Internet Marketing Magazine March 2014

MARCH 2014

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> EYE TRACKING INSIGHTS

> CREATING EYE-CATCHING DISPLAY ADS

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> SMART LEADERSHIP LESSONS

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> SPLIT TEST RESULTS P32

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> SOCIAL MEDIA PHOTO TOOLS P22

COVER STORY:

CONNECT LIKE A PRO ON LINKEDIN

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

MEET OUR EXPERT PANEL Fabian Harmik Stelzer

is the Co-Founder & CEO of EyeQuant. Fabian studied Cognitive Science in Osnabrueck and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zuerich. He helped launch Stan James’ Outfoxed Project - the world’s first social search software - before it became Lijit Networks and got acquired by Federated Media Publishing in 2011. Fabian co- founded EyeQuant in 2009 to empower every design decision with fast, reliable data.

Read his article on Eye Tracking Insights on PAGE 14

Adam Hartung

has more than 30 years of experience developing and implementing successful business strategies, making him a leading speaker in business growth and innovation.

He is currently CEO of Spark Partners and Soparfilm Energy and is on the Boards of other private companies. As the top Leadership columnist for Forbes.com since 2009, Adam has been featured in additional publications such as Rolling Stone, The Week, Inc. and BBC Television for his highly accurate and bold market predictions.

Adam also provides Board advisory services as a Fellow of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD).

Read his article on Smart Leadership Lessons on PAGE 18

Fiona Lewis

is an internet marketer and author of Mumpreneurs Online: EXPOSED. She established Mumpreneurs Online and Mentoring Mums Online as a way to pass over her knowledge to mums who are wanting to start an online business from home. Fiona also launched the Savvy Mastermind, a program which offers a higher level of internet marketing coaching and Super Savvy Business – an intersection of all Fiona’s activity as a Mumpreneur and as an Internet Marketer.

Read her article on Social Media Photo Tools on PAGE 22

Danielle Forget

is a Communications graduate with a true passion for online media. Currently she holds the title of Marketing Coordinator for WhatRunsWhere. Connect with Danielle on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Read her article on Creating Eye-Catching Display Ads on PAGE 28

Michael Aagaard is an Optimizer of Websites

and Decision-Making Processes, Conversion Copywriter and International Speaker. He has spent about 60-70 hours a week testing and optimizing websites in order to gain a deeper understanding of what really works in Online Marketing and Conversion Rate Optimization. www.contentverve.com Read his article on Split Test Results on PAGE 32

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CONTENTS

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1Expert

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

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1Alex

Pirouz shares his secrets on How to Connect Like a Pro on LinkedIn in an exclusive interview with Internet Marketing Magazine.

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1Discover

The 3 Most Surprising Insights From a 200 Website Eye-Tracking Study

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1Learn

The Smart Leadership Lessons from Facebook’s WhatsApp Acquisition

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1The10

Simple Photo Editing Tools You Can Use To Create Great Visual Content For Social Media (Plus 5 Tools For Infographics!)

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lLearn

the 5 Rules For Creating EyeCatching Display Ads 1Case

Study – 18.59% Increase in Downloads by Tweaking one Bullet Point

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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hime flies and we are now well and truly into March. I’ve already had 2 trips to the states to get the most up to date news on the latest tools, tips and strategies that are working online now. I joined the Digital Marketer Warroom top level mastermind this year.

This amazing environment will give us exposure to amazing people and strategies that we may not have encountered previously.

We will do our best to keep you at the leading edge of Digital Marketing in 2014.

From a platform point of view we’ve now stopped publishing to the Zinio platform. We apologise for the inconvenience for our several thousand readers there but the platform wasn’t cost effective for us to publish onto it, so we needed to pull it. The reality is that most people have an Apple, Android or Amazon tablet these days, so those are the big platforms that we will focus on publishing to.

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 month’s complete audio interview with Steven Essa 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.

Our Google Play App is now fixed and gets updated roughly one day after the Apple Newsstand issue. So please feel free to check it out if you are on Android.

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 this year: Send us a screenshot of your review in iTunes or Google Play (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.

Regards,

Greg Cassar Greg Cassar

is Australia’s leading Internet Marketing Strategist. With Collective.com.au Greg provides Digital Marketing Mastermind Coaching for Business Owners & Entrepreneurs. It includes everything you need to know to double your business using Internet Marketing & Digital Technology. You can follow Greg’s latest updates by subscribing to Internet Marketing Magazine at InternetMarketingMag.net for the new members area and the latest issue updates.

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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. > FACEBOOK BUYS WHATSAPP FOR $19BN You may be thinking what is WhatsApp? Well WhatsApp’s website advises “WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia… there is no cost to message and stay in touch with your friends.

In addition to basic messaging WhatsApp users can create groups, send each other unlimited images, video and audio media messages.”

The real beauty of WhatsApp is that you enter your phone number and WhatsApp looks through your contact list for other people who are using the app. Then you can message those users all you want without limits or charges. The app is available on many platforms and is free to download and has no ads, but it costs $1 per year after the first year.

So why did Facebook buy WhatsApp? The reason is simple. The giants of the Internet today such as Google and Facebook have learned from the mistakes of the giants of the past such as Yahoo and Myspace, and now rather than trying to compete with new competition they acquire them so as to ‘stay relevant’ and dominant regardless of which platform users switch to over time.

