces, Protecting Yourself Against Blocks, Unnecessary technical bounces, and in some cases unknown/mis- Removals and More…

internet marketing magazine august 2012

So the next question is natural- All you need are the following: ly, how do you protect yourself 1. Dedicated IP address(es) against blocks, unnecessary reto send email. moval of valid subscribers, and 2. Email client/software overall deliverability issues. that manages your database and handles autoresponders, The simple answer is to use a selfbroadcasts, etc. hosted email solution. In other 3. System for managing words, stop using email service bounce data and reputation. providers that take control of your own list out of your hands. This allows you to know what’s If email plays a significant role in going on with your email every your business, you simply can’t step of the way. afford NOT to have total control. Remember, there are 3 main reasons your email gets blocked: IP address issue, domain in the email, and message content. With hundreds, even thousands of people sending email through the same IP address, there’s a high likelihood that even the strictest providers will wind up with an IP block from time to time. And even if the IPs rotate, any email that’s in the queue at the time For example… let’s say you set up the block happens will be reject- some ‘test’ accounts with major ed and cause a bounce. ISPs to check for deliverability and inbox placement and you log The only way to solve this prob- in to your Hotmail account and lem is by having a dedicated IP can’t find the message. address that you have control over to send your email. PERIOD. Next, you check the spam folder. NOTHING! By having your own self-hosted email solution, you have all the If you’re using an email service data at a granular level. You know provider, you’re pretty much exactly WHY an email message dead in the water and just asis getting blocked and have the sume there was a ‘glitch’ someopportunity to correct the prob- where. You try to call them to ask lem. You also have the ability to what’s going on and can’t get a manage your list more accurate- straight answer. The process ends ly. This allows you to keep valid and you simply hope for the best. subscribers and remove bad addresses, full mailboxes, and more When you host your OWN email, based on more intelligent rules. you can continue to trace back the problem. In other words, YOU HAVE CONTROL! If it’s not in the inbox or the spam

internet marketing magazine august 2012

folder, you can check the mail queue. Maybe it’s stuck in the queue or maybe the ISP is refusing the connection entirely. Or perhaps the message bounced for one of the reasons above. The fact of the matter is, you can literally track it back all the way, diagnose the exact problem – and take the steps to correct it QUICKLY! Remember, it is important to make sure that when you decide to make the move to your own self-hosted email solution that you set it up correctly from the get-go. It takes a little time and patience to build a reputation. But, the upside is that you have control over your list. Nobody is going to threaten to shut you down or close your account. AND… nobody else can impact your reputation/deliverability. To learn more about email deliverability and the steps for setting up your own self-hosted email solution, visit www.EmailDelivered. com. There, you’ll find tips, resources, checklists and more to help you take back control over your email marketing.

Heather Seitz

is the founding partner and marketing director for Email Delivered, a company dedicated to giving business owners the tools and resources they need to finally be able to manage their email marketing programs effectively, without giving up control to 3rd party providers.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

E-MAIL MARKETING

7 MISTAKES THAT HURT YOUR EMAIL RELATIONSHIP BUILDING EFFORTS By Peep Laja throughs, better deliverability and much less spam complaints. My own personal experiments have shown that if your lead magnets is attractive enough, you’ll get pretty much the same number of subscribers as compared to single opt-in. When I switched T1Q over to double opt-in, I got maybe 5% less subscribers, but open rates shot up three times. My hypothesis is that by having to work a little bit harder to join the list (one additional intentional click), there’s more engagement and thus you’ll get a larger stake in their mindshare.

People will not buy your stuff on their first visit. The more expensive and/or complicated the product, the more time they need to think and decide. People like to buy from people and businesses they know and like. This is why it’s a good idea to capture emails and build a relationship before you even ask them to buy anything. This post is about getting the most out of your relationship building efforts with your email list. Mistake #1. You don’t use double opt-in Double opt-in means that after someone subscribes, they get an email with a confirmation link ensuring they want to receive email communications from you. While you do get a little less subscribers, you actually get people you want on your list. People who click the confirmation link are dedicated and interested enough to complete the subscription process. This in turn leads to higher open rates, click-

internet marketing magazine august 2012

Mistake #2. You think more interaction is better First off, interactions don’t build relationships unless you have shared values. Talking to somebody you have nothing in common with does not make you closer (in fact, you just get more and more annoyed). So it all starts with common interests and shared values. Once this is place, you can proceed to interactions. However, interactions don’t build relationships. Even so, there’s no real correlation between interactions with a customer and the likelihood that he or she will become your loyal customer and a brand champion. Still, too many marketers behave as if there is a continuous linear relationship between the number of interactions and share of wallet. That’s why you see many brands sending customers over 300 emails annually (#overkill). What you need to know is that consumers suffer from cognitive overload. They’re bombarded with messages and choices. The best thing you can do to your business is to keep everything simple.

