Internet Marketing Magazine November 2013 by Internet Marketing Magazine

November 2013

JOIN US ON FACEBOOK

> 9 BEST SEO PLUGINS

P17

> LANDING PAGE PAGE DESIGN

P26

ALSO:

THE PERFECT THANK YOU PAGE P33

7 ESSENTIAL ECOMMERCE LEARNINGS FOR 2014

> BEHAVIOURAL MARKETING

P22

COVER STORY: TRAFFIC AND LIST BUILDING LIKE A PRO

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

P30

MEET OUR EXPERT PANEL Jayson DeMers is the Founder and CEO of

AudienceBloom, an internet marketing firm specializing in SEO and social media marketing for small to medium-sized businesses. You can contact Jayson on LinkedIn, Google+, or Twitter. Read his article on SEO Plugins on PAGE 17

Speed PPC is software that automates your PPC

campaign building, allowing you to create highly-targeted ad groups, ads and landing pages in minutes. SpeedPPC doesn’t put you in a straight jacket. It is powerful and flexible for even the most complex campaigns. Read their article on Landing Page Design on PAGE 26

Alexandre Sagala

is an HEC of Montreal graduate, and has occupied the positions of Director of Internet Product Manager and Director of Marketing at eFundraising, Reader’s Digest and Ortivus. He is currently the Vice President of Marketing and Technological Development at Publipage. Read his article on Behavioural Marketing on PAGE 30

Theresa Baiocco

is the Chief Marketing Officer at Conversion Max. She has a Master’s Degree in Marketing from the University of Colorado in Denver, a Master Certification in Conversion Optimization from Market Motive, and she’s a Google AdWords Qualified Individual. She’s also a dog-lover and a travel junkie. Read her article on Thank You Pages on PAGE 33

internet marketing magazine november 2013

CONTENTS

1Expert commentary on what are the big plays that have recently happened online and how they affect you.

1From homeless to millionaire. Mark Anastasi shares his success on traffic and list building in an exclusive interview with Internet Marketing Magazine.

1The 9 Best SEO Plugins That Will Help Your Blog Rank Well in Google

1Discover the Seven Essential eCommerce Learnings for 2014

1Designing a Landing Page Google’s QS Algorithms Will Love

1Increase the relevance of your emails with Behavioural Marketing

1Discover the Anatomy of the Perfect Thank You Page

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

f 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 month’s complete audio interview with Mark Anastasi has now been added. It has lots of sections in it that were not included in the magazine, so be sure to check it out. A special thanks to those who have left reviews in 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 iTunes’ then scroll down and click ‘write a review’, thanks :). NEW: Send us a screenshot of your review in iTunes (info@ internetmarketingmag.net) and we will send you some great Internet Marketing Training resources that I have put together in recent months based on what we are doing in the marketing agency that is working right now. Next issue will be our bumper Christmas/New Years Issue and it has some very cool stuff in it that we haven’t done before so be sure to check that out. We say bumper Christmas/New Years issue because the Internet Marketing Magazine team will shut down for a few weeks over the silly season and will focus on improving our surfing rather than traffic and conversion for a bit. We hope you get great value from Internet Marketing Magazine. Wishing you the best of success online, Regards,

Greg Cassar 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 november 2013

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 CHANGES IT’S ADWORDS AD RANK ALGORITHM Google’s Ad Rank algorithm determines the order of the paid search ads on each search results page as well as how much advertisers pay in the ad auction. Previously, Ad Rank had just two components: your Max CPC Bid (the most you were willing to pay per click) and your Quality Score (Google’s assessment of the quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages combined). Following the recent change Google is now also going to use the presence and performance of your ad extensions in determining your Ad Rank. What’s new is, Ad Extensions are the tiebreakers. If two ads are close, the winner is going to be the one that makes best use of Ad Extensions. The Ad Rank formula now has three components: your Max CPC Bid, your Quality Score, and, as Google states, “the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats.”

Google advised best practice sitelink example

internet marketing magazine november 2013

So what is really going on here? Google is encouraging advertisers to have bigger and more sitelink extensions. Ad Extensions push the organic results lower on the page and ultimately drive more revenue for Google. It’s really only the top 3 positions that have their sitelink extensions showing. The ads down the right hand side have location and call extensions only. The change for business owners and agencies is it means that you now need to be re-writing and testing your extensions and getting enough click through rate on those for your ad to appear in the top 3 positions. > A CHANGING OF THE ‘NICE GUY’ GUARD? Google is the best search engine on the planet and an amazingly innovative and dominant company – of that there is no disputing. But for several years the general perception from business owners and Internet Marketers was that they really didn’t give a damn about them and really didn’t treat them well with things such as banning adwords accounts for life without any notice, and hard to reach support etc. For the most part seems to be changing as Google now provides excellent email support and even phone support and I have seen several instances recently of them working with businesses to help them improve their landing page quality scores rather than just banning their accounts with the old ‘Bang – stop or I’ll Shoot you in the back again’ approach.

> It’s very good to see Google living up to their “Don’t be evil” informal corporate motto. This may be coming about because Facebook offers them some real competition these days as their advertising platform is maturing.

INTERNET UPDATE

Posts on Instagram that are advertising will now have the new sponsored label on it as per the example below.

Facebook, who previously were the nice guys are now becoming more and more difficult to work with – there is no phone support and it is very difficult to even find a link on their platform to submit an advertising related ticket. Does Facebook really need to wait until they get more competition before they improve their customer service? Hopefully they will be smarter than that. > NEW INSTAGRAM NEWSFEED ADS Facebook share prices took a fall in the last month following an announcement from Facebook that they are “seeing a decrease in daily users in younger teens”. Facebook may not be that stressed about it as many of those users are now migrating over to Instagram, which Facebook owns. Facebook will now monetise this Instagram audience with Newsfeed ads starting in the US initially before rolling it out to other regions. It’s ironic that one of the things that was making Facebook “uncool” for the younger audience is now about to be added by the same company to the new platform that they are moving to.