WhatsApp is massive in size. WhatsApp has more than 450 million active users. This is a bit less than half of Facebook’s 1.23 billion users.

What’s interesting is that the WhatsApp website has a blog post where they proudly boast that “We don’t sell ads.” This is interesting considering that they have now just been bought by the biggest advertising engine since Google in the modern digital age.

See Adam Hartung’s excellent article on this subject later in this issue. > DOES GOOGLE REALLY CARE IF YOU DON’T USE GOOGLE+ AS YOUR FAVOURITE SOCIAL NETWORK? Google says Plus has 540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the social network. Do they care? No doubt they would prefer if it had taken off like Facebook, but the reality is that there is a game behind the game, namely, data mining for more effective advertising, which is quite possibly their true motivator for creating Google Plus.

These days you are forced to sign up for Google internet marketing magazine march 2014

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INTERNET UPDATE Plus to use many of their products such as YouTube. Then it becomes your account for all Google products, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself.

Before Google released Plus, the company might not have known that you were the same person when you searched, watched videos and used maps. With a single Plus account, the company can build a database of your interests, wants, desires and fears.

If you are not interested in Sofia, then perhaps getting furniture recommendations from Cindy Crawford on the same site will float your boat.

But it’s not just consumers that are getting forced into using Google Plus. Brands are now also being lured into using a Google Plus account in order to show up higher in Google’s search results. > THE RISE OF CURATED CELEBRITY ECOMMERCE One of the trends online that we have noticed recently here at the Internet Marketing Magazine Offices is the rise of Curated Celebrity ecommerce.

Sometimes shoppers need a little help. Rather than searching through an endless supply of products, they may prefer personalized product recommendations by expert stylists and celebrities. This is curated celebrity ecommerce.

Here is an example from a company that is doing it very well, which is RoomsToGo.com.

Here they have the Sofia Vergara collection.

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We believe this trend is a winner all round because the eCommerce store gains additional interest and customers by leveraging the celebrities fan base. The celebrity benefits as its another income stream for them and a way for them to express their creative side. The customers also benefit because they can buy pieces that are recommended by the people that they look up to most. We expect to see more and more of this in the months and years to come. > GETTY IMAGES NOW MAKING IT’S PICTURES FREE TO USE The Verge recently reported that Getty Images is dumping the watermarks on its images.

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INTERNET UPDATE

Historically if you want Getty to take off the watermark, you have to pay for it.

That’s about to change. Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection. It will now be moving to an openembed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page.

This is great news for bloggers and website owners after free images who are not concerned about providing links back to Getty.

How Getty Images stands to monetise it is with advertising in the footer section of the images over time similar to how YouTube has monetised its content with advertising. Only time will tell if it’s a strategy that pays off them. IMM

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> COVER STORY:

“

EXPERT INTERVIEW

LinkedIn is the most powerful social networking and marketing tool for business owners.

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ALL ABOUT ALEX PIROUZ • Alex Pirouz has a wealth of knowledge both in business creation and development. Alex is a strong digital marketer, especially in the LinkedIn space.

• Alex is a master as using LinkedIn to connect with people and journalists. As a result his work has been featured in over 50 publications including: Channel 10, Forbes, Inc, Sunrise, SMH, The Age, Yahoo 7, Smart Company and many more.

• As founder of Linkfluencer Alex now spends majority of his time focusing on strategic direction and growth to assist business owners better utilize and understand how to use LinkedIn as a marketing tool to grow their business.

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

ALEX PIROUZ CONNECT LIKE A PRO ON LINKEDIN An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar Alex, you are quoted as saying that ‘LinkedIn is the most powerful social networking and marketing tool for business owners’. Many would argue this is Facebook. Please share your thoughts.

Alex: I believe Facebook is great if you’re B-to-C (Business to Consumer). If your customers are B-to-C for one-on-one contact you should probably advertise on Facebook.

The exception is if you’re looking to get media coverage and client venture partnerships, then 100% you should be doing this on LinkedIn.

everyone else with telemarketers, cold calling, going to networking functions, spending money on advertising and marketing.

It seems nobody has realized that if you’re spending all this money just to get in front of key decision makers, doesn’t it make sense to go into a platform where close to 50% of their members are actually key decision makers?

The great thing is that you’re able to search and find out good data about them before you connect with them. I don’t know which other marketing tool you can use to gather solid information before you contact a key decision maker.

What do you see is the most common problems or mistakes that most people make when connecting on LinkedIn? Alex: The key success factor with LinkedIn is personalization and targeting messaging.

But the power of LinkedIn, for me is when you look at marketing, the number one reason why we all market our business is to get the message of our product or service in front of key decision makers.

10% of marketing is what you say and 90% is how you say it. If you look at the market out there everyone is still doing the same thing as

The biggest mistakes I find people make are: 1. They didn’t personalize their message when connecting with other people.

2. Two, they don’t segment their LinkedIn database. You probably have heard the sayings “The Money’s is in the list,” or “Content is king”. I say something similar - “Content is King but Segmentation is Queen”.

It all starts with the connection invite internet marketing magazine march 2014

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

never ever send out an invitation unless it’s personalized. Even if it’s just someone that you just met, because that’s what people are looking for, and once you connect with them personalize all your messages.

Alex: LinkedIn is no different to any other marketing tool. You have to have a set of objectives and you’ve got to have some clear outcomes. Whilst it’s a social network, it’s a serious tool. With everything I teach even outside of LinkedIn, I always have systems.

