July 2013 / ÂŁ2.00
Digital Marketing Insider
How Remarketing Is Killing Your Chances Of Making Money Does Your Business Suck? How To Build A Successful Business Entrepreneur Insights - Norman Jackson
A Note From The Editor
First a warm welcome to the July edition of the Digital Marketing Insider, produced by ROARlocal
If this is the first time you’ve received this a hearty welcome to you! You’re receiving this because we want to show you what we’re all about and also give you some usable strategies to help your businesses grow. This month starts a new collaboration for Roarlocal with the agency now looking after all the online marketing for Angel Investor Agency. For some time now Angel investors and Venture capital firms have used us to help their investments grow and we’ve helped many angel investors and VC’s triple their investments. Now this relationship is formalized with our angel investor agency agreement. You can see more (and apply for finance if you need it) here: www.angelinvestoragency.com Well I’ve had a VERY interesting month this month! We had a request from a certain far right political party with nazi leanings, to help them look after their online marketing. I’m fascinated with politics and would relish the opportunity to further the causes of things i believe in, but racist bigotry is not one of them, so we politely turned them down. Nicola was a bit worried in case they caused any bovver for us ;-) We’ve had some great success with our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients this
month, getting them on page 1 of Google in just 3 weeks and saving them $7500 a month in the process. Finally we have a BRILLIANT interview this week with another rockstar mentor so be sure to check that out. I know you’ll get a ton out of his pearls of wisdom as you will the rest of this months magazine it’s jam packed with our usual level of brilliant content and, as always, if we can help you in any way please get in touch Neil Asher CEO ROARlocal Brighton, Sydney & Melbourne (and growing!)
About Us We create great looking online advertising campaigns that enhance your brand, we use scientifically proven online advertising methods to drive visitors to your website and adverts and then we optimise your site to make sure those visitors become paying customers that tell all their friends and come back for more.
Contents 01 / A Note From The Editor 02 / How To Build A Successful Business 03 / How Remarketing Is Killing Your Chances Of Making Money 04 / How To Sell Your Stuff By Telling People Not To Buy It 05 / How To Make Google Local Pages Work For Your Business 06 / Does Your Business Suck? 07 / A Special Contribution From John Davy 09 / Penguie 2.0: Do You Have A Google Penalty?” 10 / Entrepreneur Insights
Our team is different, we focus on making you MONEY we couldn’t care less for winning awards for being “creative” our reward is money in your bank. We’re successful online entrepreneurs, world class copywriters, website optimisation specialists, online advertising mavericks and the geekiest SEO people!
01
How To Build A Successful Business
by Neil Asher
1 / The first step is to stop Googling things like, “how to make money online.” Not because you shouldn’t want to make money online, but because the stuff you’re going to find by doing that is going to help you lose money online. Sort of like asking a casino owner how to make money in Vegas…
2 / Don’t pay anyone for simple and proven instructions on how to achieve this goal. In particular, don’t pay anyone to teach you how to write or sell manuals or eBooks about how to make money online.
13 / Make money offline. If you can figure out how to create value face to face, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to do the same digitally. The web isn’t magic, it’s merely efficient.
3 / Get rich slow.
14 / Become the best in the world at something that people value. Easier said than done, but worth more than you might think.
4 / Focus on this scarce resource online: attention. If you try to invent a way to take cheap attention and turn it into cash, you will fail. The attention you want isn’t cheap, it’s difficult to get via SEO and it rarely scales. Instead, figure out how to earn expensive attention. 5 / In addition to attention, focus on trust. Trust is even more scarce than attention. 6 / Don’t worry so much about the ‘online’ part. Instead, figure out how to create value. The online part will take care of itself. 7 / Don’t quit your day job. Start evenings and weekends and figure it out with small failures. 8 / Build a public reputation. A good one. And be sure that you deserve it; and that it will hold up to scrutiny. 9 / Obsessively specialise. No niche is too small if it’s yours. 10 / Connect the disconnected. 11 / Lead. 12 / Build an online legacy that increases in value daily.
15 / Hang out with people who aren’t looking for shortcuts. Learn from them. 16 / Fail. Fail often and fail cheaply. This is the very best gift the web has given to people who want to bootstrap their way into a new business. 17 / Make money in the small and then relentlessly scale. 18 / Don’t chase yesterday’s online fad. 19 / Think big, act with intention and don’t get bogged down in personalities. If it’s not on your agenda, why are you wasting time on it? 20 / Learn. Ceaselessly. Learn to code, to write persuasively, to understand new technologies, to bring out the best in your team, to find underused resources and to spot patterns. 21 / This is not a zero sum game. The more you add to your community, the bigger your piece gets. I can’t take credit for this list as it was written by Seth Godin, but by God I agree wholeheartedly with everything on it!