Facebook is carefully adding magazine-quality photo ads to Instagram as it hopes to bring in revenue from the service without alienating users. Early advertisers on the platform includes Levis, Adidas, Lexus, PayPal, Burberry and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. What is interesting is that Facebook is using their Facebook data that they have gathered on users to figure out who best to target the advertising to. Instagram states “We want to show ads from businesses that are interesting to you, and to do that we will use information about what you do on Instagram and Facebook (our parent company). For instance, this might include the people you follow and the photos and videos internet marketing magazine november 2013

INTERNET UPDATE you like on Instagram, and your interests and other basic info on Facebook. Everyone on Instagram will see ads from time to time whether or not they’re Facebook users, and basic information from Facebook helps create a more relevant experience.” > YAHOO AND BING PPC GO THEIR SEPARATE WAYS IN AUSTRALIA Globally Bing and Yahoo have an advertising alliance in search however, in Australia it appears the two sides have been unable to come to agree. Yahoo! Australia chose to go with Google after Mi9 launched Bing Ads in Australia without migrating advertisers from the YSM Panama platform, which Yahoo!7 uses.

What this means for businesses who are currently running Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns is still to be determined. We will report an update on this story as the landscape becomes clear. Google is the big winner out of this with their search dominance in Australia growing even further as a result of this new change. > MOBILE SHOPPERS STARTING AT HOME WITH THEIR BUYING INTENT Yahoo and Dialogue recently interviewed 10,000 consumers age 13 to 64 who use smartphones, tablets, and PCs as they shopped online.

This means that Yahoo Australia search results will now publish Ads from Google. Yahoo hasn’t been very good at communicating how to now go about advertising on their platform in Australia. The way is looks at the moment is that when you opt in to advertise on Google’s search partners in Adwords, which include sites such as AOL, Excite.com and Amazon, you’ll now also be targeting Yahoo.

Some of the key findings are: • 84% start mobile shopping in a category while at home, making mobile activity a clear signal of shoppers’ intent to purchase • 88% of mobile shoppers also use a PC while researching purchases, meaning mobile plays a key role in telling brand stories across multiple devices You cannot choose what partner sites to target, including Yahoo, as they are all grouped together. (Although Google is traditionally quite transparent, it does not reveal which sites make up its search partners.)

internet marketing magazine november 2013

• Shoppers expect relevant mobile ads: 52% are looking for deals, 53% want locationbased ads, and 49% prefer personalized ads. IMM

internet marketing magazine november 2013

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW ALL ABOUT MARK ANASTASI • Mark Anastasi is the author of The Laptop Millionaire. • Mark is an online business and lifestyle creation expert. •An accomplished speaker and educator, with a mission to help business owners and entrepreneurs become financially free using the Internet. • Mark has a large track record of success, with over $2.5 million dollars of eBook and information product sales online.

“

I have over 500 different opt-in pages online. My philosophy is ‘the more you give, the more will come back to you’. The more opt-in pages I have, the more people that are downloading free things from me, the more people will know me, like me, trust me, and want to do business with me eventually.

internet marketing magazine november 2013

“

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

MARK ANASTASI TRAFFIC & LIST BUILDING LIKE A PRO An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar Mark, for those who haven’t come across you before, would you mind telling us a little bit about how you got started online, and your early experiences with Click Bank? MARK: Back in 2003 I was completely broke. I had moved from Greece to England to get a job. I couldn’t find anything good, so I wound up working as a security guard for two years, and doing a bit of telesales. I was so abysmally bad at my job in telesales, that they fired me in 2003. By that stage, I was about £7,000 in debt. I had been kicked out of the place that I was living, because I hadn’t paid rent in a while. I ended up being homeless for about five months on the streets of London. I was squatting in an abandoned building in London with about 20 or so homeless people. I realized that I had to do something pretty drastic to get out of the situation I was in. But then I heard about this seminar. It was a personal development seminar by the Tony Robbins Company close to where I was living in Earl’s Court, in London. I put together the £300 with credit cards and I paid for a ticket. I went to that seminar for myself thinking “You know, I’ve got nothing to lose. I might as well try this. It sounds like an interesting seminar, maybe it can help me.” I went there, and it just blew my mind. They talked about goal setting, they talked about

achieving your goals. They talked about how to identify and eliminate your limiting beliefs. The gentleman sitting next to me at that seminar, his name was Francis, told me during the seminar that he made over a million dollars a year selling eBooks on the Internet. I remember thinking to myself while he was saying that, “this guy is successful, maybe he can give me a job.” I wasn’t thinking entrepreneurially at all. All I’d known growing up was get a good education, get a degree, so you can get a good job. And here I was, with no job, no money, in debt, and not even a place to live. Anyway, I went back to the place I was staying, and I started writing down my goals. I identified my limiting beliefs about money. I did these exercises in neuro-linguistic programming, mental exercises, wrote down things to blast through the 44 limiting beliefs I had about money and success. I identified that my big goal was to make £2,000 a month. And so I wrote down 100 reasons why I had to do that. To this day, that’s probably one of the best, if not the best, exercise I can recommend to anybody. I wrote down 100 reasons why I must make £2,000 a month. Then I brainstormed 100 ways how. The 96th way was eBooks. So I went to a payphone, and I called Francis up, and I said, “Hey Francis, you

internet marketing magazine november 2013

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

remember me?” I reminded him of who I was. I said, “Listen, Francis, here’s my situation.” I told him my living circumstances. And he said, “Oh, you’re calling because you want money or a job. Is that why?” And I was like, “No, I read this book by Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and he says, ‘Work to learn, don’t just work to earn.’” In other words, if you need a job, fine, but get a job where you can learn something that will benefit you for the rest of your life. I said, “I’ll work for you for free, if you’ll just share with me how you’re making money online.” He sort of laughed at that.

target market. He said to me, “Find a website designer, and they’ll put it up for you on the Internet.” And that was it.

GREG: Wow, that’s very clever from your point of view, given that you were at such a low point in your life at that stage, that’s amazing vision you had to see that. That’s excellent. MARK: I was being very excited in my conversation with him. In any case, he laughed, and said that nobody had ever asked him to mentor them, and I was asking him to be my mentor. Then he said, “Mark, don’t worry. You don’t have to work for free, I have plenty of staff, don’t worry about it. In any case, it’s so simple, you just need to do four little things.” Here are the four little things he said: • Step One - chose a target market, and find out what they want. What problem can you solve for this group of people? • Step Two - create the solution. The product or service that can provide a solution to their problem. For example, an eBook could have information that solves their problem. • Step Three - Create the website that sells the product to that target market. It could be a simple sales pitch with a PayPal “Buy now” button, or Click Bank “Buy now” button. Sign up for Clickbank.com, he mentioned as well. • Step Four - Drive traffic to the website that sells the product or solution to that

internet marketing magazine november 2013

I spent the next 25 days like a man possessed. I was working 16-19 hours a day on creating this eBook from the local Internet café with my floppy disk. My first eBook was about diabetes. There was a guy at the seminar I’d attended who had an amazing insight into overcoming or reducing the symptoms of diabetes. I’m did my research and was finding out about all these alternative modalities of healing that doctors never tell you. Then I spent a week figuring out how to get that online. Luckily, I found a web designer who had just started that month. His name was Attila and he was from Hungary. I negotiated to pay him after I started making some money. To cut a long story short, everything I just described cost about £400, and on the 28th day, which I believe was the 17th of April, 2004, I had my first eBook online. I started driving traffic to that site in the way that Francis had