Instead of relentlessly bombarding customers with emails and demanding their attention, treat the attention you do win as precious. Don’t waste the attention on a message that doesn’t add value. Before sending out an email, ask yourself whether it’s going to reduce the cognitive overload consumers feel? If not, don’t send it. There is no universally best frequency to send emails to your list. You have to test it.

According to a new study some 95% of customers respond negatively when an email starts off with a greeting that includes their name. The study drew from 10 million marketing emails sent to 600,000 customers. That’s a decent sample size. So stop doing it.

Not very personal: Even when every now and then using people’s name How to figure out the best email frequency in the subject line might boost your open rates, they The simplest way to test email frequency is this: will be disappointed when they see it was actually 1. Set up 2 email lists (A and B). 2. A/B test your email subscription forms, so not a personal email. that 50% of the subscribers are added to list A and the other half to list B. Forms itself can be identi- People are not idiots. They know the difference between actual personal emails and mass personalizacal. 3. Now send different amount of emails to each tion customization. Don’t try to fake being personal of those lists (e.g. once a month to A and 4x / when you’re not. month to B). 4. 3 months (and/or later) down the line check Nobody expects you to email every subscriber manthe stats: compare average open rates, click- ually anyway. True personalization is about relevant throughs, unsubscribe rates and if you can, most content. The more you can segment your list and send tailored emails to each segment, the better. importantly look at the sales figures. Mistake #3: You don’t know why people unsubscribe This has been studied a lot. Long story short, people unsubscribe from email lists for 2 main reasons: 1. irrelevant or boring content (e.g. mainly sales promos), 2. too many emails.

Mistake #5: You follow the rule of seven All over the internet you will find websites stating this in one wording or another: A prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you.

That’s it. Hence 2 rules for you to ensure a long email relationship: 1. Email only when you’ve got interesting stuff to say. Don’t send for the sake of sending. 2. Don’t send too often. More than once a week might be too much (with some exceptions). Mistake #4: You think using the subscriber’s name is personalization I’m sure you receive plenty of “Hello, [YOURNAME]” type of emails. Do you feel personally touched? Didn’t think so. Internet is filled with email marketing articles from 2006 saying you should personalize emails with subscriber names. Whoever says that today is just re-hashing the old mantra.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

It’s referred to as The Rule of Seven. It’s a myth. The truth is that there is no research to back this up. It’s a well-spread rumor. It’s an attractive idea and you want it to be true, since it’s a shortcut, a sure thing to do to help you to improve your marketing efforts. It originates from the late internet marketer Corey Rudl who made this observation about his own business, and started to promote it. He even suggested the following schedule: • Immediate response • 3 day follow up • 7 day follow up • 2 week follow up • 1 month follow up • 2 months follow up • 3 month follow up It’s outright silly to think this schedule is the holy grail of email marketing, or that a marketing observation from pre-2005 era would carry much weight today or that one size fits all. Do your own testing and don’t assume anything about the magic number 7. Mistake #6: You stop talking to subscribers once they buy Relationship doesn’t end with the purchase, in fact it should be the opposite. Too often businesses focus on building relationships with potential customers, and ignore the existing ones. Since it’s so much easier to sell to existing customers than new ones, I say that’s where your main focus should be at. You won’t build a relationship strong relationship with emails only. You need them to actually use your products and services, and benefit from them. Once they do and you keep adding more value via email, you’re on your way to creating champions. I like how Olark is starting the relationship over email. Once you sign up, you get this email from them:

internet marketing magazine august 2012

Hi – I saw you just signed up for olark.com, let me know if there is anything I can do to help. -Ben It’s short and feels personal. Could have been even sent manually, but you never know :) In any case, the very best thing you can do after they sign up / buy is to continue talking to them. Educate them about your product, give them knowhow to get the maximum out of it. Mistake #7: Your emails don’t add value There’s no magic sauce to relationship building. Relationships get built over time by adding value to each other, just like in real life. This value can be many things – teaching and educating, entertaining and informing. A guy that works in an email marketing company told me this story. He was reviewing the promo email his client wanted to send out and saw it’s a totally dull offer. “Would you yourself want to buy this?”, he asked the client. “Oh… so you mean it should be something people are interested in?” True story, and not very uncommon. What happens is that marketers send out newsletters and promo emails that don’t add value to their subscribers. The results is that they will sooner or later unsubscribe, and that’s that. If I had only one tip for building relationships over email, I’d say be insanely useful/cool/entertaining and you’ll do all right.

