Internet Marketing Magazine June 2013 by Internet Marketing Magazine

june 2013

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> COMPLIMENT ONLINE WITH OFFLINE MEDIA PAGE 13

> 7 MUST KNOW INTERNET TRENDS 2013 PAGE 17

> CONTINUOUS CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION

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SECRETS OF A #1 EBAY SELLER

PHIL LEAHY >> THE ORIGINAL AND BEST INTERNET MARKETING MAGAZINE DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR THE IPAD, KINDLE FIRE, ANDROID AND THE WEB

INTERNET UPDATE

THE

STATE OF THE INTERNET In this section of Internet Marketing Magazine our editor Greg Cassar cover’s the facts and provides expert commentary on what are the big plays that have recently happened online and how they affect you. Google Releases Penguin 2.0 Webspam SEO Update

The simple layout of Tumblr has spawned millions of diverse, quirky, blogs. Founded in 2007 Google’s Matt Cutts announced on and headquartered in New York, the 22nd of May that Google has The real answer to be Penguin Tumblr says it has more than 108 rolled out what they are referring Proof is to design your website in million blogs, 50 billion postings to inside Google as Penguin 2.0. such a way that is compelling, and in 12 languages and 175 employIt’s actually the 4th release of where your site visitors will want ees. The website ranking site AlPenguin that Google has released to bookmark the pages, return to exa lists Tumblr as number 32 in but it’s receiving its new name learn more and generally find val- terms of global popularity. because it’s an updated algorithm ue in your site. Google is working not just a data refresh. towards their goal of making sure The deal is the largest for Yahoo searchers find web sites with high since Marissa Mayer took over as Quick Refresher: Penguin is an value content. chief executive last year and is Over-Optimization Penalty at aimed to help the struggling interthe Keyword level. Google has net pioneer regain traction with changed the way they evaluate Yahoo Buys Tumblr for $1.1B younger internet users. links and is applying penalties for: • Low Quality links Yahoo’s board has approved a deal Tumblr is popular with younger in• Keyword stuffing to purchase the popular blogging ternet users aged 13 to 25. • Excessive Bolding platform Tumblr for $US1.1 billion • Same Repeat Anchor text in cash. Despite a massive user base, Tumetc blr’s revenue was only $13million Tumblr, which is a mico-blogging last year. Even that figure was only platform for quickly posting pic- made possible after $125million in tures, text and video, also func- capital investments. tions as a social media site.

Approx 2.3% of English language web search results will be affected with the new release. Websites with more spammy links are going to get hit the most. Penguin will impact based on lan-

internet marketing magazine june 2013

guage and those languages that have more webspam will see the most difference.

Its platform manages to blend elements of all of the major social networking sites. Sharing and posting photos is simple and easy, like Instagram. GIFs and videos are all easy to share, as well. But, the site also has a new feed function, allowing users to follow other Tumblr blogs like social media networks Facebook and Twitter.

From a strategy point of view Mayer states “The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo could grow Yahoo’s audience by 50 percent to more

than a billion monthly visitors, peak video traffic. and could grow traffic by approximately 20 percent,” By comparison, YouTube took just over 17% and Hulu came in at Only time will tell if this is a good 2.4%. strategic move, but making Yahoo properties cool to a younger audi- Where it differs is mobile trafence seems a good strategy, and fic as Youtube takes up the vast obviously there are many more majority of mobile video traffic -millions of eyeballs for exposing more than six times that of Netto Ad inventory. flix’s. The Never Ending Growth of Netflix

The Latest Wearable Technology – The Wearable Mouse

Netflix has become major competition for premium and cable TV The basic design of the computer networks as it now surpasses HBO mouse today remains remarkably in U.S. subscribers. similar to the box-with-a-button first demonstrated by Douglas C. The video streaming service said Engelbart back in 1968. it now has 29.2 million U.S. subscribers and more than 36 million The latest wearable technology is subscribers worldwide -- add- the Mycestro 3D mouse – a thumbing more than two million U.S. activated, wireless mouse that subscribers in the first quarter attaches to your index finger. alone. In comparison, HBO has 28.7 million subscribers and isn’t expected to see much growth as the cable TV industry continues to suffer from a lack of new subscribers Netflix’s traffic volumes are enormous - for the past three years, Netflix took one-third of all Internet traffic in North America.

For the first part of 2013, the video content service has topped the video downstream source list, taking 32.3% of all home network

The Mycestro is the size of a Bluetooth earpiece and designed to be worn on the index finger. It uses a combination of sensors and algorithms to collect finger movement information and a touch sensitive panel located on the side of the finger closest to the thumb. The Mycestro is inactive until you touch and hold anywhere on its side panel, which means you can work seamlessly around your office without having to remove it. Once the cursor becomes active,

finger movements combined with the active thumb press direct it to the desired location, whilst further thumb motions on the touch panel button sections provide a full range of mouse clicks and scroll functionality. A recent Kickstarter campaign has been underway to raise funds for tooling and a preproduction prototype run. The plan is for the product to available for customers around October this year. Amazon Appstore Now Available Around the Globe Amazon has announced that its Appstore for Android -- the Google Play rival, is now available in almost 200 countries following its expansion of the service.

