Internet Marketing Magazine August 2014

AUGUST 2014

> GOOGLE TRUSTED STORES VS AMAZON P21

> LEARNINGS FROM A $1M PER MONTH CAMPAIGN P10

> TOOLS TO SPY YOUR ONLINE COMPETITION

> D.I.S. CONTENT MARKETING P14

P23

> PIMP YOUR GOOGLE+ PAGE P27

> TOP 10 SHOPPING ENGINES

P17

COVER STORY:

NEIL PATEL SUCCESS SECRETS OF A SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR

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

MEET OUR EXPERT PANEL Justin Brooke

has generated billions of ad impressions, sold millions of dollars worth of products, hired by dozens of millionaires, and built a highly sought after ad agency. His clients include Snuggie, Trump University, Michael Masterson, the owners of Empower Network, Rich Schefren, Russell Brunson, StansberryResearch, George Rivera, Kent Clothier, and many others. www.imscalable.com Read his article on Million Dollar Per Month Campaigns on PAGE 10

Russ Henneberry

is a content marketing and analytics professional. He is currently the Director of Editorial for DigitalMarketer.com but have worked in a content marketing and analytics capacity for companies like CrazyEgg, Salesforce.com and Network Solutions. He analyze, measure and improve content and social media marketing. Connect with Russ on Twitter.

Read his article on DIS Content Marketing Strategy on PAGE 14

Mary Weinstein

is Content Director at CPC Strategy, all around ecommerce nerd. A Google, SEM, Retail Search, PPC, Digital Search and Content Marketing expert, you can find Mary’s work featured on SEW, Forbes, Internet Retailer, SEM Rush, MOZ, and Practical Ecommerce. Follow Mary at Google+ and Twitter Read her article on 1O Best Shopping Engines on PAGE 17

ROI Revolution

is a retail-focused online advertising agency based in Raleigh, NC. ROI Revolution manage millions of dollars in monthly ad spend for 180 clients spread out among 7 countries.

Read the article on Tools to Spy on Your Competition on PAGE 21

Marta Wadsworth is Content Creator for Userlike.

Next to creating juicy content, she loves outdoors, running and her motorbike.

Read her article on Tools to Spy on Your Competition on PAGE 23

Phil Rozek

is Owner of Local Visibility System - a resource for business owners who want to attract more customers through the local search results, particularly Google+Local. Connect with Phil on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Read his article on How to Pimp your Google+ Page on PAGE 27

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CONTENTS

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1Neil

Patel talks all things from increasing conversion to blog tactics and start-up funding strategy

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1Learn

From A Million Dollar Per Month Campaign

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1Discover Why D.I.S. is Crucial to Your Content Marketing Strategy

17 21

110

Best Shopping Engines

Amazon

1Google Trusted Stores vs

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lFreemium Tools To Spy On Your Online Competition

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lKnow

How to Pimp Your Local Google+ Page

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

W

elcome to thisAugust issue of Internet Marketing Magazine.

In this issue check out the audio interview with the amazing serial entrepreneur Neil Patel. Neil is one of the most efficient and intelligent guys I’ve ever met. Listen to the interview and hear how he manages his time and talks all things from increasing conversions to blog tactics and start-up funding strategy. For those with iTunes the Podcast version may be more convenient.

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).

Our Google Play App is now live and working well. It gets updated roughly one day after the Apple Newsstand issue. So please feel free to check it out if you are on Android. We are working on a way to make it get automatically updated the same day as Apple Newsstand, so I’ll let you know if that comes off.

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 :).

Greg Cassar Regards,

Internet Marketing Strategist & Editor – Internet Marketing Magazine

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW ALL ABOUT NEIL PATEL • Neil Patel is a serial entrepreneur, blogger, analytics expert, and angel investor.

• Neil is the cofounder of two Internet companies, Crazy Egg, a heat mapping technology company, and KISSmetrics, an advanced user behavior tool.

• Neil is also an authority blogger online at quicksprout.com. Technorati has labeled Neil a top 100 blogger, and ‘Wall Street Journal’ advises Neil is one of the top influencers of the web.

“

Some startups are meant to be those billion dollar ideas in which they’ll either work or they won’t, and those are the type of companies that you should try to raise money for. internet marketing magazine august 2014

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

NEIL PATEL SUCCESS SECRETS OF A SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar end up meeting their parents. You get to know them. You date for a while. You live together.

Then, you may end up getting married. It’s this whole process.

Psychologically speaking, the web is the same way. If I convince you to give me your email address and password or your name and email address, you’re already like “Well, I already gave Neil my email and password so I might as well just finish the purchase.”

Crazyegg is an amazing tool that does Heatmaps, Scrollmaps etc. What are any key learning’s you can share with us about how site visitors navigate around websites?

Neil: Some general usability tweaks and tips for people. One that most people don’t realize is when you’re on checkout pages remove all forms of navigation and you’ll typically boost conversion rates.

The other thing I’ve found is two step checkout processes usually have a 10% higher conversion rate than a one step checkout process.