> COVER STORY: told me by buying pay per click traffic from Google Adwords. I was paying $15 or $20 a day on a credit card. And the first day I got 200 or 300 visitors, and no sales. The second day, though, I made my first sale at $67 dollars. The third day, I made two sales. By the end of the week, I was making five sales a day. I was basically buying about 300 clicks a day for about 20 dollars, and out of the 300 clicks 295 of them were saying no to me. But five people a day were buying my eBook at $67 - that was $330 a day. That was $10,000 dollars a month in passive income. While I was sleeping, people in America and around the world were buying my eBook. I moved into a nice place and I paid off my debts - it was just amazing. That’s how I got started. I then launched another five eBooks. In the following year I launched another 21 eBooks, and that is how I got started in that business. So that’s how you ramped it up, by taking the same system that already worked and going into other markets with other products? MARK: Exactly. I did a couple of things to scale things up. One is that I added another 26 or so eBooks, so I had 27 eBooks that were generating, in 2006, for example, $462,000 a year in passive income. But also, I started building the list. I have a list now of 140,000 subscribers in the health niche, people interested in improving their health. That helped scale things up quite dramatically. But at the same time, my passion became sharing this with people. I started delivering personal development seminars in 2005. So I started a small seminar company, and I started

EXPERT INTERVIEW

doing seminars about mindset; self-esteem; the law of attraction; relationships etc. That’s where I took my career next, by leveraging what I’d learned online to grow a seminar business offline as well.

You are very successful at list building What type of lead magnet offers have you found to be the most successful as far as the list building process goes, getting a good conversion rate? MARK: I have over 500 different opt-in pages online. My philosophy is ‘the more you give, the more will come back to you’. The more opt-in pages I have, the more people that are downloading free things from me, the more people will know me, like me, trust me, and want to do business with me eventually. As far as lead magnets go it’s nothing too spectacular, it’s always been eBooks, free reports, interviews, videos, but also things like webinar pages and seminar tickets. For years, I gave away free seminar tickets, and that helped build the list quite dramatically. Free CDs and free DVDs have worked well - For example, I have a page called www. FreeMillionaireMakerDVD.com. At that site, we give away a free DVD of one of my seminar talks about mindset, and that has been incredibly popular. There are many different things you can give away for free, and the more valuable it is, the internet marketing magazine november 2013

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

more people appreciate and opt-in for that value essentially. GREG: It makes good sense. I really liked what you said about the pure number of different offers you’ve got out there. That way, the good thing is that if one of them bombs and doesn’t work, it’s not that big of an issue because something else might interest that exact same prospect, so you can get them in your database and create that relationship and rapport with them over time. MARK: Absolutely. This is kind of the result of different philosophies that I’ve integrated into my business. For example, John Reese in his course ‘Traffic Secrets’ from many years ago said, “Own more of the Internet.” It’s good to have one opt-in page out there, but if you have 500 then you’re owning more real estate online. If you have different blogs you’re owning more real estate. If you have 200 pages per blog, you’re owning more real estate online, where people can find you and connect with you.

The other one is Eben Pagan said “Move the free line”. Eben decided that he’s going to create a newsletter that has such great value that people should pay at least 100 dollars a month even for the newsletter. He said, “I’m going to give it away for free,” and his philosophy was, if I give away $10 million a year in value, from that newsletter, I can expect to receive back $10 million a year. Well, he now makes $20 million a year from his DoubleYourDating.com empire. Combining those two philosophies – ‘moving the free line’ and ‘give away more for free than your competitors are’, that’s the idea there. Another key concept is that ‘money is nothing other than the value created for other people’. So if you create a lot of value for a lot of people, for example, giving away 500 different things for free, it is natural that more value flows back your way.

If you apply the 80/20 principle, which of your traffic sources do you think have contributed to your list building and ultimately your wealth creation the most over the years? MARK: There’s just so many different sources of traffic we get. Basically, I’ve got a daily routine that my team of three or four outsourcers runs for me. Every day they… • Post a new video on YouTube, and then disseminate it on 20 different video sites. • Publish an article and they submit to over 1,000 article directories. • Post my newsletter on my blog • Buy some re-tweets and things like that on fiverr.com, justretweet.com and sponsoredtweets.com • Post on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter • Buy solo ads for email blasts at safeswaps.com • Social Bookmark all the new content,

internet marketing magazine november 2013

> COVER STORY: blog posts, articles, YouTube videos etc on onlywire.com

Once every so often, we also pay bloggers to write about us. In addition, every week we organize a joint venture. So what it means is that it’s like a little content factory that constantly creates and disseminates lots of content for my company. With all these bits of content we are owning more and more real estate online every single day. All these places online have links redirecting back to our opt-in pages, to build the list. But to answer your question about the 80/20 rule, the source of traffic which has been the best by far has been joint ventures. Joint ventures for email and ad swaps, it’s just been amazing. GREG: Well, that’s actually how we even met. Your team reached out to us. MARK: Absolutely. We were looking for some joint venture partners in Australia, and that’s how we came across each other. Here’s what I found out about this. Back in 2005, I started my seminar company in the UK. I had a seminar mentor, and she told me when I asked her, “What is the best way to grow my seminar business? Where can I advertise? Shall

EXPERT INTERVIEW

I advertise on the radio? Shall I advertise in magazines, newspapers, classified ads? What can I do to get more people to know about these events?” And she said, “No, forget all of those things. You’re going to lose money if you try doing it that way. The best way is to joint venture.” She gave me a simple example. She said, “Imagine this. You have 6,000 people on your list now, Mark. What if you email your list for George over there, and George emails his list for you. It hasn’t cost you anything, it hasn’t cost George anything, but now you are doubling your reach in the marketplace. You might get 100 subscribers through that, he might get 100 subscribers from that.” So the point of all this is that I took that to heart, and started setting up some joint venture partnerships in the UK. Up to that point, I was getting maybe 80 or 100 people to my events. Fast forward two months later, we’re now in February 2006, and I had lined up 20 joint venture partnerships. I was mailing my list for them sometimes every few days and they were giving away something for free to my subscribers. I was doing that in return, and in February 2006 I ran this seminar called The Mental Game of Money, and we didn’t have 100 people at that event, we had 1,000 attendees at that event. GREG: So it just changed your math dramatically then. MARK: Completely. And how much did it cost me to multiply my seminar business tenfold, overnight practically? Absolutely zero; in fact, that entire year, our sales were £1,160,000 in sales, and I hadn’t spent a dime on advertising or marketing. Then the following year, I’d filmed a little workshop called ‘The eBooks Mastery internet marketing magazine november 2013