This is great news for Amazon’s International customers outside of the US as previously Amazon would not sell Kindle Fire’s to nonUS customers. I bought one with the help of a good friend’s USA mailing address (so that we could test the magazine there) but the device was basically useless because it’s services all required a USA credit card. Customers in the UK were experiencing similar issues to us Aussies. Amazon has revealed that the Kindle Fire’s reach across the globe will now be 170 total countries by June 13.

internet marketing magazine june 2013

From the Desk of the Editor We’ve had a fun last month here at Internet Marketing Magazine with a trip to beautiful Borocay in the Philippines with our full team of magazine staff, web developers and their families.

the apple platforms as it really helps us out. If you are getting good value from Internet Marketing Magazine and you can spare 1 minute of your time to click this link to give us a quick honest review that would be greatly appreciated (click ‘view in Whilst we did spend some time planning upcom- iTunes’ then scroll down and click ‘write a review’, ing features, experts and specials, there was more thanks :). focus put on team building fun with the Jet Ski’s, island hopping and banana boat being popular at- We hope you get great value from Internet Martractions. keting Magazine. Wishing you the best of success online, If you haven’t got access to the member’s area please feel free to do at http://internetmarketingmag.net/become-member/ (it’s free). This Regards, month’s complete audio interview with Phil Leahy has now been added. It has lots of learning’s in it that were not included in the magazine, so be sure to check it out. Greg Cassar

GregCassar

A special thanks to those who have left reviews in

Internet Marketing Strategist & Editor Internet Marketing Magazine

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EXPERT INTERVIEW

PHIL LEAHY

SECRETS OF A #1 EBAY SELLER An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar Phil Leahy is an online entrepreneur with a long history of success. In 2002 Phil started selling products on eBay and within 5 years had become the largest seller on the eBay.com.au platform measured across all categories with over 350,000 transactions. In 2007 and 2008 Phil was awarded Australia’s #1 eBay Seller award for the most sales in all categories. During 2003 he established his own website offering products to Australian and international consumers. In 2008, Phil sold the business to dealsdirect.com.au and shifted his attention towards his marketing agency, Online Marketing Experts and also the PeSA Internet Conference. Phil is the president of the eBay Sellers’ Alliance in Australasia. That was quite a good track record of success me $100 US in the mail. When the exchange rate you’ve got there. Have you always been entre- was at 60 cents and I thought ‘Well there might be preneurial? something in this.’ Phil: I guess you could call me a serial entrepreneur. I started off in the rag trade when I was a kid and by the age of 21 I had a few shops and was manufacturing for another 300. I’ve moved into a lot of different industries - from the rag trade, to the fitness business, to night clubs, to radio, record companies, and then into selling online. With eBay obviously that’s one area that you are really strong. You started your eBay business back in 2002. How did that first come about? Greg: So then you started selling more and more stuff and then just ramped it up until you were doPhil: Bankruptcy actually. I had a radio station ing it professionally? and we were trying to get a full time license in Melbourne with Kiss FM and we owned a bunch of Phil: Yes I had some DVD stock so I started putting Narrowcast stations in Sydney and Brisbane and we DVDs up on eBay and they started flying out the fought for a number of years to try to make those door, and then I started scaling it up from there. successful. We had over 200 DJ’s on there a week By the time we sold the business we were doing doing electronic dance music. Unfortunately we around 50,000 auctions a week on eBay across weren’t successful. My partner and I lost a bit of eBay Australia, eBay UK and eBay America. money. I ended up on eBay because a friend told me about it and said to me “You should be selling some of your old Sony music signed collectibles on there”. My first sale on eBay was a signed copy of a Silverchair album which I sold for $100. Someone actually sent

You were able to ramp it a lot bigger than most. What competitive advantages did you bring to the market? Phil: I guess we were pretty good across the board.

internet marketing magazine june 2013

We presented ourselves well against our competitors online. Our templates were looking really good. Our descriptions were great. Then it was about process. Finding tools in the marketplace which could help me automate the business was critical.

neutral or positive feedback. So things have progressed along the way in a really good way for eBay.

Buying right from the suppliers is very important to try to get the best price. There is a number of different moving parts in the business. You have to be good at marketing; you have to be good at communicating with your customer. But ultimately you have to be great at delivering a fantastic experience. If they buy it off you that day you make sure you get that order out the door that day. Having a firm commitment to deliver the best service to the customer makes all the difference with online.

Phil: It started off as a group in America called the PeSA (the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance). It was a bunch of us high volume sellers who got together to meet every six months at a different location in America to discuss the business.

Greg: Yes, especially with eBay. The reputation that you build is so visible, which I think is a great thing. It keeps people honest.

What is that role you do with the Professional eBay and eCommerce Sellers Alliance?

In the early days, eBay tried to keep us apart and wouldn’t really listen to us. After a few Wall Street Journal front pages from a few of our sellers things began to change. Then we got the ear of eBay and we tried really hard to work with eBay to let them know of what changes we’d like to see happen. They basically started taking notice of us. That group was formed and I brought the concept of the group over to Australia seven years ago. From the supply chain point of view when you were doing the big eBay volumes, were you buying directly from manufacturers and importing? Phil: Yes, we were buying directly from manufacturers and wholesalers. We worked in a few different areas, but predominately, we were in the media business so we were selling CDs and DVDs. In the early days companies like Warner, BMG, and a bunch of others refused to supply online retailers and I think there are still some issues around that today. So our approach back then was to go to a supplier and one by one catalogue everything they had. So I made sure for that particular supplier I was delivering value regarding the volume of orders.

Then when I was spending a lot of money with them I could negotiate to get a decent deal. Then Phil: It really is the cornerstone of the success of I’d go to the next supplier and point to the previous eBay. Some years back we were looking for changes one and say “Look at the success we’ve had with to the feedback system. We were lobbying with them”. Basically we did that until we had every eBay in America and this helped produce the de- single supplier - even the ones who said ‘No’ to us tailed seller rating system which we enjoy today. years before. We just kept going back, and when It helps eBay distinguish their best partners with we were turning over around $5 million worth of performance. Before that it was just negative or product online they just couldn’t ignore us.

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By the time we sold the business we were doing around 50,000 auctions a week on eBay across eBay Australia, eBay UK and eBay America.