Peep Laja is the face of ConversionXL. Peep is an entrepreneur and internet marketer. He runs a unique web marketing agency called Markitekt, a startup called Traindom and several niche internet business like T1Q and others. He has a free website called Dreaminder. If you want to get in touch with Peep, shoot him an email at peep@convresionxl.com

SEO

HOW TO DETECT (AND FIX) DUPLICATE CONTENT ON YOUR SITE By Zeke Camusio

I estimate that about 80% of the websites I do an SEO audit for have some sort of duplicate content issue. And there’s nothing that hurts a website more than duplicate content. In fact, if you never want to rank well on Google, all you have to do is add duplicate content to your site.

Once you know what pages have duplicate titles, all you have to do is fix them. Once you’re done with the page titles, do the same for the meta descriptions.

Step 2: Check for URL Canonicalization Issues Google sees YourSite.com and www.YourSite.com as two differThe good news is that detecting ent URLs. If you can access your duplicate content is very easy, website through both instead of and fixing it is sometimes even having one redirect to the other, easier. In this post I’ll show you Google will see two URLs with how to do it. the exact same content. The best practice is to have YourSite.com Step 1: Check for Duplicate (without the “www”) redirect Meta Tags to www.YourSite.com (with the Every URL of your website should “www). If you want to see an exhave a unique title and a unique ample, type TheOutsourcingCommeta description. Your page ti- pany.com into your browser and tles shouldn’t be over 60 charac- you’ll see how you get redirected ters and your meta descriptions to www.TheOutsourcingCompashouldn’t be over 140 characters. ny.com.

There’s a really cool tool called Screaming Frog SEO Spider that will help you detect duplicate page titles and duplicate meta descriptions. It’s free for websites up to 500 pages URLs and if your website has more than 500 pages you can get the paid version. Run the tool on your site and then go to Page Titles and select Duplicate from the dropdown menu.

lot of ecommerce sites have really bad architectures and you can find the exact same content through searches, category pages, tags and the product pages themselves. Most ecommerce platforms are very bad for SEO off-the-shelf, but can be made SEO-friendly with some minor customization. To detect internal duplicate content on your site go to one of your pages and copy some of its content. Here’s an example:

Now you’ll need to do a Google search using advanced search operators. It’ll look like this: You can set up this redirect from site:yoursite.com “text you copyour .htaccess file. Warning: if ied”. Make sure to put the text you don’t know what you’re do- you took from your website being and mess up your .htaccess, tween quotes. I did this for the your whole website could go example above and look at what down. Have an expert take care I found: of this for you if you don’t feel confident you can do it yourself. Step 3: Check for Internal Duplicate Content There are various reasons websites have internal duplicate content. Some websites have printfriendly versions of their pages, or the same type of content in both HTML and PDF formats. A

internet marketing magazine august 2012

There are several pages on this website that have We can see that the wines this company is sellthe exact same content. There are three ways to ing are also being sold by other companies using fix this issue: the exact same description. How do you fix that? Ideally, you want every page of your site to have • If you have two versions of the same piece unique content, but if you have an ecommerce site of content (such as web and PDF versions), just with tens of thousands of products, this might not tell Google not to index the PDF version. Put all be possible. In cases like this you need to have one your PDFs in one folder and use the robots.txt goal: to make your website the best place where file to tell Google not to index that folder. people can buy the products you sell. There are a lot of ways to do this, but think about it: if 10 • If there’s absolutely no reason to have two companies sell the exact same product, what reaor more URLs with the same content, redirect son can you give people to buy it from you? all the duplicate URLs to the main one using 301 redirects. Here are some ideas: • You can be the cheapest option • If you have a legitimate reason to have multiple URLs with the same (or very similar) con• You can have a lot of great content, such as tent, define a canonical URL. This is a way of videos and infographics telling Google “I know I have multiple URLs with the same content. I have a reason for it. This is • You can have a better-looking website that’s the URL I want you to count.” This is perfect for easy to use and provides a better overall shopwhen pages A, B and C are similar but you want ping experience to keep all three. Just tell Google that page A is your preferred choice and even though B and C • You can have more product reviews than won’t redirect to A, Google won’t think they’re your competitors, increasing the value of your duplicates. site Step 4: Check for External Duplicate Content • You can use social media to position your Take that same search query you did in step 3 and company as the go-to resource in your space. Esadd a dash at the beginning. It’ll look like this: tablishing thought leadership and a strong brand -site:yoursite.com “text you copied”. This will goes a really long way. show you all the duplicate content that is not on your site. OK, that’s it. Not too hard, right? Now it’s time to get to work and fix that duplicate content on your This is what I found: site.