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

Workshop’. I sold 500 sets of the seven DVD home study course of that workshop at $600 each. It generated close to half a million dollars, with all of that thanks to joint venture traffic. With these traffic techniques it’s all-cumulative. For example, in 2010, we had a million visitors to our sites. In 2011, a million visitors. Then I started scaling up this content factory strategy and owning more of the internet, and in 2012, we did 1.2 million visitors. In 2013, now, we are on track to get 1.5 million visitors.

joint ventures; leverage your content and your knowledge. But even if you don’t have any knowledge, content, or information you can learn about webinars, find an expert, have them do the presentation, and you split the sales 50/50. Actually, there are about eight or nine business models when it comes to webinars. GREG: Have you found that 90 minute webinars are more successful than the 60 minute model?

Mark Anastasi on the set of Friends in Warner Bros studio

Which of the many business models that you teach are you finding your new students are doing well with in 2013, building into 2014? MARK: The best model that we’ve seen by far in the past few years is the webinar business model. We just held a Laptop Millionaire world tour. In 2012, I published my book ‘The Laptop Millionaire’. It became a New York Times bestseller. We just completed a 12 city seminar tour, where we basically explained what the book was about, and I promoted it, and we took people from the audience and got them on stage. They didn’t have a business, they’d never done a Webinar before. That was on a Friday, and by Sunday they had a ready-made webinar completed, and they were presenting that webinar for the first time. Many generated from a 90 minute webinar anywhere from $3,000 to $21,000 in 90 minutes. Webinars are a fantastic way to leverage mailing lists; leverage

internet marketing magazine november 2013

MARK: Definitely. The old saying is that ‘the more you tell, the more you sell’, and that’s true with webinars as well, as long as you are not boring. They say that the worst sin in marketing is being boring. But 90 minutes works. It gives you enough time to tell your story, to connect with the audience, to give great content and value, and talk about your offer. GREG: What are your thoughts about price points where you’re better off taking people off to an application process, rather than a buy now, or do you do payment plans? MARK: We’ve never done it with applications. We’d rather have people take action straight away. How we typically do it is that there’s

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

the offer, for example $500 at the end of the webinar. Then the following day, we’ll have a webinar replay, where now, the second time around, there’s a payment plan – eg. three installments of $197. That seems to double the sales from the original webinar.

LaptopMillionaire.tv

Sometimes what we’ll do is have two or three repeats in the following days. For example, if the Webinar was on Thursday, there’s going to be the same webinar again on the Friday, on the Saturday, or twice on Sunday. And these would be like live events, at a specific time. And then the video replay might be available for another week or so. But there’s an element of scarcity there as well, where the repeat is not always available. GREG: We have found that as well. If the Webinar replay is always available without the scarcity element then it goes on their ‘to-do list’ and they are not as likely to watch it as if there is a scarcity component to it. What’s the best place to find you online? MARK: Please feel free to visit my site LaptopMillionaire.tv. It’s the blog and the site for my book ‘The Laptop Millionaire’. Also please checkout the free DVD at FreeMillionaireMakerDvd.com. IMM

internet marketing magazine november 2013

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

internet marketing magazine november 2013

SEO PLUGINS

THE 9 BEST SEO PLUGINS THAT WILL HELP YOUR BLOG RANK WELL IN GOOGLE By Jayson DeMers

EO (search engine optimization) is confusing to the average blogger. Some have heard the term, but many still don’t know what it even means. Nonetheless, most bloggers know or have been told that it needs to be carefully integrated into every aspect of their writing and website. Unfortunately, most bloggers feel lost when it comes to actual tactical implementation. To make matters worse, SEO forums are littered with terrible information from self-proclaimed “experts” that are further adding to this confusion. So, what’s a blogger to do? Let’s start by defining what SEO means. SEO, or search engine optimization, simply put, is the art of improving your website’s organic search traffic. Due to the rise of blogging as a way to make money online and build visibility, credibility, and authority, competition for search engine visibility is heating up faster than ever. As a result, being SEO-conscious has never been more important and plays a major role in driving quality traffic to your website. While there are myriad techniques and strategies that require extensive work, there are several ways to get an SEO boost with minimal effort if your website is on WordPress (which I highly recommend). In fact, the WordPress platform has plenty of SEO plugins that do most of the work while increasing visibility in search engines. Most of these plugins are created by experienced developers that understand the fundamentals of ranking well and have integrated the

necessary features for success. Here are some of the more helpful SEO plugins that are available.

All in One SEO Pack This is one of the best ways to get started, and is perfect for those with minimal experience. Once activated, this plugin will quickly help to improve visibility by automatically optimizing the title of each post. In addition to the normal WordPress tags, it offers additional tagging to help search engines find content with greater ease. It also has the option to alter the title and description that appears in search engines for a higher level of control. Some other features include: • Google Analytics support • Ability to override META keywords and descriptions • Nonce security If you’re new to SEO plugins, the All in One SEO Pack is relatively easy to learn. After getting the hang of it, it’s possible to fine-tune each post for maximum effectiveness. There’s even a support forum in case there are any issues. internet marketing magazine november 2013