Think of it like dating. Think about marriage.

You can’t just ask someone “Hey, will you marry me?” It never happens, unless you’re in Vegas and you’re trashed. But, what ends up happening is something like, “wow you’re awesome, let’s go out for coffee.” You do coffee. Then, you may end up kissing them. You

But, when you give someone a daunting page that has all these fields they’re just like ‘wow, this is so much to do, I’m just going to leave’.

When you’ve already got someone to commit with micro-commitments, they are much more likely to convert into a customer.

What about sliders, or they’re sometimes called carousels. Is one or many better for conversion?

Neil: I’ve done a ton of A/B testing and all my data shows that carousels decrease conversions. Carousels are just distracting.

The biggest thing that actually impacts a website’s usability and conversions is typically text. That’s the number one thing that people should be focusing on from instead of images and carousels and all these bells and whistles.

You don’t need fancy websites. You need to internet marketing magazine august 2014

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

tell people what they’re going to get, show it to them, convince them to buy it with testimonials, case studies etc, and then let them buy.

How about scrolling? What percentage of people are scrolling to the bottom of sites?

ten times from different devices.

What we do is we track people, so instead of it showing up as ten visitors it shows up as one.

In addition to that, we’ll cross pollinate every interaction you’ve made with the website, and map out your actual user flow so that way you can figure out things like ‘Greg here is a converting user. He is our ideal customer. He’s engaged. He logs in. He buys from us many times.’

Let’s say you’re Amazon, and let’s say hypothetically Amazon’s using us. You may want info like “Ok, here are all the customers like Greg who buy on a regular basis from us. What are the specific user flows and patterns that Greg goes through to purchase?”

Neil: I actually see less than 20% of the people go to the bottom of a website. Very few people scroll. If your whole website fits above the fold within the monitor resolution, you’re fine as 100% of people are going to see it.

We’ll map that out and then the website owner knows to push more people down this flow that Greg took because it’s the highest converting flow. Then, from there they can generate more sales.

Once you start getting quite long in which you’re four or five folds make up your website, you’re typically looking at around 20% are going to go all the way to the bottom.

KISSMetrics takes the learning’s of the site visitors and their actions to a much deeper level. Can you explain how it works and how best to use it to make an online business more profitable?

Neil: With KISSmetrics what we ended up finding is there are multiple devices that people use from mobile phones to laptops to desktop computers. Some people even have multiple computers within their home. What ends up happening is you can visit the website

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It’s very data intensive. The product is more complex than I would like. We’re definitely working on improving the simplicity of it.

Nonetheless, if you’re a big business and you have a ton of data it can help you make quite a bit more cash.

> COVER STORY: On the business startup side - Crazyegg was self funded, where as KISSmetrics had a VC round of $13m. What were the key learning’s from these two completely different approaches?

Neil: Crazyegg was bootstrapped. We used our own money. I think my co-founder and I put in around a half a million bucks of borrowed money into it to grow it and start it off. We struggled for the first few years, and then it started taking off. We learned quite a bit from it. If I knew what I knew today back then it would be a much bigger company.

When it comes to KISSmetrics we raised money. KISSmetrics is like crazyegg. We spun it out into different companies. Crazyegg was bleeding quite a bit of cash at that time.

We were funding all the operations through consulting.

What I ended up finding out from a venturebacked business is that you have to grow very fast. It doesn’t matter if you’re profitable, because you’re worth it for someone to acquire if you can get enough of the market share.

What we ended up finding out with doing a funded-based company is it’s quite a bit of work, more than most people think. You spend a lot of time fundraising, and dealing with board meetings. Luckily, we have good investors, so it’s actually quite relaxing, quite easy from that aspect and we can focus on the business.

If you’re not growing fast enough you don’t have a business. With a venture backed startup it’s pretty much you try to either hit a home run or you go to zero. In essence, you die trying.

EXPERT INTERVIEW

Both models are great.

The biggest thing that I ended up learning is that you can grow much faster if you’re venture backed, but you also don’t own the full percentage of the business. You have to give up quite a bit of equity to investors. I like both, and I think some startups are meant to be bootstrapped, in which they’re never going to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars so it doesn’t make sense to raise money from outside investors.

Some startups are meant to be those billion dollar ideas in which they’ll either work or they won’t, and those are the type of companies that you should try to raise money for.

With Quicksprout, Neil, there is no doubt you are an excellent writer, and that helps with growing readership, but what are other key strategies that you have used successfully for growing authority blogs?

Neil: I think having other writers is fine, as long as the content’s good, whether you know how to write or not or whether you’re paying someone else, it doesn’t matter. You just need to publish really good content. That’s the most important thing. Someone comes to a blog to read the content. If your content sucks, no one’s going to want to read it.

The next thing is you need to really engage with the community. Just like your social profiles, if you just keep posting tweets but you never engage, interact, comment, no one is going to actually

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

convert into a customer. Why? You don’t have that bond. With the blog you actually have to go out there and respond to your commenters. No man’s an island. You don’t want someone to take the time to put a comment and not even thank them for writing the comment.