Zeke Camusio is is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold three successful businesses. Zeke is the author of The Internet Marketing Bible and CEO of The Outsourcing Company, an Internet marketing agency with over 300 clients (including Chevrolet, Burger King and Subaru).

internet marketing magazine august 2012

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internet marketing magazine august 2012

ONLINE RETAIL

ONLINE RETAIL... 2012 ESSENTIAL LEARNINGS By Greg Cassar In July the Internet Marketing Magazine team received an Invitation to the Online Retailer Conference & E-Commerce Expo held at Darling Harbour in Sydney. All in all it was a great event held over 4 days covering everything from mobile to social, marketing, web store optimization, multichannel and SME strategies & tactics. The Internet Marketing Magazine community is diverse in its global readership from Internet Marketers just starting out to eCommerce Merchants doing 10’s to 100’s of millions online each year. Here is a snapshot of just some of the more noteworthy take-away lessons from the event in key categories that will appeal to our diverse readership.

the experience. • Humans relate to other • Don’t be afraid to pick up humans just like them. With the phone and connect with your product images add peoyour customers to ask them ple similar to your demographabout their experience and ic, and in particular eyes and also how you can improve. faces. • Provide value to ‘make a customer’ not ‘make a sale’. Product Strategy • Build a ‘SWAT’ team that • Sell what your customjumps on problems and fixes ers want to buy, not what you them so you keep happy cuswant to sell. tomers and so negative social • When building out your PR never becomes a problem product range sell virtual stock that gets out of hand for your where ever possible – meaning business. dropship from your suppliers while you learn what sells well and then stock those products and services yourself. • Where possible buy direct from the manufacturer or parent level distributor to reduce additional layers of suppliers management pricing overhead.

Customer Focus • Carol Steinberg of ShopNBC advises their organisaBe everywhere your customer is... tion treats the customer as the boss with a very customer centric model. The customers Bringing Products to Life title is CEC – Chief Executive • Where ever possible show Customer. as many angles of a product as • Be everywhere your cuspossible. tomer is from mobile, to tab• Utilise the rich media of let, Facebook, Youtube, Twitvideo to bring your products to ter, Pinterest etc. Keep a life. The ‘Show and tell’ methconsistent look and feel across odology of inspiring but also all devices and medias. The explaining and educating can customers don’t care about work well to appeal to a wide the channel, they care about variety of consumers.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

SEO • Don’t duplicate products in multiple categories/pages – Google hates it as it’s not unique content. • Internal links count – make content on your blog and your product pages and build a good internal linking structure. • Get Press – Do something newsworthy rather than just doing PR for the purpose of building inbound links. Then archive all press features onto your site for social proof an continual new content.

• Social signals will continue to rise in priority. The reason for this is that a social link is the equivalent of someone saying that your page has ‘something worthwhile on it’. Checkout & Site Optimization • Make your checkout process as simple and as minimal clicks and pages as possible as the competition is only one click away. • Your site visitors don’t see words as much as they do see pictures, so include supporting images to match your sales copy where ever possible. • 8 out of 10 customers as a general rule value free shipping as more important than anything else with your online process. • Guest checkout is important – As high as 1 in 2 site visitors will leave a checkout process if you force them to become a member without giving them the option to checkout as a guest. • Personalisation will increase your site visitor time on site and revenues by maximising exposure to relevant products and minimizing exposure to irrelevant products. Mobile • Mobile sites are the top priority for most eCommerce sites in 2012. Tablet optimized sites are a ‘nice to have’ but not a necessity as the browsing experience on a Tablet works fine with a regular site. • Mobile customer service is on the rise. An example would be an SMS to a customer to advise them that their product has just been shipped.

• The speed of your mobile site is important. Keep the load time less than 5 seconds – ideally less than 3 seconds. • As much as 20% of email opens now happen from mobile devices, so check your email format look and feel across a wide range of devices and operating systems. Most high-end email marketing packages now have this functionality built into them as a simulator.