The three step system to LinkedIn Mastery is 1. Plan 2. Connect 3. Profit.

Find out their main challenges and objections and provide good data or good value through articles that you share, and build what I call a ‘rapport bank’. We’ll go through this in a second, but it’s basically a multi-step system where once a new connection comes through, they’re in your target market, you need to build a relationship with them over time.

So what most people do, and you’ve probably received some of these emails before - you hit connect ‘yes I accept your invitation’ and virtually 30 seconds later you received this unpersonalized email that’s like one page long.

Even if they were the world’s quickest typist, there was no way that they could type that in.

Greg: It doesn’t feel authentic, it doesn’t feel real.

Alex: Exactly.

You were talking about your strategy. I know you teach a strategy called Three Steps to LinkedIn Mastery. What do you mean by that?

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The first step is planning. That’s where you sit down and you think, “Okay, I’m on LinkedIn but let’s just take a step back and let’s look at what are my marketing objectives over the next three, six, or twelve months.”

Let’s say I’m a marketing agency and my marketing objective is to secure six new clients over the next six months. Now I’ve got my marketing objective.

The second thing is who do I need to connect with to achieve those objectives? So where are they based? Are they in Sydney? Who is the main decision maker? Which industry are they in? How big is the company? What are some potential key words? So you gather all that data and now you’ve got your image.

Greg: So is it like an avatar? You’re building an avatar of a perfect prospect that you want to meet and connect with?

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

That takes us to the end of step one. Now you’ve got a great profile, and you know whom to target.

Step two is ‘Connect’ – this is all about building your network. But before you build your network, you need to segment your LinkedIn Contacts database. 99% of the people who enroll into our program don’t or have not yet segmented their database.

Alex: Absolutely, spot on. So you say, “Okay I’ve got my marketing objectives, great. I know who I need to connect with. Now what I need to do is stand out from everyone else. How do I do that?”

The best way to do that is through personal branding. So the next thing I do with clients is I basically get them to build their profile around ‘the outside inside approach’. So basically sit down, you look at your profile and you think, “Okay, before I look at all the sections like my summary, experiences, heading skills and expertise; let’s just take a step back and what are the main objections or challenges that my clients face?”

Now if I’m a marketing agency, and my target market is small business owners in the health niche, then I know the core challenges might be ‘we can’t get in front of the right people, our messaging is wrong, and there’s nothing different about us’. Now that you know those are the three challenges or objections, build your profile so that it solves those challenges.

This way when you start building your network and those contacts are looking at your profile, it’s like you’re speaking directly to them.

This is so much more effective than just talking about yourself, which is the inside-outside approach.

LinkedIn provides this function that enables you to create different tags, and then you can go and tag your contacts into these folders eg. ‘media contacts’.

Greg: You’re talking about sending e-mails, do you go to do them one at a time or is it smart enough to personalize through an autoresponder type system?

Alex: When I first started out I was sending out group messages, and I saw it just doesn’t work.

So everything I do now is personalized.

You seem to be a master of connecting to people without rubbing them the wrong way.

How is it that you’re connecting?

Alex: That brings us to the next step of the connect stage, now that you have got your contacts segmented, use the advanced search internet marketing magazine march 2014

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

filter and do five or ten different searches to see what brings up the best results.

Once you do that and you’re satisfied with the search result, then you’ll start connecting with people. Going back to your point about not rubbing people the wrong way. I connect with people by personalizing my message.

Greg: Yes, makes good sense. And what are you saying to them in those touches then?

Alex: That depends on who I’m connecting with. For example if it’s the media, “I came across one of your articles on entrepreneur.com and through it was thought-provoking and insightful, and thought it would be good to connect”. And that’s it, because what I want to do is I want to build a relationship with that person, and it all starts with reaching out and acknowledging that you actually appreciate their work.

Once you’ve done that, then it brings us to step three.

Which is what I call ‘Profit’.

It’s the most important step because everything else is irrelevant unless you’re increasing your business.

The first thing in the profit stage is you create a call to action. You need to think what action do I want them to take after I’ve built a relationship with them. That might be a webinar, or a seminar, or a face-to-face meeting. You’ve got to look at your sales cycle and see how LinkedIn fits into that cycle.

Once you have your call to action planned, we go back to what I mentioned before, which was the rapport bank. Over four different e-mails you essentially build a relationship with your contacts. And one e-mail might be, “Here’s an interesting article I came across I thought I might share it with you” but with these make sure that the articles you are sending them are highly relevant to their business.

Greg: Everyone wants positive affirmation really, at some level.

Alex: Absolutely, 100%. Okay so you’ve now found the search result you start connecting with people and my recommendation is to connect with a minimum of 400 people and tag those 400 into those specific folder that you’ve created.

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Greg: So essentially you’re just giving without asking, you’re creating value there.

Alex: Yes exactly. The first email, you’d want to say thanks for connecting. And over the next couple, you just

> COVER STORY: choose which one you want to send to them, whether it’s an article, a white paper, a video etc. You build up enough value so that on the fourth e-mail you can promote your call to action.

The next step from there is you take action on all the results from that campaign with your follow up meetings, webinars etc. For the people who don’t reply back to you, send a follow up e-mail to them. That’s where a lot of people go wrong - they stop at the first instance.