It’s really important, because once you build that rapport and that bond with your visitors they’re more likely to come back and purchase when you offer them products that they can potentially buy. Those are the two main mistakes that I see people making.

The third one is most bloggers focus on content and not the headlines. What most people don’t know is eight out of ten people will read a headline in a news article or a blog, and only two out of ten will actually read the content. If you can create an enticing headline you’re more likely to increase the number of people that actually read the content. I would focus at least 20, 30 minutes coming up with your blog headline.

You can find out more about Neil and his products from any of the following sites: • NeilPatel.com • QuickSprout.com • Crazyegg.com • Kissmetrics.com IMM

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CONVERSIONS

WHAT I LEARNED FROM A MILLION DOLLAR PER MONTH CAMPAIGN

By Justin Brooke

I

f you’re paying for traffic or ever plan to, then you need to hear this.

These are the most important lessons I learned while managing the Facebook channel for a large media buying campaign. I was just one media buyer among several, in fact I got to work with Chad Hamzeh who was managing the Google Display channel.

The client was pushing a million per month in sales, and he was doing it with two separate offers.

One day while visiting his house for a backyard BBQ and beers, I started throwing him a question here and there.

Due to the beers, I cannot remember the exact words, but these are the golden nuggets I did keep.

Before I give you the goods…

I want you to resist the urge to say “My business is different this doesn’t apply to me.”

IT MOST CERTAINLY DOES APPLY TO YOU! No business gets to avoid these fundamental rules of marketing that you’re about to read. Just because this was a BIG million dollar campaign does not mean that the same rules don’t apply to newbies and start ups.

That response is your brains natural defense to try and resist change. Fight the resistance!

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Profit Is Grown Not Made We got to talking about the early days before his product (a line of health supplements) was making millions.

When I prodded him about how he took it from nothing to millions, he replied “Well you definitely don’t luck your way into 200% returns.”

From there he went on to explain how the most expensive mistake people make is buying traffic and hoping it’ll be profitable.

It starts out with buying $100 here and $100 there. Then they buy another course, and spend some more money. Which continues all the way down to hiring this expert and that expert, all the while feeling like the traffic networks or the experts defrauded them.

Meanwhile they were defrauding themselves.

He explained to me that you’re supposed to

> first establish your cost per sale and average order size and then optimize your sales funnel until you’re breaking even on the front end. You keep the traffic going until this happens, you don’t stop and start and bounce from here to there.

Then you optimize your email follow up sequence, add upsells, cross sells, and high ticket backend offers.

He said “Profit is grown, not made.”

Now, that he’s taught me this lesson I see the mistake he talked about everywhere.

Which is what made me write this article.

I’m hoping I can help a few of my subscribers and customers get off the expensive hamster wheel of “Buy & Pray” or what I call the “Traffic Hail Mary.”

CONVERSIONS

than a high conversion rate, but I’d love both.”

He then explained the key metrics he watches; Audience Size, Cost Per Acquisition, Average Order Value, and Daily Order Volume.

Audience Size What good is a killer campaign with only 100 customers. Today as I watch other Facebook experts bragging about their 1,000% ROI, I shake my head.

90% of the time these campaigns are to their own list, their own Facebook fans, or a small custom audience. The ROI is great, but there is no room to scale. You can’t go from 10 orders a day to 100 orders a day to 1000 orders a day.

What you want is an audience size of 1 million or more, if you can ROI that you’ll eat well for months or even years.

Cost Per Acquisition Arguably, the most important number any business owner can track, yet few know it off hand.

This is the number that let’s you know if every sale you make is digging you into a hole or fattening your wallet. Ideally, you want this number as low as you can get it, but it’s more important that you increase your average order value than reduce your CPA.

Watch The Profit Signals Not Conversions His sales page didn’t convert well at all.

In fact most days his conversion rate was half of 1%. Yet, he made boatloads more money, than much higher converting funnels.

When I asked him about this he said “I’m much more concerned with a high customer value,

Sometimes, people worry too much about reducing their CPA and hand cuff their campaigns. Your goal is not to spend the least, but to be able to spend the most. THAT is how you crush the competition.

He who can buy more bullets, wins the war!

Average Order Value This is the number you want to concern yourself most.

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CONVERSIONS Knowing your CPA is important, but your AOV is the throttle behind your business. You should be spending most of your time optimizing your funnel to increase your AOV. All you gotta remember is CPA < AOV = Profit.

Spend 80% of your time increasing your AOV and 20% of your time shaving points off of your CPA. Think about it like this, poor people stay poor because their natural response is to try and save money. Their idea of trying to have more money is to spend less on other things. It’s an oppressive scarcity type of mindset.

scale up in controlled increases.

What About Conversion Rate & CTR? These are still useful numbers, like bounce rate and time on page. Use them as directional cues for optimizing your funnel, but always cater to the key profit signals in the end.

A great CTR or conversion rate means diddly, if it limits your ability to scale.