A big thanks goes out to the folks at www.onlineretailer.com for putting on this amazing event. We hope you get one or good learning’s from this that you can implement in your business. Greg Cassar is Australia’s leading Internet M a r k e t i n g Strategist. With InternetMarketing D o n e F o r Yo u . c o m Greg & his team provide traffic, development and conversion optimization services for medium to large businesses, enterprises & eCommerce stores looking for serious growth online. 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.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

COPYWRITING

WHEN NEVER TO USE A COPYWRITER By Bret Thomson

I just knocked back a quick $3,000. I’ll tell you why. Firstly, she was a lovely lady. No… not because she was happy to pour some moolah into my bank account. Had nothing to do with it… Just one of those deserving souls trying to crack it in this unforgiving (sometimes ruthless) Internet marketing world. There’s a good lesson here, so pull up a chair. She’d recently dropped another $5K into her project – for a big fat ZERO return. Small for some – but painful for most, would you agree? Anyway… I checked out her copy and sure

internet marketing magazine august 2012

enough, it needed a thorough overhaul. That’s why she came to me.

promoting your product or service. But if your sales page sucks, then try this…

My A-team and I could’ve whipped it up to perfection – no probs – but I canned it for 3 reasons.

Offer to do a webinar or teleseminar to the JV’s list – give massive value – then make your offer at the end.

1) It was her last $3,000 Folks, that’s what we call “scared That way, you’ll build instant money” – wrong energy. You don’t trust and rapport that’ll carry wanna be someone’s life raft. the sale… despite what your page looks like. 2) She had no list Well, a tiny (very tiny) list that Cost to do this: ZERO she hadn’t contacted for months Potential results: Instant sales – so pretty much no list. Meaning, and leads she needed some heavy market- If she does this – she’ll make it – I ing muscle. Which brings me to know she will point 3… I told her to do this, get a bunch 3) No funds for marketing of sales, then come back and see No use having a killer sales page us – so we can crank her converif you’ve got no resources to get sions even higher. it seen by your target market. She needed a marketing solution Bret Thomson – not a better sales page. And because I actually care about my people… I gave her this advice on how to get clients fast (on a shoestring budget). Instead of spending time looking for clients or customers – spend that energy on finding “Joint Venture (JV) Partners” who have a list of hungry prospects in your niche. Offer the JV a percentage split of profit if they send out an email

is one of Australia’s highest paid in-demand copywriter/marketing & conversion strategists, best selling author, speaker, coach and mentor to thousands. Bret has been the secret weapon behind some of the largest (and most profitable) direct response marketing campaigns in Australia. His wickedly effective ability to nail the BIG IDEA is admired and respected by even the most seasoned marketing experts. You can get instant access to free video training form Bret by going to his blog www.bretthomson.com

CONTENT CURATION

WHAT IS CONTENT CURATION? THE NEW AUTO-BLOG? By Derek Allen

Well, sorta, but not really. I know that doesn’t make a lick of sense right now. That’s why I wanted to write this article to explain what content curation is and why you should make at least one site using this structure. Folks – Buckle up because this article is going to make your head spin around like a top! Brace yourself and take some notes here. A lot of people are unfamiliar with the term so let me give you a brief description and then we’ll get more into it a little further down. What Is Content Curation? Here’s the definition… Content Curation - Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting the best possible content that surrounds a specific subject matter and posting it on your site along with your opinions. … or a better description: Curation is basically a content marketing tactic. Rather than adding to the mountains of “original” content being uploaded every minute to the web, the curator researches, gathers, and picks

the best information around a specific topic and shares only the best with their readers or followers. A curator becomes a thought leader through commentary to provide context and meaning to the information they curate into a blog post or a share with their “real-time” audience on the social web. (Source: http://curationsoft.com/types-of-curation) To be quite honest, I love this model. It’s kind of like profiting off of other people’s hard work in a totally cool way. You get the content and they get a link pointing back to their site.

tally different except you don’t have to write your own content (at least not much of your own content) and the articles are delivered straight to your inbox on auto-pilot. That’s where it’s sorta similar. Duplicate Content Issues? For years people have cranked on and on about duplicate content. They would say that posting duplicate content on your site will result in some sort of penalty from the search engines… and in most cases, yeah it would.

AWESOME! Doing it this way saves money and time! The two things that I like to save the most of. I have tried auto-blogging in the past. I just didn’t like it. The content quality was too low and didn’t convert visitors and it was just a waste for me. I could have went about it a different way and pulled content from all kinds of places where the Google spider can’t get into but I just found that it was better to do it right.