SEO PLUGINS Yet Another Related Posts Plugin When someone finds a page through search engine results, there’s a good chance that they will be interested in similar content on the website. This plugin capitalizes on this fact by automatically displaying related posts at the bottom of each article. It accomplishes this by using a customizable algorithm to scan tags, content and titles. This is beneficial because it often leads to visitors exploring more content, resulting in more overall page views and a lower bounce rate. Consequently, this often results in higher conversion rates, increased social media followers, and increased sales. The best part is that it doesn’t require any effort on your part. After it’s been activated, it takes care of everything on its own. Twitter Facebook Social Share Due to the new social media obsession and the way the people share content via networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, along with the progressing integration of social media with SEO, it’s important to encourage social sharing and make it convenient. Like traditional backlinks, social shares help search engines figure out what content people are enjoying, which results in higher search engine rankings for that content. While the exact impact of social signals is still somewhat unclear, it’s clear that it has a beneficial impact on rankings. The Twitter Facebook Social Share plugin is helpful because it’s one of the most straightforward and easy-to-use plugins. All that’s required is installation and activation, and it automatically places social share buttons at the top or bottom of each post. Currently, it allows visitors to post content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Stumbleupon. WordPress SEO by Yoast This plugin is similar to the All in One SEO Pack, but is a bit more sophisticated. One of its key

internet marketing magazine november 2013

features is the snippet preview that displays what a post will look like in search engine results. This is advantageous because the title can be changed if it’s too short or too long. If the META description (a basic element of SEO that’s often used by search engines to figure out what a page is about) is out of place in relation to the context, this plugin will let you know. By optimizing these aspects of each post, it’s usually possible to maximize click through rates and bring in more traffic. If you’re sick of being outranked by sites that duplicate your content, this plugin can help by including a link to your RSS feed that points to the original article. WordPress SEO also utilizes comprehensive XML sitemaps (another behindthe-scenes SEO element that is largely invisible to humans but is very important for helping search engines index your website). My favorite feature of WordPress SEO by Yoast is its ability to seamlessly set up Google Authorship markup on your website, enabling your author avatar to display next to your pages in search results. This improves click-through rate (the percentage of searchers that actually click your website in the search results), increasing organic search traffic. UppSite It’s no secret that mobile devices are extremely popular. More and more people are using them every day to access the Internet and stay in touch. For this reason, it’s never been more important to have a website that’s mobile friendly. Otherwise, it’s easy to lose out on valuable traffic that may end up going elsewhere because of a negative mobile experience. Rather than going to all the trouble of creating an alternate mobile website or spending big money on responsive web design, UppSite takes a WordPress site and turns it into an HTML 5 app. From there, visitors can view it on the mobile device of their choice including an iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and tablet.

This provides a seamless viewing experience with fast loading pages and simple navigation. Furthermore, responsive design is detected by Google and rewarded with better search rankings for users performing the search on a mobile device. As mobile becomes the new mainstream, this will become more and more essential for business websites to capitalize on mobile search traffic. Google XML Sitemap for Images This plugin operates on the same premise as WordPress SEO by Yoast’s XML sitemap, but is used to optimize pictures. It works by creating a sitemap of any image URLs that are incorporated into each post. Doing so is important because search engines don’t always pick up on images and they may not be discovered. By installing this simple plugin, your images will be indexed and more likely to appear in Google’s image search results, giving your website the opportunity to rank and receive more organic search traffic. Google XML Sitemap for Videos Just like the sitemap for images, this plugin takes SEO one step further and helps search

SEO PLUGINS

engines find videos embedded in posts. Whenever there is a link to a video on YouTube, Vimeo or any other site, it will add it to the sitemap. This indexation of multimedia content will allow your website more opportunities to rank in search engines. WP Super Cache Another factor that’s important in the eyes of search engines is page loading speed. The faster the better, and sites that take too long to load can suffer ranking drops as a result. We live in a fast-paced world where people want their information quickly and without complication. In most cases, the average Internet user will wait a maximum of 5 seconds for a page to load before they leave. Consequently, it’s important that a WordPress site is able to load completely in the shortest time possible. The WP Super Cache plugin is designed to generate static HTML files from a WordPress site instead of processing bulkier PHP scripts. This results in a significantly shorter download time and overall better performance. Visitors internet marketing magazine november 2013

SEO PLUGINS won’t have to wait as long for the site to load and can explore with greater ease. Faster page load time will result in better search engine rankings as well. Google Analytics for WordPress Keeping track of which keywords are receiving traffic and identifying visitor patterns is vital for long-term success. Otherwise, it’s like blindly throwing arrows and hoping that one hits the target. That’s why this plugin is a goldmine of valuable information, and is ideal for determining which content is getting found and what adjustments need to be made. After syncing up Google Analytics for WordPress with your website, this plugin will display upto-date data concerning a variety of factors. This includes visitor demographic, location,

language, entry pages, bounce rate, etc. More importantly, it shows how much traffic coming via search engines and the specific numbers. It also creates a list of which keywords are receiving the most searches. This is helpful for choosing keywords in the future and can optimize your entire SEO campaign. Conclusion You now know everything you need to know about SEO plugins to get started with your SEO-integration initiative. Simply install these plugins, configure them, and then publish lots of excellent content on your blog. You’ll be racing ahead of the competition in no time, while enjoying more visitors, readers, and subscribers. IMM

Download Your Complimentary

Internet Marketing

CHEAT SHEETS STOP Advertising Online Until You Read This Free Report

Find out why most online ads, sales letters and web sites don't work – get 'Cheat Sheets' and discover how to get more customers fast – as easy as 1, 2, 3.



The 12 most powerful words in the English language and how to use them to spice up your ads and sales letters with that added touch of 'mojo'

Also discover marketing and advertising secrets like...



The vast majority of business owners never figure out the concept which allows them to write ads no interested customer in their right mind can resist (and yet the "solution" is easy and will send your sales through the roof)



The 2 fatal mistakes amateurs make when putting together an advertising campaign



How to make sure your customers never forget about you (Plus - the



The single most important secret (less than 5% of business owners follow) behind long term advertising success



How a simple '7 minute change' change to your ad can drastically boost results (get this part right, and you're 80% of the way there)

internet marketing magazine november 2013

SINGLE most important thing you can do to get them to buy over and over and over again... and the worst sin you could ever commit an unforgiveable act that can destroy your business!) Once you have these shortcut 'Cheat Sheets' in your marketing and advertising arsenal, you'll see immediately results. PLUS you'll finally have the confidence to take advantage of opportunities you used to let pass you by. But download the "Cheat Sheets" while you can. (Complimentary access limited) For FREE, INSTANT ACCESS go to http://www.adcheatsheets.com/imag

SUMMIT

TR E G U YO

S T E !!! K C TINOW

15-17 NOV. BRISBANE 22-24 NOV.MELBOURNE Live in

Australia

internet marketing magazine november 2013

ECOMMERCE

7 ESSENTIAL ECOMMERCE LEARNINGS FOR 2014 By Greg Cassar

013 has been a big year for the maturity of eCommerce with online retail sales growing exponentially as a result of a larger percentage of the everyday public now comfortable to buy online.

It’s more cost effective to source stock in only one niche market. It’s also much easier to rank from an SEO point of view if your eCommerce store is just about one thing rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

2. Speed of Implementation: There is no longer any need to over engineer the build. Unless you are building a highly complex store that needs to scale to handle millions of site visitors then there is no need to go down the custom build from scratch route when first getting started.