Rich people on the other hand default to think “how can I make more.” It’s an abundance mindset and its the little secret that keeps the rich richer.

Daily Order Volume This number tells you the health of your campaign.

The higher it gets the healthier your campaign is and the more revenue you’re earning. If you

have a big audience size and your CPA is < your AOV, then you should be able to scale your daily order volume. Just watch it closely, because sometimes scaling changes the numbers.

Lots of ad networks try to sneak in lower quality traffic when they can’t supply you with enough high quality traffic. So make sure you

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If all of this sounds overwhelming, let us handle your traffic. We’ve already developed the systems to track, monitor, optimize, and scale your most important metrics.

Key Takeaways • Don’t buy traffic and pray it’ll be profitable, MAKE it profitable • Blame your funnel, not the traffic • Concern yourself with customer value more than conversion rate • Don’t waste your time on small audience sizes, go big or go home!

• Keep an eye on your cost per acquisition, but don’t obsess on it • Spend the bulk of your time working to increase your average order value • Make daily order volume your big scoreboard IMM

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CONTENT MARKETING

WHY D.I.S. IS CRUCIAL TO YOUR CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

By Russ Henneberry

T

he shift in marketing dollars from traditional advertising mediums to the emerging mediums available to us via the Internet has more to do with the consumers behavior than the seller.

Many businesses today are holding onto the hopes that this is all a fad, that this will all go away. Then they can go back to business as usual.

Marketing was much easier when it was controllable. It was much easier when all you had to worry about was getting an average product out to market and ensure that the 4 P’s of Marketing were evident in your ad. It was much easier when the company steered the conversation.

But Consumers Like New Media We (the consumer) like these “emerging” types of marketing mediums better than the old ones.

Here’s why: • We can find answers to problems when we have them, and not be

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disturbed when we don’t have them • We can interact with other customers and prospective customers in these mediums • We can share what we find interesting about products, services, brands, etc with our network We are no longer consumers of only the products/services provided by a company but also of the marketing content that these companies create. When “new” marketing is done right, it is willingly consumed and not force fed to us.

We consumers like that.

Why We Reach For The Spoon Today, we are looking for one thing in the content that we consume online — whether it is high-dollar marketing content created for the Coca Cola Facebook page or just a personal blog post written by our Aunt Sophie — we are looking for VALUE.

> Content can give us value by (among other things): • Making us money • Saving us time • Protecting us or those we love • Educating us • Entertaining us For example, if you are a CPA and you publish a [well researched and well written] article to your website called…

10 Tax Deductions Uncle Sam Wishes You Didn’t Know About I will grab the spoon and willingly engage with your business. After all, you could make me money, save me time, protect me and educate me with this article.

CONTENT MARKETING

via Google search, a video via YouTube or through an archive of indexed Tweets — we want the content we are looking for, when we are looking for it. This means the best kinds of marketing content need to be crawlable by Google (and the others), properly tagged, and optimized for search engines.

• Interactive - The web is now truly multidimensional. Marketing content that allows no interaction, falls flat. We want to tell you what we think about your products, services, articles, videos, audio, etc. It gives us the ability to steer the conversation — and we like that. This means your content should allow ratings, comments or other forms of feedback.

But Wait… We Also Want D.I.S. As consumers of products/services and also marketing content we are also interested in something else — D.I.S.

We want our marketing content to be: • Discoverable - Marketing content is consumed on our time and with our permission. We go looking for it when we want it, and we expect to find it.

Whether it be discovered as a blog post

• Shareable - We expect that your marketing content will be shareable. If we like it we want to pass it around to our network so that they can interact with it. This is how we connect with each other online, by sharing content. This means your content should be capable of easily sharing through the major social networking sites as well as any niche sites your market is using. Appropriate forms of content should be embeddable as well on other web properties.

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CONTENT MARKETING When considering the mediums you will use to market your business, consider D.I.S. Below is a graphic that places marketing mediums and tools where I believe their strengths lie on the D.I.S. model

Certainly today, all of these tools and mediums can be made to be discoverable, interactive and shareable â&#x20AC;&#x201D; but I wanted to point out that each tool and (in some cases medium) has inherent strengths and weaknesses in this model. For instance, a static web page on a site can be shareable but it is certainly not a strength of a static page. A Facebook profile update is very shareable. However, that Facebook profile update is not inherently discoverable by search engines â&#x20AC;&#x201D; creating a weakness for that tool. IMM

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ADVERTISING

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SHOPPING ENGINES

THE 10 BEST SHOPPING ENGINES

By Mary Weinstein

E

ach quarter, CPC Strategy releases their Comparison Shopping Report, a compilation of data from more than 4 million clicks and more than $8 million in revenue. The report ranks the industry’s top shopping engines for online merchants based on significant metrics like overall traffic, revenue, conversion rate, cost of sale, average CPC, and merchant response ratings.

Ecommerce merchants can use this data to tailor their marketing budget to make more sales and increase product exposure on the sites that online shoppers frequently use to find great deals on products.