But this is content curation! It’s different. The most common question I get about content curation is, “Isn’t that duplicate content?” (in the eyes of the search engines) There are two answers to this question:

First, if you’re just aggregating So even though this content cu- content into your website, yes, ration stuff may be similar to it is most likely duplicate conauto-blogging… it’s not. It’s to- tent. But if you are curating the

internet marketing magazine august 2012

content, pulling great (not all) site from the best sources, you’ll information from elsewhere — be alright. manually, not automatically — adding your own perspective to Isn’t It Illegal? it and grouping things into collections of useful information, that is valuable stuff. This is unique presentation of information that exists nowhere else and is not duplicate content. And we’re not just skirting by duplicate content filters. The goal is to create truly useful and unique content.

sites gather internet content and sort through only the best. • Copyblogger.com and sites similar. These sites link to the most relevant content for the specific topic. • SEOMoz collects content about SEO from around the web. I could go on but I think you’ve got the point. Content curation is awesome and it can turn a no-name site into a trustworthy source for information on a topic and turn it into the most visited site for the topic rather quickly.

The short answer here is no. Second, if you are providing a As long as you cite the original valuable service by finding the source and provide a link back best information on a subject, to that source you’ll be fine in Why Should You Use Content responding to a need of a com- the eyes of the original content Curation For Your Sites? munity of people interested in owners, readers and the search your topic, you will become an engines. The benefits are plentiful. Have authority and build an audience. you ever wanted to write about By engaging this audience, it will So there is nothing illegal about a topic but just couldn’t find the grow into a community who is it as long as you cite the source words? I have. It sucks. That’s waiting for each of your updates and shoot some credit to the where content curation comes and will respond to you. At that original author. into play. You could easily repoint, you’re “Google proof”, search a the topic to find the and the question is moot… Who Uses Content Curation To best content and just compile all Populate Their Sites? the best info that you can find to And the irony is with your valumake it flow with the style you able curated resource and social Sites have been doing this since like. Thus, ending your writer’s proof you achieve by adding val- before content curation was block. ue, that’s when Google will see even cool. If you look around you you as an authority and rely on may not have noticed that this Here’s a few more reasons why you and your website to provide has been going on. Here’s some you should use content curation: good results for people search- examples: ing in your niche, and all that • Mix your content in with free traffic is gravy. (Source: How • Social Bookmarking sites curated content to provide the to Get Shareist | Shareist – Content have been doing this all along. best piece of content you can Curation Platform) They set it up so users can for your readers. share content and vote on it. • Become the top source for (Boom! I just curated a bit of This has allowed them to build information in your niche. content. See how easy that was? huge authority with the search • Start your sites quicker. I’ll do some more.) engines. This is the reason why Instead of trying to write 10 internet marketers like us have posts or so to get your new site So as far as the duplicate conbeen able to take advantage started you can just curate tent issues is concerned, I think of their work for links, etc… some content and cut your it’s squashed. As long as you are • Some internet news sites time in half. posting the best content for your like the Huffington post. These • Link to other bloggers

internet marketing magazine august 2012

1 - You need to remember to post only the best content from the best sources available. Sometimes the smaller sites will have better content than the bigger one’s.

posts in yours to try to create a relationship with other people in your niche (people love having their content shared and they can see you were the source of traffic in their analytics). • Curate pictures and videos on your site to give your posts a little more depth. • It’s easier and faster than writing all original content. • If you encourage people to curate your content you will get back links the natural way. Just the way Google likes it.

2 - Handpick your content. The content will automatically be delivered to your inbox but you need to personally go through the content and pick the best to use on your site (you can use software if you have it, more on that later)…

Again, I could go on and I’m sure that you see that this is a highly effective way to populate your site with content and visitors. Also, to make more money with your site by way of ads, adsense or building profitable relationships with other like-minded individuals. And the most important… The internet is slammed full of information. People want answers but don’t have time to sort through the scattered sources to find it. If you can provide them with everything they are looking for in one place, you have won them over. They will be back.

3 - Always cite the source. Never post other peoples content without letting your reader know where it came from.