There are so many people who I have connected with that have become my clients who I have achieved through the follow up process.

EXPERT INTERVIEW

Are You Doing SEO and Finding the Rules are Changing All the Time?

Outdated SEO Tactics Can Result in Your Sites Not Getting Any Free Organic Traffic from Google & Being Penalised From Ranking Again.

Then the last two steps are learning what has worked and what hasn’t worked. Then systemizing the process, and delegating that work out to someone else to do the process for you.

I have a virtual assistant that I pay on a monthly basis. Besides all the other stuff that she does for me she also implements everything that we’ve talked about. All I do is I give her a document which has this strategy planned out and she goes out there and implements it.

How can our listeners readers subscribers and members find out more information about you online and also the Linkfluencer?

Alex: The first step in discovering how to master LinkedIn is joining us on a webinar. On this webinar I go into the three step system that I just mentioned in greater detail. We have webinars every two weeks. Here’s the link if you would like to register: www.linkfluencer. com/linkedinmastery IMM

Get the very Latest SEO Updates as They Break From the Team That the Internet Marketing Magazine Team use for the Latest SEO Authority Advice

Keep Up To Date With The Very Best in SEO

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EYE TRACKING INSIGHTS

THE 3 MOST SURPRISING INSIGHTS FROM A 200 WEBSITE EYE-TRACKING STUDY

By Fabian Harmik Stelzer

A

t EyeQuant, we do a lot of eye-tracking as part of our mission to teach computers to see the web like humans do. The main purpose of our studies is to find the statistical patterns that power our attention models (which you can use to instantly test your websites!) Today, we’re sharing 3 of the most surprising insights we found.

A lot of you have asked us about general rules of thumb around what drives (and doesn’t drive) attention – in this post you’ll learn why rules of thumb are difficult to establish and how a lot of the common ideas we have about human attention are more complicated than they seem. In fact, what you’re about to read is going to be rather surprising and we’re hoping to dispel some common myths about attention and web design with data.

METHOD: We’re looking at data from one of our recent eye-tracking studies with 46 subjects who were purchasing products on 200 AdWords eCommerce pages. We recorded 261,150 fixations in

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total and users we looking at each webpage for 15 sec (+/- 6 sec) on average. The study was conducted in the Neurobiopsychology Lab at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany.

DISCLAIMER: Since the purpose of this study was to further expand EyeQuant’s predictive capacities, we’re also providing EyeQuant’s results for comparison next to the empirical data – please note that these predictions are based on a new EyeQuant model that’s currently in early testing, but are already quite close to the real thing (currently this model provides over 75% predictive accuracy (AUC, warning: math), whereas our standard model achieves over 90%).

Myth #1: “Faces always & instantly draw attention.”

This is probably one of the most universal design assumptions about human attention you’ll find on the internet: “as humans, we’re naturally wired to always seek out and look at at any available faces first.”

Roughly correct – except for when it isn’t. The truth is that as

> humans we do really like faces. We’ll look at them sometimes. We probably even have a dedicated brain area involved in processing faces. However, we look at them much less often than you would typically believe.

The data:

EYE TRACKING INSIGHTS

Not convinced? Below you’ll find a lot more examples – from beautifully designed eCommerce shop to web 1.0 wall-of-text. We’re not saying faces don’t attract attention at all and are never looked at. Our data just shows that faces aren’t the powerful attentiongrabbers as one usually thinks they are.

Example: a Levis landing page. Left: EyeTracking heatmap of users visiting a Levi’s landing page – users are almost completely ignoring the faces. EyeQuant’s prediction on the right puts a bit more emphasis on the logo than the empirical data, but the big winner on this one is the clearly the headline copy, not the faces.

Example: a hotel search website, featuring an incredibly happy couple with clearly visible faces. Yet users only seem to care about the search box and the call to action in the center.

EyeQuant’s new model provides a very similar result but gets a bit distracted by the wooden texture.

What about guiding user attention through faces?

This is another popular assumption which seems to make a lot of sense: we’re social beings and user gaze follows the gaze of faces on a website. Again, that’s true, except for when it isn’t: Example: A Hilton Hotel landing page.

Users go straight for the search form and check the offers below, but aren’t paying too much attention to the woman or the headline she’s staring at.

What’s going on here? Our careful, explorative hypothesis is this: looking at a face does provide a sort of emotional buzz, so we may remember looking at them more than we do remember looking at other things. This might lead to wrong conclusions about general viewing behaviour.

Watercooler conclusion: “Faces are emotionally powerful, but they don’t always internet marketing magazine march 2014

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EYE TRACKING INSIGHTS attract as much attention as we think they do.”

to users immediately when they’re visitig a page? Our data says otherwise.

Myth #2: Large text instantly draws a lot of attention.

“Large text is a great way to attract user attention” is another rather popular idea about how attention works online.

However, our data shows that it usually doesn’t work. In a lot of cases big fonts even seem to have a negative effect on attracting attention: Example: English Proof Read landing page: Big typography doesn’t work nearly as well as you think it would. The winner on this one are the three descriptive areas below.

Example: Canadian Railways. Users had the task to purchase a rail ticket deal. And promptly ignored the advertised one which is USING AMAZINGLY BIG FONTS. Note how this result includes another example for how gaze doesn’t always guide attention (see Myth #1) What’s going on here? Our careful, explorative hypothesis is this: there may be an element of “banner blindness” involved. At the same, extremely large letters might be less readable for the human eye as well.