Here are the 10 best comparison shopping engines.

1. Google Shopping (CPC) More than 5 billion searches happen on Google every year. Many of those retail specific searches happen through Google Shopping, a cost per click program. Google Shopping is the top performer highest traffic and conversion rate shopping site for merchants online consistently generating more clicks and sales for retailers.

Following Google Shopping’s switch to a the paid Google Product Listing Ads / Google Shopping program, Google has lead shopping engine performance in nearly every significant ecommerce KPI. During Q1 2014 Google Shopping drove the highest traffic, and revenue among the major

shopping engines online. Google’s COS is the lowest of the paid Shopping engines (14.27 percent), and provides the simplest merchant tools for online advertisers.

Google Shopping switches to Google Shopping’s in August which positions Google to continue to dominate shopping engine performance.

Retailers on Google Shopping should review the new Google data feed requirements before signing up for the program. Merchants can manually upload feeds or use an FTP to upload in bulk.

2. Shopzilla (CPC) Shopzilla is a paid shopping site that highlights similar products from various retailers online.

For merchants, Shopzilla features one of the easier bidding tools, and allows retailers to zero-bid, ($0.00) on poor-converting products.

As a Bizrate partner, Shopzilla merchants gain the benefit of Bizrate reviews – both on Shopzilla and Google. The third highest

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SHOPPING ENGINES 5. eBay Commerce Network (CPC) The eBay Commerce Network (formerly Shopping.com) is a paid comparison shopping site. For retailers, the eBay Commerce Network CPC bidding model provides greater flexibility with category level bids.

revenue producer among the shopping engines, Shopzila is a high converting converts at almost 4 percent. Shopzilla also supports bulk product feed uploads via an FTP. 3. PriceGrabber (CPC) PriceGrabber is a paid comparison shopping site which features deals, coupons, and weekly specials. PriceGrabber has a nominimum CPC bidding model, which allows retailers to penny-bid, or bid as low as $0.01 on products.

PriceGrabber is second only to Google for its low Cost of Sale (15.52 percent), and is a leading shopping engine for click traffic.

Merchants using PriceGrabber also have the added advantage of sending their product lists to Yahoo Shopping.

4. Amazon Product Ads (CPC) Amazon Product Ads (APA) are paid ads on Amazon.com , often found on product detail pages, search, buy boxes, and tower ads.

Amazon Product Ads benefit from Amazon’s Marketplace traffic and brand recognition. However, unlike the Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Product Ads links shoppers to a merchant’s external web store for transactions, adding retargeting and branding value for retailers.

Amazon Product Ads are a viable option for retailers who already have listings on the Marketplace, or who want to list on Amazon without subscribing to the Marketplace program.

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For the second quarter in a row, the eBay Commerce generated the second highest traffic of all the shopping engines – in part because merchant listings on the eBay Commerce Network also receive exposure on Google Shopping.

6. Become (CPC) Become is an online shopping engine which aggregates research on products including expert reviews, consumer reviews, articles, buying guides, and forums. A smaller Shopping Engine, Become impressively beat out both Nextag and The Ebay Commerce Network with 18 percent COS. 7. Nextag (CPC) Nextag is a paid comparison shopping site that allows businesses to list physical products online- including tickets, real estate, and travel plans. Prior to Google Shopping, Nextag generated the highest revenue and conversions for paid Comparison Shopping Engines.

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SHOPPING ENGINES

Although Nextag’s surpasses the majority of the Shopping Engines with a 20.66 percent COS , the engine converts at almost 3 percent.

In addition to category and product level bidding Nextag’s CPC bidding model allows merchants to bid at the brand level.

8. Bing Product Ads (CPC) Q1 2014 marks the last quarter for free Bing Shopping. Bing Product Ads are now available for online merchants, and work on a cost per click (CPC) basis, similar to Google Shopping. Bing Product ads appear on Bing search with product details and images.

9. Pronto (CPC) Pronto makes it easy for shoppers to find current sales and facilitates buying popular products (e.g., HDTVs) with buying guides. Pronto surpassed all but one Shopping Engine with almost 4 percent conversion rate during Q1.

This CSE allows for whole feed processing via an FTP. 10. Amazon.com (% Sale) Amazon.com is an online Marketplace, not a comparison shopping engine. However, it warrants a place on this list as a large source of ecommerce traffic for online merchants, a shopping site where consumers can sort products for purchases.

Amazon’s fee structure is very different from CSEs, in addition to how retailers can sell on Amazon. IMM internet marketing magazine august 2014

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ECOMMERCE

GOOGLE TRUSTED STORES VERSUS AMAZON

By ROI Revolution

F

ree two-day shipping.

Some of the best customer service on the Web. An Internet-wide reputation as a trusted seller of… well, everything. If you’re in the business of online retailing, this is the competitive reality you deal with every day. Many merchants and marketplace sellers willingly give up their autonomy in exchange for the chance to piggyback on Amazon’s traffic and trust.