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Greg: So you really let your results speak for yourself and then go back and negotiate better rates and better deals. You’re really coming from that position of authority once you have that proven track record. Phil: Yes. It’s hard when you’re a small player. I started the business with $100 cash and I didn’t borrow any money in that business. It’s hard to get deals when you’re really small. So you really need to look at the suppliers you’re doing business with and deliver the best value you can possibly deliver so you can help grow their business. Over time the word gets out into the marketplace that you are a good person to deal with. Greg: I think that whole concept of online reputation is so very much important with the days of social media where we are now - one good thing is the ‘get rich quick scheme’ type of business doesn’t really stick around that long. It comes back to the fundamentals - online is really about sound business fundamentals the same as offline. You’ve really got to preserve your reputation. Phil: We also don’t like seeing people selling that ‘get rich quick’ concept. I’m sure it does happen to a very small minority of people where they have an amazing value proposition, but the fact remains that in any business offline or online, it’s hard work and it takes time and it doesn’t happen overnight. With online retail via eBay and also traditional eCommerce stores there are a bunch of efficiency tools that can really help you automate your listing and selling and feedback processes etc. Is there any efficiency tools that you’ve really been impressed with or supported over time? Phil: Yes there’s a few. The first tool I used was a company called MarketWorks which was one of the first players in the area. Then they got acquired by ChannelAdvisor. I would say that anybody who’s going to be listing on third party marketplaces needs to look at ChannelAdvisor as a partner in their business. Another automation tool would be some sort of email communications tool. I’ve used a few over the different years but basically looking at all as-

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pects of the business to automate, because at the end of the day if you’re going to be heavy with staff, then you’re not going to be competitive. The idea, the complete dream of any online business is to come in to work in the morning and just see a bunch of orders printed off the computer and then pick them up and send them out the door. It doesn’t really work that way, but that’s the ultimate goal for all retailers. You spoke about ChannelAdvisor. My understanding is it’s got functionality both for eBay as well as traditional eCommerce stores. What’s the real main benefits you’ve found from ChannelAdvisor? Phil: The team at ChannelAdvisor are very dedicated to automation and being multi-channeled. ChannelAdvisor plugs into eBay, it also plugs into Amazon, it also uses Google and a bunch of other different places to list your product. It has a bunch of tools around re-listing; it’s got centralised inventory management, and it’s also got tools like price elasticity. So you can set parameters around a price point on a particular product and see where its sweet spot is. You can set times around it, if it doesn’t sell by this date then drop its price by x%. You can automate all that sort of thing. When you’re dealing with a lot of SKU’s that’s what you have to do because you can’t spend your time looking at all those SKU’s all the time. You need to put rules and parameters around those price points.

One of the things we see many successful eBay sellers do is start with the eBay platform because they’ve already got the ‘buying intent’ traffic and then slowly migrating their customers over to their own traditional eCommerce platforms, so that they can have a more intimate relationship with them via database and auto responder. Is there ethical ways of going about doing that so that you can stay within eBay’s guidelines? Phil: Absolutely. Yes there’s ways that you can do that. A great example is your guest a few months ago - Paul Greenberg from DealsDirect. He is an example of someone who actually migrated completely off eBay and became the biggest department store in Australia and ended up back on the platform and started selling again. eBay is a platform and the customer is really owned by yourself. It’s not owned by eBay. eBay has a bunch of rules around how you talk to that customer post sale. I don’t want to go too deep into that but I can say it does offer the opportunity to acquire new customers. So not only is it a profitable place to trade. It’s also a profitable place to acquire customers. Greg: One of its real competitive advantages is that you’re not actually paying for the traffic whereas if you setup a website then you have to go buying clicks etc. That’s certainly some expense that you’re getting by without, by starting with the eBay platform and then migrating them across. Phil: That’s right. You can acquire customers through a sale and

win that customers’ hearts and minds by delivering great service and great product and hopefully the customer will come back to you one day either through eBay or direct. If you’re starting an online business and you’re selling, I’d recommend to this day that eBay is the place to start a business and to learn about online. Then having a multi-channeled strategy of having your own website and looking at other marketplaces is critical too. What can you tell us about your marketing agency ‘Online Market Experts’? Phil: OnlineMarketExperts.com is an agency. We represent a range of different companies in the USA and Australia. We represent eCommerce Partners from New York City who built the Surfstitch website. We represent SEO Moves from Washington and then a bunch of our local SEO guys and landing page optimization firms. We write reports for customers on their current website and strategy. We’re pretty flexible. I guess you could call us a consultancy and agency working with small and big business. Greg: So who’s your ideal client, what sort of business, and what sort of problem are they trying to solve? Phil: It’s multi. It could be a small business owner who’s got a website who wants us to run a report and we get to help that business by that report and also recommend different services and service providers that we know that are good.

internet marketing magazine june 2013

Make Your Website Easy to Read & Effective on all Mobile Phones

internet marketing magazine june 2013

USABILITY TESTING

HOW TO COMPLEMENT YOUR ONLINE STRATEGY WITH OFFLINE MEDIA By Andrew Benikos By the end of 2015 it’s expected that there will be more than 3,400,000,000 global internet users (econsultancy, 2013). In 2012 e-commerce sales grew to top $1 trillion for the first time and global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent. Over 144 billion emails are sent daily and users spend an average of 3.2 hours a day on social networking sites. (Cisco, 2013) Clearly the future of marketing on all fronts is to ride the digital wave right? Or is it that simple?

per click, even social media & affiliate activity increases. In a recent iprospect study about this ‘halo effect’, consumers were asked what prompted them to search online for a company, campaign, product, or service. The results were: • Television advertisement: 44% • Word of Mouth: 41% • Magazine/Newspaper Advertisement: 35% • Radio: 23% • Billboard: 13%

I see so many businesses and marketers today that seem to be solely focused on using digital for all their marketing. They have become so focused that they’ve cut themselves off from what’s actually going on in the market and forget they are in reality marketing to only just one channel – online.