The mobile web has continued to grow and whilst mobile commerce is still in it’s infancy, mobile retail sales are now becoming commonplace. 2014 is set to be an amazing time in the history of Niche eCommerce. As Internet Marketers there are several key learning’s to be taken from 2013 for building into 2014. Below is a summary of 7 Essential eCommerce lessons for the modern entrepreneur. 1. It’s time to niche down. Unless you have access to large pools of Venture Capital (VC) funds, the cost of entering the market as a dominant mass merchant retailer is now very prohibitive. So the chances of you building the next Amazon.com are slim, but opportunities still exist to be a dominant eCommerce retailer in many niche markets.

internet marketing magazine november 2013

In recent years custom builds have been commonplace with complex platforms such as Magento. Many other eCommerce platform service providers have now matured and offer viable feature rich platform alternatives for the majority of Internet Retailers. Two good examples of these are BigCommerce and Shopify. With our Traffic and Conversion Marketing Agency we have now changed from doing Magento eCommerce builds to BigCommerce to enable much faster and more cost effective eCommerce store development for our clients. Whilst BigCommerce is very feature rich and on the surface an amazing solution - we have found BigCommerce’s support to be less than satisfactory and they are slow with adopting responsive templates, so we will be doing more Shopify eCommerce store builds in the near future.

> With both of these solutions there is many ‘off the shelf’ templates that provide a good look and feel straight out of the box. Obviously a more professional and unique look and feel can be achieved by implementing your own graphic design layer over the top of the theme.

3. The Maths with Drop Shipping Stinks. As a general rule Drop Shipping as a business model is for mugs, as the cost of traffic makes it very hard for the maths to be profitable if you are only making 5% to 20% on a product sale. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, such as if you are selling big-ticket items where there is enough profit in every sale to make it viable. Not all drop shipping is bad, as it can be a great way to cost effectively test out the viability of a market without large outlays of funds for stock. Drop shipping can also be an excellent way of expanding your product range beyond your core best selling products. Still with that being said, as a general rule the maths for drop shipping makes it hard to be viable as a serious player. It is for this reason that we learned to import from china this year so as to make the maths more viable with making closer to 50% per transaction.

ECOMMERCE

We learned the ‘import from China game’ from Craig Ford over at MyImportLabel. com. We recommend if you are serious about eCommerce that you invest in these skills also.

4. Use Responsive Themes straight out of the gate. It’s not uncommon to see as high as 25% of traffic hitting sites from mobile devices as 2013 draws to a close. It is for this reason that all eCommerce stores really need to have a mobile solution. The most straight forward least hassle mobile solution for an eCommerce store is a responsive theme (a theme that adjusts itself based on the size of the screen it is displaying on). 12 months ago we were writing in this very publication that the standard of responsive themes was of a very low level – well that has all changed and now there are some very sophisticated responsive themes available for just about every eCommerce Platform. We would recommend if you are purchasing a new theme that you make sure that it behaves responsively as a mandatory requirement. 5. Utilise Cart Abandonment to recover lost sales. This may not be a mandatory requirement if you are just getting started but once you start to do any sort of serious internet marketing magazine november 2013

ECOMMERCE volume through your store it’s a great addition. Site visitors who have started but have not completed the checkout process are closer to making a purchasing decision. Studies have shown that you can increase conversion rates by as much as 48% if you follow up with potential customers who abandoned the checkout process. Most eCommerce platforms now have easy add-ons or extensions that will integrate with your autoresponder to automatically follow up with site visitors who have abandoned your cart. Barilliance is another great solution for easily implementing email cart abandonment in a cost effective way with simple integration.

An example of Google Shopping Ads

Dynamic remarketing lets you automatically create customized ads that connect with your site visitors by reminding them of items they’ve seen or bought in the past on your site and suggesting other products they might like. Google reports that click-through rates have been recorded as much as 450% higher from dynamic remarketing campaigns vs. campaigns that did not use dynamic creative for remarketing.

6. Test out Google Merchant Feed. Exporting your sites feed and importing it into Google Merchant feed opens up two new exciting opportunities for you – Google Shopping Ads (Product Listing Ads) and Google Dynamic Remarketing for Retail. Product Listing Ads appear in their own box on Google search results above or to the right of the organic search results. It can be a very cost effective way of getting traffic, with our testing resulting in cost per clicks of as low as 40% of the cost of standard Adwords ads.

internet marketing magazine november 2013

An example of Google Dynamic Remarketing Ads

7. eBay is another great way to acquire customers and eCommerce store traffic. We find most retailers focus on a Google-centric approach for eCommerce store traffic. One

key traffic source that is not to be overlooked is eBay as a place to acquire buyers rather than just leads for Internet Retailers.

Need More Traffic? Need More Leads? Need to Reduce Your Adwords Cost Per Click & Cost Per Lead?

Once you make a sale on eBay you can add that customer to your database and market to them again by sending them relevant related offers on your eCommerce store. We learned a lot of the finer points of eBay marketing this year from Matt and Amanda Clarkson at BiddingBuzz.com.

CLICK HERE

The great thing about selling on the eBay platform is that there is no cost of traffic as eBay provides the traffic for you. If you are in eCommerce its crucial to master eBay also as another source of income as well as a way of acquiring buyers that you can market to again.

to touch base with Greg Cassar and the team at InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com about Professional Adwords Services with a real focus on ROI for you the business owner.

So feel free to take these learningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on board and test and measure them for yourself in your eCommerce business for a very prosperous 2014. IMM internet marketing magazine november 2013

LANDING PAGE DESIGN

QUALITY TIME:

DESIGNING A LANDING PAGE GOOGLE’S QS ALGORITHMS WILL LOVE By Speed PPC needs with those of your marketing? Let’s take a look at the three tiers Google judges your landing page by and explore how to make the cut without losing conversion power.

It’s no secret why this tension exists between marketers and the search giant. Google only wants meaty, content rich websites that offer uniquely valuable experiences its users cannot get anywhere else. They have been very explicit about this, and will actively remove pages from AdWords that do not measure up to their requirements. In contrast, marketers frequently find that less can be more. A compact, laser-targeted sales page that focuses on delivering one message with few on-page distractions works best for conversion. So how do you reconcile Google’s

internet marketing magazine november 2013

That said, you don’t need to publish a book there, but a headline and an opt in box will not suffice either. Be sure to include a

“

Google only wants meaty, content rich websites that offer uniquely valuable experiences its users can’t get anywhere else.