Amazon.com has grown by leaps and bounds to dominate the ecommerce market, but that doesn’t mean you have to join their marketplace just to keep your business viable.

Google has many different free tools available to help online retailers capitalize on their corner of the Internet, but our

focus today is Google Trusted Stores and how it can help your business compete with Amazon.

This tool has been available for nearly three years now, but is still vastly underutilized by the majority of retailers. In a nutshell, Google Trusted Stores offers business owners a process by which they can prove their store’s trustworthiness and receive a stamp of approval from Google itself. This badge can then be displayed on your website, and will reveal your “grade” on customer service, shipping, and returns to potential buyers. This badge will also appear alongside any Google Shopping results for your products.

With this move, Google seems to be positioning Google Shopping as a place for retailers to compete directly with Amazon, while still remaining independent from a “marketplace.” Google, as you’ll recall, is in the advertising business, not the retail business.

So not only do you not have to worry about Google competing for your business a la Amazon, but in its own way, Google is also in competition with Amazon.

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ECOMMERCE

As more and more users conduct their initial product searches on Amazon instead of Google, Google in turn loses those advertising dollars.

It’s in Google’s best interest to steer those purchase-ready searchers off of Amazon and back to the welcoming arms of your paid search ads.

Google Trusted Stores is one way Google is attempting to draw users back from Amazon by providing consumers the kind of shopping security they find on Amazon. If we’re lucky, it’s only the first of many ways Google will help smaller retailers compete against the Amazon juggernaut. But for now, it behooves any and every retailer to apply for the Google Trusted Store badge–especially with the 8.6% increase in revenue that early adopters have been seeing with this program.

If you’re interested in learning more about Google Trusted Stores, especially as pertains to your Google Shopping campaigns, then download our whitepaper, Google Shopping Supremacy Secret: The 3 Advantages Given to Google Trusted Stores. IMM

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FREEMIUM TOOLS

11 FREEMIUM TOOLS TO SPY ON YOUR ONLINE COMPETITION

By Marta Wadsworth “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles” - Sun Tzu

following list of free(mium) tools you can use to unravel the actions and underlying strategies of your competition.

1. Moat Moat is a free ad search tool that allows you to fill-in your competitors’ names and it will show you the ads they’ve been putting up lately as well as the locations where these ads appeared.

W

e all know the quote “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. Whatever field you are in, the first move in beating the competition is a close analysis of their actions.

In online business, innovative tools have made the field much more transparent than they were before.

Business can learn a lot from ancient military wisdom. Armies have been using spies for thousands of years to report on the other side’s strategies, weaponry, supplies, morale, and general’s hangover.

2. Google Alerts This easy-to-use Google tool sends periodical reports to your e-mail pointing out all the mentions on you competitor’s brand name.

This tool also allows you to monitor specific keywords of your choice.

3. Open Site Explorer

While binoculars and a fake moustache may have been the most important tools for most of spying history, the internet age has provided us with somewhat more advanced tools to keep track of our competitors. Take a look at the

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FREEMIUM TOOLS Open Site Explorer describes itself as a search engine for links, backlinks, mentions, linking domains the anchor text used and much more.

It allows to you take a in-depth look at your competitor’s linking strategy and understand when, where, how and why are they linking and improving their own popularity.

4. Alexa Traffic Rank This tool allows you to rank your website and/or competitors’ in global rank of visitors traffic. As they say “information is power” and thus Alexa is one of the must-have tools to transform data into meaningful insights which may translate in competitive advantage for your business. On the other hand side, Alexa is only able to count visitors with who have their toolbar installed and therefore, for certain cases, data outcomes might not be that relevant. It is also possible to falsely influence the ranking, which is sometimes done by websites depending on ads to drive up the price.

5. Social Searcher This platform allows you to look into your competitors’ latest social actions (on Facebook, Twitter and Google+). Additionally, on Social Searcher you can have a look at the analytics from their social interactions and subscribe e-mail alerts.

6. Social Mention Similarly to Social Searcher, this tool tracks your competitors’ behaviour on the social

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media. However this tool as a slight twist, apart from only listing all the mentions on social networks it also analysis several other sources such as Blogs, Microblogs, forums and different communities crawling for the tiniest appearance and movement on the web.

7. Ahrefs.com A super complete tool to analyse your competitors’ inbound strategy. With power and useful graphs, tables and in-depth insights into their accurate backlink footprint. Take a look and be astonished by how much information this free tool can provide you.

8. SpyOnWeb.com This research tool helps you discover your competitor’s IP Address and further domain information. One of the coolest uses for this tool is to discover all the resources who belong to the same owner.

9. Simply Measured

From Simply Measured there’s a new set of Freebie tools which may help you increase your efficiency in analysing your competitor’s social

> media. One of the most popular and curious ones is the Free Twitter Customer Service Analysis which tells you how well you and/or your competitors are responding to customer enquiries on this social platform.