Just looking at one path to market for most businesses, without looking at offline options to enhance your online strategy to me just doesn’t make business sense over the long term – and in my opinion is akin to playing a game of football and leaving half your team sitting on the bench!

Think about it, whatever industry you’re in and whatever product or service you sell, it’s likely that despite the recent growth in online there’s still a similar or even bigger potential customer base consuming media offline.

So, whether or not you’ve considered moving forward with integrating your online strategy with your offline efforts like TV, print, radio, direct mail, etc, I believe going through the process of continually looking at and analysing what’s happening in the wider market, what message your target market is exposed to and benchmarking the results you’re getting online versus what is likely offline is important.

Potential customers who are looking for solutions to their problems that aren’t jumping onto Google or Facebook every day - BUT, still read posted mail, still watch TV four to five hours per day, still listen to the radio 1-2 hours a day and still read magazines and newspapers. And, if you’re still not convinced here’s also another key point to mention. What if not integrating offline media was costing you online traffic and conversions as well? Even if people are consuming your online advertising, there’s plenty of evidence that offline direct response marketing not only generates returns in its own right, but also boosts online traffic, revenue

internet marketing magazine june 2013

And the good news is, despite the seeming complexity of integrating offline and online media and changing consumer behaviour, if you’ve been successfully marketing online already (especially using paid campaigns) you’ll probably be able to implement direct response offline campaigns using skills you already have. Like anything, success starts with asking the right questions. Here are four key questions to ask before you make the investment. 1. Do you know your definition for success?

Any offline direct response campaign starts and finishes with knowing your numbers. Data needs to be your best friend. Without understanding how much you can spend on customer acquisition, you’ll have a difficult time defining what success means for your particular campaign. When those first results come in, you’ll need to know immediately whether or not it was a success. Fortunately, the great thing about having a fully developed online strategy in place is you should know some of the key metrics which you can use as a starting point, such as: - Average cost per lead - Average cost per acquisition - Average lifetime value - Average ROI of your campaigns Not only will these numbers guide your decisions they will also let you know how much you can/ should spend on direct response offline advertising. On a side note, in my experience lead quality for offline can be substantially higher than online leads. So, while the cost of advertising may seem higher, your conversion rates can often times

internet marketing magazine june 2013

double or triple (especially using longer form print and TV). Testing your offline campaigns will tell you the full story of course, but it’s an overlooked point that you should look out for when starting out. 2. Are you ready to test? Many companies try offline advertising once, and if they don’t get the results their after straight away they often blame the medium itself rather than looking at all of the variables. It’s essential to test different methods (offers, executions, calls to action, etc) with several trials first in order to find out what works best. There can be many variables involved in direct response offline advertising, you have to approach it with a testing – rather than a one-time-mindset. Two other key points to remember: I. Make sure you have a quantifiable test budget in place. Unlike online where campaigns can be switched off with a moment’s notice, most offline campaigns require a commitment for ad space over a period of spots or time as an example (even for a test) so have this budget in place before commencing. II. Offline advertising can be very effective very quickly, but you have to be ready for the amount of leads and orders that could come your way. Project your cost per lead and cost per order and then work backwards. Can your business handle this much volume? Run the numbers first before you spend. It would be a shame to lose out on those leads due to a lack of planning. 3. Where can I get the best “message to market to media” match? Is your campaign fishing where the fish are? The great thing about mass offline advertising (i.e. TV, print, radio, etc) is that you have the potential for massive reach. But, your customers often consume media in very specific channels and specific places. While testing will play a large role in ultimately determining the right media to advertise in, having a strong knowledge about your target customer and in particular which media they’ll likely be consuming is critical. Once again, analysing online metrics and surveying your database will give you a great guide to begin with.

Test small in publications that offer low cost/high reach and are either very specific to your product (i.e. if you’re promoting a weight loss pill advertise in a ‘women’s fitness’ publication) or very specific to your demographic (i.e. using the weight loss pill example again, women’s ‘gossip’ magazines or entertainment channels could be good choices). Reading the media kits of each publication/channel/list or using direct response focused agencies can help further define your best target media for testing. Once this is in place, enhance the integration of the campaign by: 1. Making sure you create a unique & compelling call to action that is backed by a sense of urgency will be one of the key reasons for success and help you cut through the mainly branded competitor advertising. 2. Using multiple response mechanisms to enhance the performance of the campaign (including phone numbers, URLs in TV and radio ads, or placing a QR code in your print ads or sales letters).

set up for all of your key campaigns sources. If you’re expecting large volumes, feeding all of this information into a central sales results dashboard is ideal and can be facilitated by several software options such as dynamic numbering and the like. II. Optimise your online funnel - If consumers don’t respond straight away to the call to action in your offline advertising, it is likely they’ll end up online to do further research. In fact, in a recent survey Nielsen reported that 40% of television viewers are now watching with a tablet or Smartphone and researching in real time. But, only 12% of marketers simultaneously integrate and optimize their search campaigns.