“

or many creative marketing people, entering your landing page URL into a new ad and submitting it to AdWords can be a nail-biting moment of worry. Will the quality score (QS) decide that your optimized, highconverting sales page isn’t up to their standards of quality? If so, will your ad’s position suffer, or perhaps fall off the first page altogether?

The Page Must Contain Relevant and Original Content This requirement is without question the biggest landing page QS determinant of all. The reason is simple — Google’s searchers are its users, and their single mission is to provide the highest quality user experience possible. Therefore, before they proudly display your ad and direct traffic at it, they want to make sure people will be satisfied with your page once they get there. The only way they can do this is by assessing the contents of the site.

> detailed description of your product or service, testimonials, and links to blog articles, PDFs, or other original content hosted elsewhere on the same domain. QS Action Items: Feature your high converting offer above the fold: If you have found that a particular headline or quick offer coupled with an optin form converts exceptionally well with your audience, you don’t need to get rid of it. Simply place these elements prominently above the fold and organize the rest of your content beneath them.

Break up your content with tags: When writing descriptive content on your page, be sure to use <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> tags. Containing important keywords and phrases within these tags lets Google know that they are related to your page. Ensure that your landing page content can be read by Google: In some cases, a landing page already features plenty of content, except that it is a format that cannot be processed by bots. Pages that contain their important content in large images or videos suffer because Google cannot read it.

LANDING PAGE DESIGN

The Page Must Be Trustworthy and Transparent A crucial part of Google’s desired user experience is the safety and protection of its searchers. Unfortunately, the Internet provides a thick veil of anonymity that some fly-bynight marketers exploit to take advantage of people. Naturally, Google does not want to send a single person to a questionable-looking page. AdWords guru Perry Marshall suggests asking yourself if Google’s ad reps would be comfortable sending their grandmother to your landing page, and tweaking until you can confidently say “yes.”

To guard against unscrupulous behavior, the quality score engine judges landing pages for transparency. It seeks to understand how easy it is to contact you, and if your page informs visitors of how you will use their personal information. QS Action Items: Make sure you have a privacy policy: This is the standard in information use disclosure. Your privacy policy should explain what value you intend to provide with the information that you collect from your visitors, and how you will protect it from third parties. Make contact simple: Websites that have something to hide don’t often make it easy for internet marketing magazine november 2013

LANDING PAGE DESIGN visitors to contact them through a variety of mediums. Provide your business address and phone number in the footer of the page, as well as in a separate “Contact” page readily accessible from your navigation. Take advantage of Google Maps: While there is no evidence to suggest that including a Google Map of your location on your contact page gives you a particular boost, it does help increase transparency which adds to an overall favorable quality score.

The Page Must Provide Easy Navigation If a visitor arrives on your website and cannot find what they are looking for, how valuable of a page have you created? Google knows that ease-of-use is a top indicator of quality and your navigation is the cornerstone of it all.

While you don’t want to distract your visitors away from your offer, a page with no navigation looks like a scammy sales letter fed into Google and your QS will suffer. You don’t have to place a lot of design emphasis on your navigation, but it needs to be present to comply. QS Action Items: Provide a top and bottom navigation: Your nav

internet marketing magazine november 2013

should appear once at the top of your page, and as small links in the footer. Include a page’s nav button text in its title tag: Continuity between a link’s anchor text and what is in that page’s title tag is a big signal of what the page is about. For example, if your nav button says “Contact Us”, the title tag of the contact page should also contain those words. Submit your XML site map: Using Google Webmaster tools, you can submit your website’s XML site map, which greatly aids their crawlers in discovering all the pages and content on your website.

Making Google Smile Instead of Slap

If there is one key take-away running through all of these tips, it is that Google’s quality score is increasingly mirroring its SEO algorithms. The goal of the company is high quality and relevancy across the board, and if they had a perfect world they would want their paid results to be as instantly relevant as the natural ones. The nature of paid search means that this 1:1 quality ratio will likely never be achieved, but the closer you can come to designing a site that ranks naturally, the fewer QS headaches you will encounter. IMM

internet marketing magazine november 2013

BEHAVIOURAL MARKETING

BEHAVIOURAL MARKETING:

INCREASE THE RELEVANCE OF YOUR EMAILS By Alexandre Sagala

“

Behavioural marketing consists in adapting your message, its communication method and moment according to each individual. This will render the communication much more relevant and effective.

internet marketing magazine november 2013

“

BEHAVIOURAL MARKETING

ne of the marketing challenges of today is producing a message that resonates with your customers or prospects. They are inundated with advertisement, sales messages and phone calls both at home and at work, which makes it difficult for them to listen to and focus on your message. Would you like to be able to better adapt your message to your customers? Would you like to have the attention of your prospects? If your answer to both of these questions is yes, behavioural marketing is the solution for you. Behavioural marketing consists in adapting your message, its communication method and moment according to each individual. This will render the communication much more relevant and effective. This is the key to success. For our message to stand out from the mass, we need to increase our relevance. How to increase the relevance of your marketing If you have read some of my columns in the Grenier aux nouvelles or on the Publipage blog, you are already aware of my opinion regarding non-personalized mass communication: it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work! And if by some chance

mass send-outs work for your business, imagine what the results would be if the message was personalized! That being said, how do we make our Internet marketing more relevant? The first step is accepting the fact that as marketing managers, we have to allow our customers and prospects to tell us what they find relevant or not. Thus, an increase in relevance comes through your customers and not through the marketing department. Here is a concrete situation to better illustrate my point. You work for a retail business which sells various products for men and women. You own an internet website on which your products are categorized and you send a monthly newsletter. A pretty standard situation for a retailer today. Here are a few steps you can

take to make your Internet marketing more relevant. First and foremost, make sure your newsletter is addressed to at least one individual by their name. You can also add other relevant information for your customer. Retailers with stores located in various regions could modify the newsletter so that it originates from the store closest to the recipient. In the case of a pharmacy, there could be information on its location and on the ownersâ&#x20AC;Ś All of this would serve to make your email more relevant and more personal for the customer receiving it. Second, change your newsletter template and add a dynamic zone in which you can add offers, promotions or content based on your customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; demographic information. For example, a retail business could insert internet marketing magazine november 2013