Check Out This Infographic To Put Some Things Into Perspective: This infographic really puts some things into perspective. The one that really stands out to me is the one about 20% of searches have never been performed! I know that really has nothing to do with curation but I just thought it was interesting. In any case, this is a massive opportunity. And with all the changes Google is making lately, if we can do things right by them then I’m sure we will be rewarded. So I guess you’re probably wondering how to curate the content? *NOTE: My method is a little time consuming so get your notepad ready. Before I get into how to curate your content there’s a few things I want you to remember. Curation Infographic

4 - Never take an entire article and post it in quotes with the source on your site. Taking some of the article is one thing, but putting the whole thing on your site without adding anything of your own is not really the idea of content curation. Sure, you could use the entire article and break it up into chunks and add your own content between the chunks but don’t just paste the whole thing an call it a day. The whole idea of content creation is to add context about what you have to say and to add more depth to your post.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

5 - Be sure to add your own original post here and there on your site. Don’t post purely curated content. It’s best if you add your own style and personality from time to time. 6 - Don’t just post as much content as you can. Take it easy on your readers. You can post 3-4 articles each day. Just make sure they are good. You don’t want to get into too much of a rush and start posting crappy content. Your readers will notice and they will leave. With all of that said, let’s go! Here’s How I Do It… I’m going to assume that you have a niche. If not, you’ll have to do a little research to find one. I am more interested in showing you how to actually curate the content. If you have issues finding a niche or don’t know how to do the research then just contact me using the form on this site and I’ll point you in the right direction. Let’s go through this step-bystep… I’m going to try and simplify this process for you as much as I can. Step 1 – Find Your Keywords Keywords are the life to everything online. We use them to determine the competition in a niche all the way down to getting in front of peoples faces. This is no exception. What you should do is fire up the free google keywords tool and enter in the main keywords for your niche. Log into your Google account so that you can get the

internet marketing magazine august 2012

maximum number of results. If you are not logged in you are limited to the amount of keywords that will show up.

the one’s that aren’t anywhere closely related to your niche. You don’t want you email inbox full of junk. That’s time wasted on your part. So scrap the one’s that don’t make sense.

When I say the main keywords for your niche I mean… if you are in the weight loss niche you would Step 2 – Find Relevant Sites enter the keyword “weight loss” Okay… so step one is a little easiinto the box (without quotes). er because we have a tool to help us in the process. Step 2 is a difThis will return a lot of results ferent story. for you. Once you get your results you’ll want to download all the This is where all the boring work results. This will give you all the comes into play. What I recomkeywords you selected in a .csv mend is that you have someone format. do this for you. You can head over to Odesk.com and hire someone You’ll want to repeat the above to do this task for you. Just open process with the 5-15 most an account and post your job. searched keywords in your niche. You’ll have several applicants to We are doing this so we never run apply for this. You can sort them out of content. from hours logged and then the number of reviews they have to **BONUS TIP: Competition is find the best person for the job. not really and issue here, but if I have 2 full-time assistants that you would like to rank well for help me that I pay by the hour, keywords then go after the low- if I had to guess, you could post er competition keywords first. an hourly job for about $5 bucks You’ll have to do some research an hour to complete this process. on that but it will be worth it. You’ll be glad you did. What I’m saying is that if you go after smaller niches and smaller Onward… keywords you will have less content to choose from but it may So that list of keywords you not be a bad thing. just compiled, you need to sort through them to find the most relYou need to have at least 100 relevant sites for the keywords. evant keywords that you can use for the next step. Of course, you Take each one of those keywords can run the above step as many one-by-one and plug them into times as you want and if you are Google. What you are looking for in a big niche then you could eas- is relevant sites to the keyword ily come up with thousands of with good information on them. keywords. You can do that if you You want to find a site that posts want but I find 100 seems to be content to their site regularly or the sweet spot. at least once a month. You are going to find a lot of mini-sites where Once you have this list you’ll want the owners threw up a 5 page site to go through and look at each and never touched it again. keyword. You want to eliminate

These are pretty easy to spot and YOU DON’T WANT THOSE! Skip them, don’t mark them down. They are worthless to you. These are sites where affiliate marketers are just trying to make a dime (I’m guilty). You can take a look to find the “posted on” date. If the site owner posts regularly and the content is fresh, relevant, and good then you need to copy that sites’ url and paste it into a spreadsheet so we can gather their Feeds later. You can give your outsourcer these exact instructions. You’ll want to do this for each keyword. See… I told you it was long and boring. It can take awhile to go through all your keywords and find the best sites. That’s why I recommend you outsource this because I’m sure you have better things to do. Since this does take a long time to complete I’ll give you a tip. If you have a site where you want curated content on it in a hurry… Run the process above for the top 5 keywords that you have found and want to either rank for or get traffic from. Take those sites you’ve found for those keywords and go to step 3. Just remember to run the process for the rest of those keywords. Or have your outsourcer give you the results from those top 5 keywords. I’m really being redundant about the whole outsourcing thing because this part really does suck… **BONUS TIP - I’m sure you know what a sub-niche is. Example, if your niche is weight loss and you find the keyword weight loss workout routine… The weight loss workout routine is a sub-niched keyword. If you find during step 1 and 2 that you are running into a lot of sub-niched keywords (you will) create a few generalized sections in your spreadsheet for these sub-niche keywords and group them together like that. This will make it easier to manage the Feeds later on so you will know exactly where to find what you are looking for when the time comes.