10. Klout Score Klout is a tool usually used to understand how influencial a certain individual is through its networks (usually social networks). However, if you and your competitors are active on different social networks using and analysing their Klout Score might also be helpful in understanding how well you are performing regarding your social engagement.

11. Mention Mention is a real-time monitor that lets you track millions of sources in 42 different languages. If you want to make sure you are able to control everything being published in the web and social networks with comprehensive reports and a unique team feature that lets you assign specific tasks and alerts to different members while comparing data from you and your competitors you should try out this tool.

FREEMIUM TOOLS

platform you can observe a website’s global metrics such as ranking, visitors, bounce rate, traffic sources among others. Some of the most useful insights this platform gives you include website’s most relevant organic and paid keywords, top referring and top destination sites.

SEMRush This tools was specially designed for SEO and SEM practitioners to analyse competitors’ efforts. With SEMRush you are able to monitor your competitors’ live traffic (organic and paid), main paid and organic keywords and most relevant ads competitors. From SEMRush it’s important to highlight its visual graphics and flexibility provided to suit in-depth data according to your research goals.

Virality Score If you are concerned about measuring your competitors’ real-time virality this might well be one of the best tools out there. In this website you can compare your website to your competitors’ and generate a virality average score for each followed by a ranked list of content for given domains.

The following tools were suggested by our readers: SimilarWeb To have a semi-detailed overview of your competitors’ website performance SimilarWeb free tool is a great starting point. In this

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FREEMIUM TOOLS Unruly Viral Videos For some of you, measuring virality of your competitors’ videos is among your highest concerns. To help you with this task Unruly brings you this chart tool real-time updated with the most viral videos out there. Additionally, you can check most viral videos by region or source. Complementary, Unruly offers a paid analytics solution for measuring virality in your own videos.

Final Considerations Reading your competitors’ strategies is just the beginning. To use this information productively you will need to compare with your own strategies and understand in which way can you improve your operations. Implement a system of constant improvement where monitoring competitors is only part of the process and include customer feedback as an unavoidable complement.

Always remember that what works for one doesn’t work for all and thus don’t become a copycat, but use the insights about your competitors to create your own strategiy to find your own space in the market. IMM

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GOOGLE+

HOW TO PIMP YOUR LOCAL GOOGLE+ PAGE

By Phil Rozek

Y

our business’s local Google+ page could be like this:

You may remember the post I wrote over 2 years ago, How to Pimp Your Google Places Listing. That’s old-school. Less than 4 months after I wrote it, Google retired the old Places pages. Much else has changed in the last couple of years - with the most-recent big change being the “My Business” rollout.

In that time, I’ve put together a whole new bag of tricks for pimping a Google page. (By the way, we help you with these as part of our LocalSpark service.)

But I’m guessing it’s more like this: A few notes:

Don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. Most businesses neglect their local Google+ (AKA Google Places) pages.

At best they’re virtual business cards - minus the paper and social significance. At worst they fail to make would-be customers step inside, because they look about as comforting and cool as a colostomy bag.

There’s hope. If you hustle, you can be the only one in your ‘hood with a pimped Google page that makes mad bank.

• I’m assuming you’ve got the upgraded, “fully social” type of Google page.

• Some of these tips will improve the userexperience for people who are on your page, and others will help your page stand out in the search results (and some tips will do both). All of them can help your local rankings at least indirectly.

• These tips should still apply even if local Google+ / Google Places pages get a new name a month from now. It’s possible.

Google’s “local” department has gone through more name-changes than Larry King has gone through wives.

Given that the dust seems to have settled for a few minutes on the new types of Google pages, I can finally give you my suggestions for how to pimp yours.

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GOOGLE+ #1 - Pick a clever name for your business.

If you’re just starting out or are rebranding anyway, now is the time to think about your business name. You’ll stand out in the search results and will probably steal most of the clicks from your lame competitors. You can also start your relationship with customers the right way: with a chuckle.

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma:

Some of my favorite names.

I give an honorable mention to Like No Udder, a vegan ice cream truck in Providence. They have a Yelp page, but no Google page probably because they don’t have a physical location.

#2 - Consider adding a “descriptor” to your business name.

No, “Fidler” is not a typo. Dr. Vicki Fidler is the dentist there.

Then you’ve got the Best Western in Intercourse, PA.

First read my post on Google Places descriptors.

Descriptors carry some risks. You can’t just do whatever you want.

Then see if you can think of a descriptor 1-3 words long. It should help searchers make a choice without needing to click through to your Google page or site.

And my all-time favorite - a piercing salon in

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For example, if you’re John Doe, Esq. and you specialize in divorce, maybe your local Google+ business name should read “John Doe, Esq. Divorce Attorney.” That will help encourage

> the right people to click. It will also deter people who wouldn’t become clients anyway.

You attract to the degree you repel.

#3 - Create a classy cover photo.

GOOGLE+

take the photo(s) yourself, it’s smart to get a designer to add some polish.

#4 - Work your description.

Include a couple links to subpages on your site.

Mix up the formatting - like with bullet points.

But don’t overdo it. Don’t make the description too long, or it will push your reviews far down the page.