4. Is the online campaign funnel set up to optimise your offline campaign results? This is where I often see offline campaigns fall down and one of the first things I look for when consulting with clients. I’ve seen it many times where a campaign is generating a positive response, but is let down by ‘gaps’ in the campaign funnel (ultimately leading to your advertising dollars sending customers to your competitors); a lack of proper tracking put in place; and a clear definition on which campaign source you attribute the lead to. Here’s an overview on how to approach each of these issues: I. You need to be able to track where the lead is coming from – Each potential customer calling you, filling out a form online, etc needs to be able to be tracked back to the advertising source. The bare minimums to put in place are: a. unique phone numbers for each campaign b. a unique url (preferably to unique landing page also featuring the same offer advertised) c. if testing multiple campaigns in a particular medium use promo codes on your advertising which customers supply to you over the phone or lead capture form when making their inquiry. d. it is essential that Google analytics goals are

So, it makes sense then that two particular areas be addressed when your media planning and buying: -1. Your advertising must follow your consumers journey to your website and 2. All of your advertising communication is kept consistent. internet marketing magazine june 2013

It is essential to optimise both your SEO and PPC campaigns (and even your social platforms) to ensure that when customers are searching they’ll be able to effortlessly find their way to your website and that your don’t open yourself up to your competitor siphoning off your paid for traffic. Think of online as a ‘capture’ channel for your offline efforts. Matching the offer or style of offline advertising in your online executions will also further prompt potential customers to take the action you want them to. III. Define where you will attribute the sale – A challenging area of online and offline integration is exactly which advertising source you’ll attribute the final acquisition of a customer to. There are many rationales for either the ‘first click/contact’ or ‘last click/ contact’ attribution approaches and beyond the scope of this article. My suggestion though is start small by choosing one or the other in your reporting and use the data you collect from your initial campaigns (like assisted conversion in Google Analytics) to guide your final decision. Over time, understanding the consumer journey will be an important distinction to make, especially if you’re doing serious volume.

Summary. Even though online lead generation offers affordable access to a near limitless number of prospects, traditional offline techniques deserve their place as part of your advertising profile as well. Not only can these strategies generate strong returns in their own right, they can dramatically boost traffic and conversion to your web and social media sites. Taking a synergistic approach and finding the offline/online advertising sweet spot can create the pipeline of customers every business needs to sustain its growth.

Andrew Benikos

is an online and offline consultant specialising in customer lead generation strategies, customer conversion strategies and strategic internet marketing. He is also the founder of web design and marketing firm The Conversion Company. You can contact him directly at andrew@theconversioncompany.com.au

internet marketing magazine june 2013

INTERNET TRENDS

7 MUST KNOW INTERNET TRENDS

FOR THE SWITCHED-ON ENTREPRENEUR IN 2013 By Greg Cassar Mobile Internet Usage is soaring past desktop usage is several parts of the world, while the mobile advertising opportunity remains largely untapped. Wearable computing is poised to replace mobile computing as the hot new thing. Those are just some of the findings in a new report on the state of the internet from Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Summarised below are 7 Must Know Internet Trends for the Switched-On Entrepreneur in 2013. 1. The USA is not the center of the Internet World – Emerging Countries are Growing More Rapidly China has the most Internet Users with 564 million and is also growing the fastest with 264 million added just last year, which is a greater number than the total number of Internet Users in the States. The next 5 fastest growing countries in terms of new Internet Users added are India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia and Nigeria.

2. Content is exploding The amount of digital information created worldwide, tagged, and shared has grown 9-fold in the past five years, and is on track to quadruple again by 2015.

3. The Top 5 Social Media Sites are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Google+ is going better than most people imagine with it now being the 4th biggest Social Media site, and because its ability to affect SEO it will continue to grow. It’s surprising to see MySpace is still bigger than Instagram and Tumblr as I personally haven’t heard anyone talk about posting to it in several years.

4. Mobile Internet Traffic Growing Fast Mobile traffic now represents 15% of all Internet traffic. Just 4 short years ago this was less than 1 percent internet marketing magazine june 2013

(in May 2009). This trend is expected to continue with 25% of Global Internet Traffic to be from mobile by this time next year.

tional medias such as print, ratio and TV into Internet and Mobile Internet in particular.

In certain parts of the world the trend towards mobile has already exceeded desktop PC’s. A good example of this is currently in China more people access the web via mobile devices than via PCs.

6. More Tablets Sold Now than Desktops and Notebooks In Q4 of 2012 the number of Tablets sold globally was greater than the number of desktops or Notebook PC’s. A large percentage of these are Apple iPad’s which don’t run Adobe Flash at all, so it’s worth testing your site from an iPad and an Android Tablet to make sure that its all working the way you’ve intended.

5. Mobile Ad Spend is an Un-Tapped Opportunity Ad spend is going to the wrong places. There’s a huge gap between the amount of time people spend on mobile devices and the amount of ad spend directed at mobile. Mobile takes up 12% of our time, but gets only 3% of ad spend.

7. Wearable is the next trend in Technology Throughout history people have laughed when new Traditional media’s such as Print media is the op- technology types have been introduced, such as posite, getting 6% of our time but pulling in 23% of when PC’s first came out and Ken Olsen the founder the ad spend dollars. of Digital Equipment said “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” We expect to see this change in the months and years to come with ad dollars moving from tradi-

internet marketing magazine june 2013

Remember when Apple changed the game with the iPhone and they seemed expensive at the time, but now I wouldn’t run my business a single day without a smart phone as it’s just too inefficient. It will be interesting to see which of the wearable’s changes the world the way Apple did with the smart iPhone. It’s a pity Steve Jobs isn’t still alive or we may have already known the answer to that one.

Source Data Credit: Mary Meeker / Liang Wu Internet Trends D11 Conference KPCB – Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Greg Cassar

is Australia’s leading Internet Marketing Strategist. With InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com 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 june 2013

OPTIMIZATION

WHY YOU NEED CONTINUOUS OPTIMIZATION By Peep Laja

How often does this happen: A company budgets for a website, it’s built according to the budget and then it’s done. Hooray! … and everybody moves on to other important things. Unfortunately too often. Declaring it done is a waste of money Your website is not done. Declaring it done is arrogant, stupid and will cost you a lot of money. A newly built website is a hypothesis at best (hopefully it was designed with the user in mind). Now the real world test starts – and with it the process of continuous optimization.

mizing it to figure out what works the best. Optimizing is the best thing you can do for growing your revenue.