Step 3 – Feed ME! This is where things start to get a little easier. So you found your keywords, you’ve found the best possible sites to pull your content from. You now need to create a few accounts. 1 – You’ll need to get a Google Reader account. You’ll need this in order to receive your Feed in an organized fashion. 2 – If you don’t have a regular Gmail account you’ll need one of those too in case you run into a feedburner RSS feed where you can subscribe via email. This account can be brand new and can be niche specific. This way you can have one Gmail account for each niche. When the blog owner posts new content it will come straight to your inbox and you’ll be nice and organized. Now, that you have these accounts you can move on… Basically, you are going to be using these accounts to subscribe to the RSS Feeds of the sites you found from step 2. It’s that simple. By doing this you will have all the content you need delivered straight to you. The best part is that all of this content will be neatly organized in your Reader account or in your email. And in both programs you can create new files/folders that you can rename to organize the topics you receive by “topic”.

internet marketing magazine august 2012

Step 4 – Curate The Content Onto Your Site This is the easiest part. As the content hits your inbox all you have to do is actually read it and make sure it’s good quality content. If it is then it’s time to post it. Just remember what I said about the whole copying the whole thing and posting it alone thing. You need to add your voice to the article. Your opinions. And cite the source (very important). Here’s some examples of sites utilizing content curation. You can use these to find your style: • www.scoop.it/t/contentcuration-social-media • www.seomoz.org/blog • www.digg.com • www.copyblogger.com • www.huffingtonpost.com Tools To Help You Get It Done Content Curation is awesome and it’s a great way to gather content and make some money online. As I mentioned before… My way is a little time consuming and it may not be the absolute best way but it is free to do unless you outsource some of it. And I know I said not to use software to post your content and that you should handpick the content that goes onto your site and you should, but I see no reason why you can’t use software to gather the content for review. So in order to help you get the upper-hand I have compiled a list of tools that I have either used myself or have heard good things. I think this list will come

internet marketing magazine august 2012

in handy if you are going to get serious about content curation. 1 - Curation Soft - This is an awesome piece of software for the serious curationist (I don’t know if that’s the official term but it sounded good). This software pulls content from Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, Flickr and G News by keyword from the most recent content to the least. This software also allows you to drag and drop the content right into your WordPress editor. It’s cool and a HUGE timesaver if you are going to be curating a lot. This is a paid tool and is worth it’s weight. 2 – PageOne Curator – This is a neat piece of software that works for both Mac and PC. It runs on Adobe Air so you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues. This software will gather content and even show you the license types for the content. It’s a close second the Curation Soft. You can get a single user license for less than $27 or an outsourcer license for $47. 3 – Galert Plugin – This is WSO that I have recommended before and still do. It’s not the best tool available but is a good low cost alternative. 4 - I already talked about Google Reader. 5 – Google Alerts – G Alerts are great because you can set up alerts so you are notified when certain keywords are mentioned in posts. This is good but it can get a little un-targeted and your alerts could be filled with other affiliate marketers.

6 – ALLTOP – ALLTOP is cool because they have a list of top blogs and the most recent posts made by those blogs. Conclusion… So I hope that this article was helpful and that you have a better understanding of what Content Curation is and how to use it to better your content for your sites, readers and for your bank account. Just remember to always provide quality and over-deliver. If you do that you will build a fan base for your site that will come back again and again. Oh… and don’t forget to encourage social sharing on your site. Just tell people to share your content and they most likely will. This helps get you traffic and it will help your SEO efforts as well.

Derek Allen is a popular teacher in the Internet Marketing community, local business consultant, established affiliate marketer, software developer and a statistics maniac. With over 5 years of digital marketing experience Derek has been called an Internet Marketing innovator. He loves to help, teach, and coach. Derek has a website where he shares tons of valuable information at http://ultimateimclub.com He also came out with the first official Pinterest marketing course. If you would like to learn more about using Pinterest to help build your business please feel free to check it out.

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internet marketing magazine august 2012