Watercooler conclusion: ”Big typography is visually loud, but not at all a safe way to grab user attention. We need to look into other ways as well.”

Myth #3: “The magical word ‘FREE’ always pops out.”

It’s true: economically, nothing beats ‘FREE’.

But does this also mean that the word pops out

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Note how EyeQuant’s automatic prediction (on the left) does pick up a little bit on the copy that contains “free”, whereas users in the empirical study on the right completely ignored it. Both study and prediction place almost all the attention on the product description and the model.

Watercooler conclusion: “‘Free is a powerful semantical tool. We shouldn’t rely on it as our main attention grabber though!”

Conclusions: don’t rely on rules of thumb.

Testing always beats guessing.

Rules of thumb are fun. They’re simple. And the more complex the thing is they’re trying to explain the more appealing they become.

Alas, that’s also where they often fail – and visual attention is a rather complex, extremely context-driven system that cannot be captured in a set of simple rules.

What we’re doing at EyeQuant is to combine large amounts of data like the study above in lightning-fast computer models. As you’ve seen, our predictions come close to what you’d get from a real study, so if you’re curious to get results for your own website, just test it for free in our web app. IMM

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SMART LEADERSHIP

THE SMART LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM FACEBOOK’S WHATSAPP ACQUISITION

By Adam Hartung

by CEO Zuckerberg’s team that is well worth learning.

F

acebook is acquiring WhatsApp, a company with at most $300M revenues, and 55 employees, for $19billion. That’s billion - with a “b.” An astonishing figure that is second only to HP’s acquisition of market leader Compaq, which had substantial revenues and profits, as tech acquisitions. $19B is 13 times Facebook’s (not WhatsApp’s) entire 2013 net income and almost 2.5 times Facebook’s (again, not WhatsApp’s) 2013 gross revenues!

On the mere face of it this valuation should make the most dispassionate analyst swoon.

In today’s world very established, successful companies sell for far, far lower valuations.

Apple is valued at about 13 times earnings.

Microsoft about 14 times earnings. Google 33 times. These are small fractions of the nearly infinite P/E placed on WhatsApp. But there is a leadership lesson offered here

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Irrelevancy can happen remarkably quickly.

True in any industry, but especially in digital technology. Examples: Research-in-Motion/ Blackberry. Motorola. Dell. HP all lost relevancy in months and are struggling. (For those who want non-tech examples think of Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, JCPenney, Abercrombie and Fitch.) Each of these companies was an industry leader that lust its luster, most of its customers, a big chunk of its employees and much of its market valuation in months when the company missed a market shift.

Although leadership knew what it had historically done to sell products profitably, in a very short time market trends reduced the value of the company’s historical success formula leaving investors, as well as management, wondering how it was going to compete.

Facebook is not immune to changing market trends. Although it has been the benchmark for social media, it only achieved that goal after annihilating early leader MySpace. And although Facebook was built by youthful folks, trends away from using laptops and toward mobile devices have challenged the Facebook platform. Simultaneously, changing communication requirements have altered the use, and impact, of things like images, photos, charts and text. All of these have the potential impact of slowly (or not so slowly) eroding the

> value (which is noticably lofty) of Facebook.

Most leaders address these kinds of challenges by launching new products to leverage the trend. And Facebook did just that. Facebook not only worked on making the platform more mobile friendly, but developed its own platform apps for photos and texting and all kinds of new features.

But, and this is critical, external companies did a better job. Two years ago Instagram emerged as a leader in image sharing. And WhatsApp has developed a superior answer for messaging.

SMART LEADERSHIP

answer. It will often ignore the trend, disparage the competition, keep promising improvements to its historical products and services and blanket the media with PR as to its stated superiority.

But, as that list (above) of companies that lost relevancy demonstrates, this rarely works. In a highly interconnected, fast-paced, globally competitive marketplace customers go where they want. Quickly. Often leaving the early leader with a management team (and Board of Directors) scratching its head and wondering how it lost so much market position, and value, so quickly.

Hand it to Mr. Zuckerberg’s team. Instead of ignoring trends in its effort to defend & extend its early lead, they reached out and brought the leader to them. $1B for Instagram was a big investment, especially so close to launching an IPO. But, it kept Facebook relevant in mobile platforms and imaging.

Historically leadership usually said “we need to find a way to beat these new guys.” They would make it hard to integrate new solutions with their dominant platform in an effort to block growth. They would spend huge amounts on marketing and branding to try overcoming the emerging leader. Often they filed intellectual property litigation in an effort to cause short-term business interuption and threaten viability. They might even try hiring the emerging company’s tech leader away to stop development.

All of these actions were efforts to defend & extend the early leader’s market position.

Even though the market is shifting, and trends are developing externally from the company, leadership will tend to look inside for an

And making a nosebleed-creating $19B deal for WhatsApp focuses on maintaining relevancy as well. WhatsApp already processes almost as many messages as the entire telecom industry.

It has 450million users with 70% active daily, which is already 60% the size of Facebook’s daily internet marketing magazine march 2014

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SMART LEADERSHIP user community (550million.) By bringing these people into the Facebook corporate family it assures the company of continued relevancy as the market shifts. It doesn’t matter if these are the same people, or different people. The issue is that it keeps Facebook relevant, rather than losing relevance to a competitor.