It takes (depending on your traffic volume) at least 6 to 12 months to pick the low hanging fruits and get the initial gains (often very significant amounts of extra absolute dollars earned). But it doesn’t end there – it’s a non-stop process. When the conversion industry creators, Eisenberg brothers, work with a client, they have a 3-year perspective in mind.

A mindset change is needed No Plan Survives First Contact The era of just building websites, and keeping them the way they With Customers are until the next “new website” - Steve Blank project, is gone. If you’re stuck If you just allocated a budget for in that mindset, your business is launching a new site, you basi- going to shrink and your smart cally paid for a rough diamond. It competitors are going to eat your My friend Chris Goward advocates what he calls evolutionary web works, but it doesn’t sparkle. A lunch (and dinner). design - ditching radical makecut and polished diamond is worth Your website budget has to in- overs at all and just replacing it so much more. clude continuous optimization – with continuous improvement. I It’s impossible to know in advance it’s a non-removable part of your support that idea wholeheartedly what will work the best for your website. Having a website is not (with some exceptions – there ARE customers. Yes there are heuris- a goal – it’s a means to an end – quite a lot of awful websites out tics and best practices, but they revenue. Optimization is about there that have nothing going for are a mere starting point for op- getting MORE revenue out of your them, those need a fresh start to timization. Once your new site is website (improved marketing ef- get moving + continuous optimization). launched, you need to start opti- ficiency).

internet marketing magazine june 2013

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing it for a long time. You may *think* you know what people want and how they want it. However, you don’t – you must talk to people, understand them and run experiments.

experiments based on solid data! Experienced optimizers know that you can’t be sure of anything – especially when you’re designing a new site.

My friend Craig Sullivan says that even though he’s run thousands of tests over the years, and he’s better at guessing the outcome of the test than an average person – he’s still not that much better than flipping a coin. And this guess is made when running

Sadly, we the people are lazy and we’re after the one true answer. We want it now, without testing and experimentation. We want to believe our intuition or some experts’ opinion is the final truth. It’s not. Ariely again:

Your success depends on the number of experiments you run and the speed of implementation. For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first Knowing what to look for, how to operate with the achieve theirs. data and using a structured approach will ensure - Bryan Eisenberg your experiments are done right and they actually have a chance of achieving significant lifts. Traffic Data, Not Intuition and HiPPOs and time are precious resources that shouldn’t be Most sites are still built the stupid way – based on wasted on random tests. a committee meeting (where none are conversion analysts) or the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opin- Marketers still rely on intuition ion). A study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 Another prominent approach is copying what your companies found the vast majority of marketers competitors are doing. Trust me, most of them still rely too much on intuition – marketers depend don’t know what they’re doing, and their website on data for just 11 percent of all decisions. looks the way is does due to a combination of random factors. Plus, they probably copied somebody Funny that alelse. most 100 years after the book That’s a surefire way to crappy results, but even Scientific Adverthat could be salvaged and turned into something tising came out that works through experimentation and continuwe’re still relying ous improvement. on intuition more than anything. Continuous optimization is based on actual user beDan Ariely notes havior data. “But we used data when designing the in this excellent site!” Great! We should use behavior data every article: time we design a site! The problem is that even when your new site is designed by solely relying Companies pay on user behavior data, it is a design based on data amazing amounts that happened in the past, on the old site. Your new of money to get website is a great hypothesis at best. answers from consultants Better than the average person, but that’s not with overdevelenough oped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus Every conversion consultant has heard this a million groups—a dozen people riffing on something they times: “So what will our conversion rate be after know little about—to set strategies. And yet, comyou work on our site?“ If someone indicates they panies won’t experiment to find evidence of the can answer that, they’re lying. Nobody can. right way forward.

internet marketing magazine june 2013

When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking. Never mind that asking good questions and gathering evidence usually guides us to better answers. This study shows that an incremental 241 percent ROI can be generated by applying data to business decisions. And 91 percent of CMOs believe that successful brands make data-driven decisions, as per Columbia Business School.

This is the process to follow on your website too. You have some ideas (based on data – both qualitative and quantitative). You build a website – and measure *everything* that’s going on there. You do whatever it takes to gather useful data – web analytics, user behavior, usability tests, email tracking- everything. You end up with a bunch of data, learn from it – and form new hypotheses for new experiments. And repeat, repeat, repeat. You just keep experimenting.

Bid data and research for research’s sake are stupid. What matters is what you do with the analysis and data you have – you don’t want to be “data If your website was built based on intuition, HiPPO rich and optimization poor”. One execution is and mere best practices, you’re losing money ev- worth more than all the unimplemented analysis ery single day. You could be earning a ton more, in the world. but your website sucks. Structured approach to testing Stop paying attention to your competitors and best Split testing via spaghetti method (testing random practices, and start benchmarking against your things and seeing what works) will only take you so customers’ expectations. Can you meet or exceed far. Companies that employ a structured approach those expectations? Your conversion rate will be a to testing get way better results. leading indicator. Continuous optimization starts with a strategy Build – Measure – Learn – having an idea of what a successful conversion Ever thought that Lean Startup methodology and optimization system looks like, how to define the conversion optimization are similar? You’re right, right goals, prioritizing where to test, how to plan they are. In fact, I’d even say that the overlap is for rapid-cycle testing and so on. Companies that so huge, they’re almost the same thing. In the end have a structured approach to conversion are twice it’s about growing a company by figuring out what as likely to see a large increase in sales. the customer wants and how they want it. (By the way if you haven’t read The Lean Startup yet, pick • Measure. You can only improve what you it up now – it’s amazing). can measure, so measure everything. Be clear on your business goals, benchmark your compeThe critical piece of the puzzle is this diagram: tition for ideas, dig in your web analytics data, conduct customer surveys and analyze search behavior on your site. • Analysis. Once you know your goals, it’s time to figure out what’s working well, what’s not and why. Analyze your content for relevancy and clarity, figure out if it matches user needs, do usability testing and analyze user paths/journeys on your site. • Test. A/B and multivariate testing are the two most valuable methods for companies to improve conversion. Prioritize tests by potential value and cost. • Optimize. After conducting tests, implement successful design and content changes.

internet marketing magazine june 2013

It is a rather simple concept, but it is also complex as you can go very deep in analysis (too deep for your own good). To get the most out of your analytics — or just your optimization efforts — develop a cost-effective, smart system for improving continuously.