BEHAVIOURAL MARKETING promotions on products according to gender: a man would receive the promotions for the men and the women, the promotions for the women. The same logic could be used for age or any other criteria or combination of criteria (age + gender). Once more, our newsletter communication has become much more relevant. The right content needs to be sent to the right person. Third, use your customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; interactions and actions to better target their interests. Take the above mentioned example: if I was one of your customers, I would have received an email for men in my age group that was addressed to me personally. A good start, but it would be even more relevant to offer me promotions or content based on my interests. For example, if I visited the sports section on your website, it would be relevant to send along with the newsletter current promotions or content having to do with sports. Another idea would be to use the information from my interactions with the newsletter (the articles read, the promotions consulted) to target my interests even further. The fourth step would be to put an emphasis on the timing

internet marketing magazine november 2013

of the communications. For example, a marketing campaign to invite me to revisit the website when I havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t visited in a long time could be put in place. A campaign to wish me a happy birthday, or one to offer me related products two weeks following a purchase, etc. Relevant messages sent at the right time are very effective. And last but not least, you could close the loop by creating communication sequences â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a series of sendouts adapted to my profile (demographic information, interactions and timing). I receive the newsletter, I visit your website, I use your fidelity card and I make purchases. All those criteria and actions can trigger micro marketing campaigns that are highly-targeted and highlyrelevant. By putting this type of behavioural marketing in place, your campaigns become extremely relevant both on the message level and the timing. All these changes contribute to helping you stand out from the competition and escape the stream of useless and irrelevant communication. These changes are not all easy to apply, but the important thing is to start changing your practices today. Relevance is the future. IMM

THANK YOU PAGE

THE ANATOMY OF THE PERFECT THANK YOU PAGE By Theresa Baiocco

ou put a lot of effort into your landing pages. You follow a process to analyze all the pages in your conversion funnel and identify where people drop out, then you run A/B or multivariate tests to improve those pages. And your conversion rates are increasing as a result. Congratulations! But what are you doing to reduce buyer’s remorse after the conversion? Are you giving as much attention to your thankyou page as the rest of the pages in your funnel? If not, keep reading because the thank-you page is one of the most important pages in the conversion process. Unfortunately, it’s also the most overlooked by webmasters and marketers, which is why so many of them end up looking like this:

What do I do now? And why are you asking me to book now? I thought I just did that! If you have an ecommerce site, don’t think that just because you got the sale, you’re done. After all, people still shop around after buying, and they can certainly cancel their order and get a refund if they find something they like better. Same goes for lead gen. Even though they filled out your form or talked to your sales rep, it doesn’t mean they’re not also filling out forms on your competitors’ sites and talking to them at the same time. So how do you reduce the chances of that?

internet marketing magazine november 2013

THANK YOU PAGE With the perfect thank-you page. Let’s dissect what makes a perfect e-commerce thank-you page by looking at the master, Amazon:

> First, I am thanked and get confirmation that

my order was placed, as well as the reassurance that an email confirmation has been sent.

> I also get confirmation of my delivery date. > I can review or edit my order, even after it

was confirmed (how many businesses are afraid to offer this?).

> Notice important calls-to-action are above

the fold: First, I’m invited to share what I just bought via facebook, twitter or email. This obviously isn’t relevant for the majority of products that I buy on Amazon, but even if I do this only once in a while, Amazon is getting fantastic reach with the items I do share. I’m also reminded of the items I recently viewed — and haven’t bought yet, mind you — in case I’m still interested in them.

> Notice how well page is personalized for me:

1) I counted 30 instances of “you,” “your,” or my name. 2) Not only am I reminded of items I’ve viewed in the past (baby mattresses), but I’m also introduced to items related to that search (cribs). 3) Amazon suggests new (and everyone loves new) TV shows for me based on what I’ve watched in the past. 4) Same with books and what’s in my wish list. Because Amazon tracks what I’ve viewed and bought in the past, I’m actually interested in the products they’re offering. This isn’t just a generic list of products related to the coffee grinder I just bought; this is, a list totally personalized for me, based on my previous activities.

> Notice the social proof: Every recommended

product has ratings and reviews. I can see what other products customers viewed.

> Notice how they try to re-engage me: It’s clear

internet marketing magazine november 2013

that the goal of this page is to re-engage me and get me to buy something else or convince someone I know to buy something. This is just one of the reasons why Amazon is the master. It’s a stark contrast from most thank-you pages, that basically tell you to get lost after they’ve gotten what they want from you.

> And for lead gen:

THANK YOU PAGE

Here is a checklist for a good thank-you page:

> Again, this page below thanks the visitor for their action.

> It tells them what will happen next — and

when: “One of these tax strategists will contact you within 25 minutes.” Important: don’t overpromise here. Make sure your sales team can realistically deliver on the timeframe.

> If the visitor decides s/he doesn’t want to wait 25 minutes, s/he is invited to call and speak to someone immediately.

> The company’s credentials are near this callto-action.

> I love the fact that pictures and short bios of

the people who will call back are featured. (A video would be even better.) This accomplishes 2 things: (1) It establishes a human connection before the salesperson even calls the prospect, which reduces the chance that the prospect will also fill out a form at a competing firm while waiting for a call back; and (2) It warms the lead for the salesperson and makes the prospect more receptive to talking to him once he calls.

> Notice the social proof with 2 testimonials,

which reinforces that this firm has helped other people with similar problems.

> Thanks the visitor for converting and confirms that it was completed successfully. It includes the details of the transaction if applicable.

> Reinforces why converting was a fabulous idea.

> Tells people what to expect next, and when. It’s specific and only promises what can be delivered, such as a phone call within 10 minutes or an email receipt.

> Has another call-to-action, such as to like/

follow the company on social media, share information about the transaction with the visitor’s own network, or to buy something else of interest to the buyer.

> Establishes a human connection. Just like for the rest of your site, you should define a goal for your thank-you page, then run it through A/B tests. By putting the same amount of time and effort into your thank-you page as you do on the rest of the pages in your conversion funnel, you can increase sales and reduce the chance that your visitors will also convert on your competitors’ site. IMM

internet marketing magazine november 2013

Important: Become a member today

Your Free 24 Month Subscription is Valued

at $311.88

& Now Includes Members Area Access

and you will be notified the instant new episodes of ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’ become available... You will also receive access to the Members Area for video training, expert interviews, eBooks, webinars and much more…

Register your details now at http://InternetMarketingMag.net to get access to the Members Area, the Webinars, the Expert Interviews & all Back Issues’

Experience the Benefits of the Internet Marketing Magazine in your life this year If you have enjoyed this edition of ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’ please head along to http://www.facebook.com/ InternetMarketingMagazine and click ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ to share the message with fellow switched on marketers, business owners and entrepreneurs

internet marketing magazine november 2013