How will this all be monetized into $19B? The second brilliant leadership call by Facebook is to not answer that question.

When looking to grow in new markets, and you find a team with the skills to understand the trends, it is independence rather than integrationthat makes the most sense organizationally.

Thirdly, back to that valuation issue. $19B is a huge amount of money. Unless you don’t really spend $19B. Facebook has the blessed ability to print its own. Private money that it can use for such acquisitions. As long as Facebook has a very high market valuation it can make acquisitions with shares, rather than real money.

In the case of both Instagram and WhatsApp the acquisition is being made in a mix of cash, Facebook stock and restricted Facebook stock for employees. The latter two of these three items are not real money. They are simply pieces of paper giving claims to ownership of Facebook, which itself is valued at 22 times 2013 revenue and 116 times 2013 earnings.

The price of those shares are all based on expectations; expectations which now require the performance of Instagram and WhatsApp to make happen.

Facebook didn’t know how to monetize its early leadership in users, but management knew it had to find a way. Now the company has grown from almost no revenues in 2008 to almost $8B in just 5 years. (Does your company have a plan to add $8B/year of organic revenue growth by 2019?)

So just as Facebook had to find its revenue model (which it is still exploring,) Zuckerberg’s team allows the leadership of Instagram and WhatsApp to remain independent, operating in their own White Space, to grow their user base and learn how to monetize what is an extraordinarily large group of happy folks.

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By making acquisitions with Facebook shares the leadership team is able to link the newly

> acquired managers to the same overall goals as Facebook, while offering an extremely high price but without actually having to raise any money - or spend all that money.

All companies risk of becoming irrelevant. New technologies, customer behavior patterns, regulations, inventions and innovations constantly challenge old success formulas.

Most leaders fall into a pattern of trying to defend & extend their old business in the face of market shifts, hastening the fall into irrelevancy. Or they try to acquire a new business, then integrate it into the old business which strips away the new business value and leads, inevitably, to irrelevancy.

The leaders of Facebook are giving us a lesson

SMART LEADERSHIP

in an alternative approach.

1. Recognize the market shift. Accept it. If there is a better solution, rush toward it rather than ignoring it.

2. Bring it into the company, and leave it independent. Eschew integration and efforts to find “synergy.” (You never know, in 3 years the company may need to be renamed WhatsApp to reflect a new market paradigm.)

3. And as long as you can convince investors that you are maintaining your relevancy use your highly valued stock as currency to keep the company moving forward.

These are 3 great lessons for all leadership teams. And I continue to think Facebook is the one stock to own in 2014. IMM

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PHOTO EDITING TOOLS

10 SIMPLE PHOTO EDITING TOOLS YOU CAN USE TO CREATE GREAT VISUAL CONTENT FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

By Fiona Lewis

A

you in search of free, user-friendly photo editing tools?

Are you using images in your blog posts? What kind of pictures are you sharing on your social media profile?

I totally get that. If you are like most of these business owners, I’m sure you totally get that too.

This is why I put together a thorough list of the best photo editing tools. Most of them are free, and the ones which aren’t are worth every penny.

Tip: If you are patient enough to read to the end, you will see the article is sprinkled with several bonus tools that are simply heavensent. Really, they do their job SO well you will start wondering whether you will ever need the help of an illustrator…

Tools to create amazing photos & photo collages: PicMonkey

In an online business a picture may be the only reason someone clicks on your link, or reads your article. However, a lot of the amazing business owners I know are working with limited budgets. Hiring a full-time illustrator is not something they can afford. Plus, they shy away at the thought of having to work with complicated software such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

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PicMonkey has a free option with lots of frames and font types to choose from. As long as you have a photo ready to be edited, you can crop it, resize it, add frames, text or special effects.

Plus, you can also create great banners for your social media profiles.

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PHOTO EDITING TOOLS

Then, of course, there is a paid version, with even more frames and more fonts…

The software only works with Windows, so if you’re a Mac user just skip to the next tool.

Bubbls.us Bubbl.us is not really a photo editing tool, but I included it here and you’ll soon see why.

Allow me to explain…

Bitstrips Bitstrips is increasingly popular among Facebook users, and it’s easy to see why. What could be more fun than creating crazy scenarios where you and your friends are the main cartooned characters?

I know you are a brainy person, and very organised when it comes to your business, right? So whenever you want to work on a new project, the first thing you do is you brainstorm everything.

The tool can be successfully used on social media profiles to share something funny with your audience.

You can easily create a bitstrip for those status updates that don’t have an image yet.

This is what Bubbl.us is great for. It allows you to create your own mind maps and save them in your computer. You can also publish them: • on blog posts • in infographics • on social media profiles • in PowerPoint presentations • for webinars

PhotoFunia I recommend PhotoFunia for those situations when you need a mock-up. It also has great sketch effects, museum-like mock-ups and a lot of other interesting backgrounds.

Paint.NET As the name suggests Paint.NET is a photo editing software. Although its Home page is not impressive, you can download the software and have a try; you might be surprised.

Some really great effects include: • Posters and Cards • I particularly like the Filters section

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PHOTO EDITING TOOLS • Galleries and Billboards mock-ups • Drawings and Photography Canva Canva is that kind of tool that allows even a novice to become a designer. You have a variety of backgrounds, text fonts and layouts that you can play with to obtain great visual effects.

You can sign up using your Facebook profile, and once logged in you get access to: • mockups • layouts • collaboration tool

But as great as Canva is, you have to pay for it.