Conclusion Your website budget needs to account for both – getting the initial version done and running continuous optimization programs on it for 12 months or more. That’s the way to keep growing your sales while minimizing waste and achieving your potential. Optimization never ends since the world is constantly changing – user preferences, devices they’re on, their mindset, market conditions, and so on. What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow. Keep experimenting.

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@conversionxl.com

internet marketing magazine june 2013

FACEBOOK

FREE WAYS TO REACH MORE PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK By Devin Harper It’s been interesting to see the increase in social media ad spending as of late. A recent study based on a survey of over 500 online marketing and media professionals throughout the U.S. revealed that 64% of them planned to increase social media spending by as much as 10%! With over 650 million daily active Facebook users as of March, 2013, which is a 26% increase year-overyear, this budget increase makes some sense. However, while Facebook offers Insights to help monitor progress, there seems to be this sort of metric morass that has left many in the industry wondering about the effectiveness of social media ads – not to mention siphoning money into social media campaigns curtails other marketing channels. Truth is, you don’t have to spend money to reach more people. Facebook’s EdgeRank, aka their News Feed algo, confirms that. You can increase your social media presence simply by sharing the right kind of text, photos and videos.

Here are a few ways you can reach more people on Facebook without spending a single dollar. EdgeRank People spend the majority of their time now browsing through their News Feeds. EdgeRank is Facebooks way of determining if the content you share is worthy of being put on your friends’ News Feeds. Basically there are three key ingredients at work here: Affinity, Weight and Time. • Affinity: a measurement of the relationship between the viewing user and the creator. The closer that relationship is, the higher the EdgeRank. • Weight: a measurement of the type of post (text, photo(s), video) and how engaging it is. In addition, the more interactions the post has, the more weight it carries. Facebook pours over rich media like photos and videos because they have proven to keep visitors on site. • Time: a measurement of freshness. Be consistent in your posting and time will ever be in your favor. EdgeRank says in with the new and out with the old. Short & Sweet If you can’t say it in 250 characters or less, you’re shooting yourself in the foot because your posts won’t get as much interactions. Think about it. Facebookers have a lot of posts to rifle through and only a limited amount of time before they get wrangled out of the digital world and have to resume real life.

internet marketing magazine june 2013

Stay Relevant Avoid venturing off on unrelated topics like politics and religion if they aren’t relevant to your audience. Nobody likes a lousy pitch. If it’s not up their alley, they’ll lose interest. Target your audience and appeal to them by throwing perfect strikes every chance you get.

Use this data to deduce when your audience is present and most active and schedule posts for those times. I went ice fishing once with a fish finder and it changed my whole experience. Your website, given that you have sufficient traffic to analyze, is your fish finder!

In Summary CONsisTENT Is King For those who toss and turn over the effectiveness Developing and implementing a consistent post- of Facebook ads, consider these suggestions the ing strategy will keep people interested because next time you share a post. If you’re consistent, I they’ll be reminded of your brand and be able to believe you’ll see significant increases in your onget the information they need from you! I think of line presence on Facebook. When you don’t have it like a TV show, when it’s being aired each and ev- to spend any money, you can expect a pretty good ery week, more people are aware and participate. ROI! I can definitely see these suggestions working Between seasons however, when it’s not aired, is on other social media platforms too. Do you? when people lose interest and go to your competition. You’ll reach more people and keep more Devin Harper tuned in by maintaining a consistent schedule. is the content marketing manager at Know Your Audience You can learn a lot about your audience by analyzing your traffic. When does your site get the most visits? What times of day, what days of the week?

Maple North, an internet marketing agency. Link building via content is his bread and butter. When he’s not hiding behind his computer, he enjoys riding the Boise foothills. Follow him on Twitter @ monsieurharper.

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internet marketing magazine june 2013

TRAFFIC STRATEGIES

7000 NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS FROM 1 YOUTUBE VIDEO (TRAFFIC STRATEGIES WITH INCREDIBLE ROI) By Gregory Ciotti

“Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.” -Ron Swanson Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the importance of Being Everywhere and I’m not knocking that advice, but I will warn you that spreading yourself too thin (especially during your blog’s early stages) is your one-way ticket to failure. Take Twitter for example. I use the service and it sends me some decent traffic, but I couldn’t really give a damn about my Twitter account. I have no desire to share 20 things a day like most people recommend, because I’ve seen the numbers: it’s not worth my time. In fact, in all of my time doing content strategy (for startups, for personal projects, even for local clients), I’ve yet to come across any ‘tactic’ that actually works that doesn’t somehow involve creating epic stuff or doing some sort of promotion on another big blog/website.

ning, it matters just as much what you do off your site as what you do on it. The content you publish on-site should be your best stuff, no doubt. It needs to be the kind of epic work that people can qualify as soon as they hit your blog: “Yeah, this is definitely what I’m looking for!” The problem is that the hardest part about building an audience is starting from scratch. You might have heard that it’s good to be drowning in competition, because that means there are plenty of people interested in your topic. Since that really is the case, the best way to jump start your ghost-town of a blog is to get involved with folks who already have your ideal audience. It took me a while to learn this, but when I did, I never looked back! Recently, I was able to acquire over 7000 newsletter subscribers in a 30day period with one unique video collaboration.