Don’t stuff it with keywords. It won’t help your ranking, but it might get your page penalized.

The description should read naturally.

Oh, and take it easy on the anchor text: don’t have your links read, “implant dentists Las Vegas” and “cosmetic dentists Las Vegas.”

Notice I said “create.” Don’t just buy a lame stock photo and call it a day. If you use a stock photo, at least add your branding or logo to it, and maybe tile other photos onto it.

#5 - Include a bilingual description.

This can be helpful if anyone in your company is multilingual. Or maybe there’s something you really want to tell potential customers in a language other than English.

And notice I said “classy.” Your photo doesn’t need to be flashy. See the above examples.

The best approach is to pay a pro to help you design a mighty fine photo. Even if you

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GOOGLE+ #6 - Add a unique special offer to your description.

Create a page on your site specifically for that offer, and put a coupon (or whatever your offer is) on that page.

You can get even more mileage out of the photo shoot if you embed it on your site.

(It’s a minor hassle to grab the right code, so just let me know in the comments if you have questions about how to pull it off.)

The benefit of this is you’ll be able to go into Google Analytics (not to mention CrazyEgg) and learn more about how your visitors behave on your page. This is one way to track at least some of the leads you get from your Google+ Local page - which has long been a frustration for anyone who knows what “local SEO” means.

#7 - Consider adding your address (and phone number) to your description.

If your address is “hidden” just because of Google’s rules, but you want customers to know your address, you might want to add your address (and phone number) to your description.

#8 - Get a Google Business View photo shoot.

You don’t need to be in a sexy industry (although if you are, it’s a no-brainer). People want to see what your place is like before setting foot in it.

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#9 - Get at least 5 Google+ reviews.

That’s how you’ll get those golden stars next to your listing in the search results.

> #10 - Get enough Google reviews that you get the “People talk about” snippets.

How many is enough? Not necessarily more than a handful.

GOOGLE+

#12 - Embed your Google+ reviews on your website.

Here’s a good walkthrough.

Fine, I guess technically this isn’t a way to pimp your Google page. But it is a way to leverage the Google+ reviews on it.

By the way, I do mean “embed” your reviews; don’t just copy and paste them. That’s against Google’s review guidelines.

On the other hand, you’ll probably get more snippets if you have more reviews.

#13 - Reply to your reviews - the good, the bad, and the lukewarm.

#11 - Encourage reviewers to upload profile photos.

Reviews without profile photos just aren’t “pimp”. If the customers who reviewed you don’t have a profile photo ask them to add one.

It adds a nice human touch.

#14 - Feature some of your Google+ reviews in your “Posts” stream.

Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if a review is less likely to get filtered if the reviewer has a profile photo. Total conjecture on my part.

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GOOGLE+ Yes, you can do that.

To do this, sign into the Google account you use to manage your local page, find the review (in your “About” tab), and click the “share” arrow.

#15 - Get reviews on sites besides Google+ and Yelp.

In many cases 3 of those sites will be mentioned on your Google page.

By the way, the testimonials need to be unique.

Don’t just copy and paste your reviews - or snippets of them. Although...you can take filtered Yelp reviews and repurpose them as testimonials on your site.

#17 - Add a bunch of your customers and other people you know to your “circles.”

Some will add you back. And they’ll all be noticeable on your page (under the “posts” tab).

Up to 4 of them will show up in the knowledge graph that people see when they search for your business by name.

It’s also a great barnacle local SEO technique.

#16 - Mark up customers’ testimonials with Schema and feature them on your site.

They’ll show up in the knowledge graph and under the “Reviews from around the web” area of your page.

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#18 - Do at least a couple of short Google+ posts every week.

Check out the Google page of Dr. J. Ryan Fuller in New York if you’d like to see an example of good Google+ posts and “social” interaction done right.

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GOOGLE+

#21 - Upload photos. Lots of photos.

Try to tell a story with your photos. Use them as a tour of your business. Or use them to show the problem that you can help solve, plus your solution.

By the way, include photos in your posts as often as possible. They’ll make your page nicer to look at, and they’ll stick out in your knowledge graph. (Check out this post by Mike Blumenthal to see what I mean.)

#19 - Encourage customers (and other readers) to leave comments on your Google+ posts.

I’d say the best way to do this is simply to ask a question in each of your posts. You probably won’t get many people who comment, but so what.

#20 - Upload a profile photo.

Ideally it’s a picture of a person or of a small group of people in your company.

Goofy is usually good - like the business owner in a costume.

Whatever you do, make sure the photo would look good if it shows up in the local carousel. (Do so for your other photos, too - see next suggestion).

Show award badges and other distinctions you’ve earned (like the Angie’s List Super Service Award).

Consider using animated GIFs in small, tasteful quantities.

#22 - Upload videos.

If you don’t have videos and don’t feel like making any, remove the “Videos” or YouTube tab from showing on your page. Funnel that attention to your other tabs. IMM

*This article was originally published on Whitespark.ca

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