You can use it for free to create your visuals, but when you want to publish your artwork you will be asked to pay.

PowerPoint

tested it as an image-creating tool and loved to see the variety of things it can do.

It was a great experience. You can use PowerPoint’s tools to give life to some brilliant illustrations. When you are happy with the result go to Save As… and choose PNG or JPEG. Fotor Fotor is incredibly easy to use. I know some people who are using it to create photo collages of their products. They then post the images on their social media profiles and on their blogs. The visual effects are really great…!

I highly recommend it and I suggest you use it on social media… especially if you have an e-commerce. You can easily showcase product details, add your company logo, and so on.

The tool also offers some options for editing portrait images AND it can help you create postcards.

LiveLuvCreate LiveLuvCreate might strike you as a website for teenagers. But it really is not. It is the perfect match between those quotes you’ve been wanting to post online for so long and a beautiful background to complement them.

A highly underestimated tool, PowerPoint is amazing, amazing, amazing. I have recently

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Personally, I love quotes, and I share them on my profiles as an inspiration for me and the

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PHOTO EDITING TOOLS

community around Super Savvy Business. With LiveLuvCreate you can share famous quotes with your audience too.

Bonus Tool: PowToon PowToon is a tool I stumbled upon a long time ago and I’ve been loving it ever since.

Even better, if – let’s say – you are a writer, you can showcase your own quotes using backgrounds from LiveLuvCreate.

You can create personalised video presentations that tell YOUR story.

PicCollage PicCollage is a killer combo between pictures, text and stickers.

It is an app that you can use on your smartphone or iPhone. Download it from the iTunes App Store or from Google Play and keep it on top of your mind when you want to share images while on the move.

PicCollage allows you to edit your pics and share them instantly on social media!

The team at PowToon are doing a great job helping business owners weave stories around their businesses. You are given access to an abundance of characters, cartoons, drawings, sketches… you can record your voice and play it over the video and… ta-daaaa!!

You have an amazing opt-in video. Or a video for your latest blog post. Or a video for a webinar. You know, good-looking videos for every situation.

PowToon has both a free version and a paid one.

Tools to create infographics: Now here’s the problem: infographics are darn expensive. But not only do they cost a lot, they also take time to create. You need to: Honestly? The end result is rarely what you hoped for. You now need to explain what you want changed, taken out, replaced… quite the headache.

Forget about that.

Why don’t you create your own infographics instead? For free.

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PHOTO EDITING TOOLS Here are some tools I found:

But this one comes with a twist: the world’s first VIDEO infographic creator.

Venngage Whenever you want to create an infographic Venngage is there to help. You can choose from a multitude of backgrounds and themes, you can add charts, icons and images.

How do you like the sound of that? I’m definitely curious and interested! Find out more about video infographics on Infogr.am’s page.

It is great if you’ve never done an infographic before because it’s a drag & drop kind of tool.

When you’re happy with the result, save. Then publish.

Piktochart Piktochart is another cool tool that I wanted to share with you today. Although it caters more to teachers and professors, it can be used by online business owners as well.

Venngage comes with a free version and also with a Premium one. Considering that an infographic usually costs hundreds of dollars, the $19 per month subscription is a bargain price.

Easel.ly

It is a paid service but you can create infographics for free by clicking on the “Try for free” button on the top right of the page.

Easel.ly offers a multitude of themes for infographics, but you can also try to create a new one from scratch. You work on a clear canvas and build your infographic to the tiniest detail.

The website is still in beta version, but its success is obvious: almost 400k themes have been created so far.

Infogr.am Like the other infographic tools, Infogr.am also allows you to create free interactive infographics.

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Plus, if you are a teacher, you are a lucky person: they offer a free subscription account to those working in education (but the free version has a limited number of themes).

They also provide discounts for non-profit organizations.

PowerPoint

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PHOTO EDITING TOOLS

Yes, PowerPoint again… Have I told you what an under utilised tool this is? People use it for presentations and… that’s about it.

Yet the potential of PowerPoint is admirable; you can create crazy good-looking images with it and you can also create… infographics.

Here’s how: • Open a new PowerPoint presentation.

• Go to Design and click on Page Setup.

• Edit the width and height of the slide to fit the size of an infographic (which varies depending on the amount of text & images you need).

• Create your infographic using photos, shapes, charts and the SmartArt feature.

• When ready, click on File – Save As… – jpeg or png.

Bonus tool: Hubspot Hubspot is NOT a photo editing tool and it certainly is not a tool for infographics.

But the amount of marketing materials it provides is absolutely mindblowing.

You’ll find here an impressive amount of information, guidelines, advice and great tips for running an online business… and these marketing resources are free!

So there you have it: the best photo editing tools that don’t dry your pockets and give your business a professional look on the internet. If you read this article carefully, you discovered more than just somephoto editing tools. You now know how to create your opt-in video on a budget, and you alsodiscovered an unquenched resource of marketing materials. IMM

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DISPLAY ADS

5 RULES FOR CREATING EYE-CATCHING DISPLAY ADS

By Danielle Forget

W

ge all know images are far more successful at grabbing people’s attention than just text alone. That’s why display advertising is so popular. However, most marketers don’t realize just how much a specific image can effect your click-through-rate (CTR).