In short, to maximize the ROI of your blogging efIt was called the ‘Science of Productivity‘ and it forts, spending most of your time researching how was an animated video with the ASAPscience team: to create outstanding, unique content will give you far better results than learning that “one simple YouTube trick” that will end up doing jack squat for your bottom line. As for that title up there? I’m going to show you how it went down, along with 2 other traffic tactics that are actually worth your time. Let’s do this! 1.) Pouring Tons of Effort into Collaborations If there is one sad truth about traffic generation that I hate to acknowledge, it’s that in the begininternet marketing magazine june 2013

Pretty cool right? Check out the first week results, directly from my AWeber account… It was released late afternoon on the 13th, so the first 36 hours sent nearly 1,000 new leads! While it was obviously a pretty unique example (and far more successful than any other collaboration I’ve done), I’ve found a few simple rules that apply to every big collaboration project: 1. You need to talk about how they benefit: Sure, the collaboration will likely end up being great for you, but you must recognize that nobody BUT you will care. When I first emailed ASAPscience, I mentioned that I would use my contacts to heavily promote the video everywhere it would be a fit. We ended it up landing on places like Gizmodo andLifehacker, so this turned out well.

versial content WITHOUT making people hate your guts, or putting your business’ reputation in jeopardy? This important question has seemingly been answered by a Wharton Business School study titled When, Why, and How Controversy Causes Conversation. The lead researchers examined multiple examples of controversial content and how popular the conversations around these pieces of content became. They concluded the following… “[Data] shows that controversy increases likelihood of discussion at low levels, but beyond a moderate level of controversy, additional controversy actually decreases likelihood of discussion.” What does that mean exactly?

In a nutshell: Topics that are too controversial (pol2. The agreement needs to be crystal clear: itics, religion, national tragedies) can end up being If they are bringing the larger audience to the bad things to discuss (outside of the news) because table, you need to be flexible with what you get people won’t want to talk about them for fear of out of the deal. Since the ASAPscience YouTube offending someone. Also, it can make you look bad channel had 150,000 subscribers, I gladly gave if you try to address these topics and end up coming them full rights to the video (and it’s ad profits) off as uncaring. in exchange for a mention in the video and a link in the description. So what’s the answer? 3. You better be willing to do the legwork: The newer your blog is, the more you are getting out of a collaboration, so you better be ready to work. Even though Sparring Mind already had a 5-digit newsletter, I was glad to do all of the research for this post and write up the entire script.

I love pointing towards this image as a perfect example of the “low-level” of controversy mentioned in the research:

The honest truth is that these sorts of collaborations don’t necessarily have a set ‘how-to’ and they will depend on your ability to recognize creative opportunities and your willingness to make first contact and put something amazing together. The benefits, however, are well worth the effort! 2.) Creating Content that Causes Controversy If there is one thing that can help your content stand out in a saturated industry, it’s controversy. Here’s the problem: how can you create contro-

internet marketing magazine june 2013

Basically, any topic that people love to argue about, but that won’t actually hurt anyone’s feelings. A topic that stirs up debate, but not hate, spite, and bad vibes.

I recently acted on this research in a post entitled Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers.

It examined “customer feedback vs. internal innovation” and played off of Steve Job’s famous quote that it is “really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” This is a topic that is really controversial in the startup community, because tech startups sometimes feel like their engineers should be the only people stirring innovation. Not surprisingly, the post hit the front page of HackerNews and had about 9,000 people visit within the first 12 hours.

a huge majority of our active (and very engaged) newsletter subscribers join the list through one of our free resources, and I’ve seen incredible returns by spending the extra time to write these over more blog posts. • A “toolbox” works better than a single freebie: I’m sure Corbett and Caleb can back me up here given the Traffic Toolbox’s success, but creating a treasure chest of resources that people can get their hands on (as opposed to yet another measly PDF) has been incredibly effective for conversions from where I’m standing. • Resources can pick up some incredible features: Since we’ve created a variety of guides, they’ve been featured in round-ups on places like Unbounce (#1 of the year), and have been entered (by our audience, not us!) into e-Book competitions and the like. Great articles will obviously get links too, but it is so much easier to reach out and promote free guides on your own. When I first released my guide on 10 Ways to Convert More Customers (with Psychology), it was downloaded nearly 1,000+ times, and that was only during the first few weeks and without off-site promotion. For those of you keeping score at home, that added a boatload of new subscribers to my email list, and since it was a resource and not just some crummy blog post, I was able to successfully promote it with a number of successful off-site appearances, including this post on Copyblogger that got over 3,000+ tweets.

3.) Publish Less Articles & More Resources If you’ve ever heard blogging ninja Derek Halpern speak on traffic generation, you know he recommends a harsh shift in the “content creation balance” recommending that you spend nearly 80% of You’ll notice I’m not the only content marketer doyour time promoting your content and only 20% cre- ing this, check out Copyblogger’s page forthe Scribe ating it. Content Library, chock full of resources made to help promote the software. I agree, and I’ve taken it a step further: I’ve started spending more of my allotted content creation time When’s the last time you created something worth creating resources that are far easier to promote promoting? than regular blog posts. Gregory Ciotti

Corbett himself has shown you how well this works with his downloadable guides and manifestos, but let me break down some insider tips from my software startup Help Scout: • Resources count for over 2/3 of newsletter sign-ups: Seems crazy right? This is likely because it’s a software business and not just a blog, but

is the marketing strategist for Help Scout, the invisible email support software for startups and small businesses. He has years of experience in content strategy for startups. Get more data-driven content from Greg by downloading one of our free resources (no charge).

internet marketing magazine june 2013

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internet marketing magazine june 2013