1. Don’t Bother With Stock Photos Here is the truth about stock photos: they are dull, boring and definitely do not catch much attention. Never mind they were probably used a few hundred times by other sites.

The whole stock photo craze started due to a very limited supply of quality digital photos available online. The ability to purchase stock photos was seen as an easy way for online marketers to gain access to a huge variety of professional quality photos.

Don’t forget back in this ‘Stone Age’ there weren’t millions of photos being posted online every second.

(Thanks camera phones and Instagram!) These days we are numb to the boring images stock photo sites carry.

Instead, try using amateur photography when creating your ads.

(Note: Each of the ads used in this article are top performing ads found using our Top Ads feature.)

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2. Don’t Over Feature Your Logo Don’t worry; once we click through to your landing page we’ll see your logo. There is no need to broadcast it in the ad.

Some think that using your logo as the main imagery for your display ads is good for branding. Although it may increase your brand recognition, it won’t do anything for CTR. Brands that ditched the logo thumbnail in their ads saw a CTR increase of 27%!

Try creating display ads that include your logo, rather than feature it.

3. Crop To The Exact Dimensions This is a very simply rule that is guaranteed to boost the impression of your ad.

Just like clothing, ads come in all different sizes. And just like clothing, you would never want to squeeze an XL ad into a XS ad space. It just looks wrong.

Before creating your ads be sure to get the correct size ratio of your ad space and tailor them exactly to that size. If you need a filler, use a border with a contrasting bold color.

> 4. Go Easy On The Copy You don’t need to give up all your details upfront. That’s what a landing page is for.

Display ads are meant to simply pull in viewers and entice them to click.

Use clear, easy to read, short copy. You have only seconds (if that) to make a compelling impression. Also, make sure the colors, font style and size that you use are very clear to read.

HINT: Read it out loud to be sure that it isn’t a mouthful.

See how powerful these ads read?

DISPLAY ADS

When you split test your ads, you may find that all your ads that use the word “Free” have the highest CTR, but all your ads that mention a lower price have a better conversion rate. You may discover that your target audience prefers green over blue. The point is that you won’t know until you test it.

Recently when split testing our own ads, we noticed a 1% CTR increase just by adding a red boarder to the image. Nothing else in the ad was changed. Simply adding a red boarder to the image made it more noticeable and increased clicks.

Check out this infographic lending plenty of simple A/B split tests you can try with your ads…

5. Add And Subtract Always split-test different elements in each of your ads.

I know, I know, this article is supposed to be telling you what makes up a click worthy ad.

The truth is that what works for one, may not always work for the other.

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DISPLAY ADS

IMM

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SPLIT TEST RESULTS

CASE STUDY:

18.59% INCREASE IN DOWNLOADS

BY TWEAKING ONE BULLET POINT

By Michael Aagaard

Y

ou don’t necessarily need to make radical changes in order to impact the decisions and actions of your prospects. Often relatively small but strategic changes to critical elements can have major impact on conversions.

Here’s a cool little case study where tweaking the copy in one bullet point increased downloads on an ebook landing page by 18.59%.

Background info A few months ago, I published a free ebook, 7 Universal Conversion Optimization Principles.

Being the test junkie that I am, I started tweaking, testing and optimizing the ebook landing page right away.

I’ve experimented with everything from privacy policies and button color to headlines and testimonials. The most recent test was particularly interesting as it revolved around a very simple copy tweak that ended up having major impact on conversions.

How I came up with the treatment My iPad is packed with awesome free ebooks that I really want to read. Unfortunately, I rarely have time to sit down and actually read them. In fact, I’d say that time is a barrier that impacts my decision every time I’m about to download free ebook.

I figured that I couldn’t be the only person with this problem. Therefore I hypothesized that I could increase downloads by emphasizing the fact that my ebook only takes about 25 minutes to read.

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After messing around with different treatments and ideas, I realized that the main challenge was finding the right spot to address the time issue. The fact that the book is an easy read is not the main selling point, so I didn’t want it to be the overriding message.

To get inspiration, I turned to Eyequant.com – a clever new tool that helps predict how visitors look at your web pages. The Eyequant analysis suggested that the first few words in the first bullet point would attract initial attention from visitors, and I decided to tweak the bullet copy towards addressing the time issue.

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SPLIT TEST RESULTS

The variations Control bullet copy: Insights and experience from 4 years of research and over 350 A/B tests distilled into one 26-page free ebook Treatment bullet copy: Read the book in just 25 minutes and get insights from 4 years of research and over 350 A/B tests

Take-Aways Addressing the mental barriers of your target audience is an effective tool for increasing conversions. Moreover, small tweaks can have major impact on the decisions and actions of your prospects, IF those tweaks are applied strategically to critical elements and address relevant questions or pain points.

Test hypothesis By tweaking the copy in the first bullet point to directly address the “time issue”, I can motivate more visitors to download the ebook and increase the conversion rate of the landing page.

Test design and results In order to examine whether my hypothesis would hold water, I set up a simple A/B test where the only variable was the copy in the first bullet point.

I ran the test for 20 days and reached a statistical confidence level of 98%. During the test period, the book was downloaded 391 times.

The test data confirmed my hypothesis as the treatment increased downloads by 18.59%.

This case study is just one example, however it is representative of the tendency I see across hundreds of split tests. If you want to learn more about when and how small changes impact conversion, check out my free ebook 7 Universal Optimization principles – you can read it in just 25 minutes.

IMM

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