02
How Remarketing Is Killing Your Chances Of Making Money
by Neil Asher
What is Remarketing? Here is a MUCH more intense remarketing explanation, or see this graphic for the brief overview: What It Does Remarketing lets you show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the web. When you use remarketing, you’ll tag pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, you could add a “TV” tag on all of the pages where you sell televisions. You can then create an AdWords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a special offer on TVs) to people who’ve visted these pages as they browse sites across the Google Display Network. Why You’d Use It Remarketing is a powerful way to stay engaged with your target audience. Presenting them with highly relevant ads and offers across the web — and making sure your brand is top of mind when they’re ready to buy –- can radically improve ROI. You can achieve even higher conversions by combining other targeting methods, such as interest categories, demographics, or keyword campaigns. For example, if you wanted to expand the reach of your fashion brand, you could target only women between the ages of 18-24 who have not yet visited your site, and present them with an offer that is tailored to them. Sounds GREAT right? Like getting 100% of people who go to your website to opt into your e-mail list so you can market to them again and again and again! BUT, there’s a problem. Big companies with HUGE wads of dumb cash to spend on branding are using remarketing faster than a politician lies. Y’see most big dumb companies set their remarketing tags to unlimited views. “So what Neil” I hear you say (I hear voices a lot). Well, 2 things: 1 / It is VERY annoying when you’re online to keep seeing the same ad for the same thing you did not want on a website 20 clicks ago. Most digital marketing agencies assume that you went to a site and it just wasn’t the right time to buy for you, which is true of course.
But as well being true that what you saw wasn’t right for you, you didn’t WANT to buy, and therefore, showing you ads again and again for something you didn’t want to buy is just dumb.
Sucks right?
2 / Setting your remarketing tags to unlimited views means that if you have the budget you can pretty much dominate what ads a prospect sees on the net.
First up, recognise that when someone comes to your webpage to check out your offer, if you’ve done your work right they’re there because they’re ready to buy.
Think about that.
It’s therefore safe to assume that what you showed them did NOT convince them to buy the first time, so showing it to them again 50 times a day will not convince them to buy either.
Most companies have no idea how to market online and most digital marketing agencies get paid based on how much money they can spend for their clients (usually 15% of the budget), so, the more they spend they more they get paid! Smart right So now, as a smart, savvy marketer, you’re using the display network to market your business online; you’re doing everything right, setting good bids and tracking spend. BUT, your ads are not working. In fact, they’re NEVER being shown to your prospects because big budget companies are using remarketing (badly) to ensure their ad is the only ad that gets seen. It’s a land grab for cookies. The business that gets their cookie onto the prospect’s computer wins! Thus the big get bigger and the small get smaller. Or to put it another way… Your display ads won’t work because big business is using up all the online ad space by showing remarketing ads to people.
As always though, if you’re smart you can win. How to fight it:
So try showing them something else. Pay more (know your LTV) If you know your numbers you can beat the big companies easily. You’ll know exactly how much to bid and how much you can pay to acquire a customer. Most digital marketing agencies want this figure as FAR away as possible from their clients. We, however, want to work this out first so we can beat it and acquire customers for our clients as cheaply as possible. Our incentive is to save our clients money, not spend it for them. Finally, consider doing direct media buys I’ll cover this in more detail in future posts, but essentially, you’ll go direct to a website owner and pay them to run your ads on their site, cutting out the middle man (Google) and saving yourself a ton of cash in the process. Their are other more advanced strategies that we use for our clients of course, so if you’d like us to look after your online marketing for you and have all our secrets applied to your business, get in touch here. 03
by Neil Asher
As an entrepreneur, you want people to read your marketing. If they don’t, you cannot sell to them.
How To Sell Your Stuff By Telling People Not To Buy It
Just follow the example of this doctor: I found this ad in my local newspaper and was immediately struck by the bold headline: “You don’t want me to be your family doctor.”
BUY NO DESK Until You’ve Seen the Sensation of The Business Show Example ad headline utilising Sell By Not Selling. Here’s an example observed by John Caples (well-known copywriter) and mentioned in his book, Tested Advertising Methods:
Another example of this is the emergence of flogs with use of the “dynamic duo.” These are fake blogs written in the form of a testimonial for two or more products. Essentially, the copywriter writes about the benefits of each product and how they complement each other and how using both is the only way to get the desired results. This technique works well since you can (in theory, anyway) double your sales and also appear more “honest” with admitting that no product is perfect.
This was a negative disqualification that was able to provoke curiosity so well that the ad was read and resulted in sales after consumers read the entire copy. Additionally, story appeal and news headlines also utilise marketing disqualification well, but we’re not going to discuss this technique at this time since it doesn’t directly utilise Neg Theory.
For this technique, you have to be very careful. It can give a brand a poor name if done improperly. At the moment, I know of two situations where this technique has been used quite effectively. Essentially, your advert will pick apart the product’s imperfections and eventually by the end of the ad copy, these minor imperfections are overcome in some way. For the first example, you’ve likely seen the confession-style ad copy. This typically utilises an authority in a field or industry confessing something about a product, service or even him/herself. Jeff Sexton wrote an article on what he calls “Reverse Camouflage“: Want to stand out? Sharply define the edges between you and your competitors. The better you do this, the more strongly you’ll turn-off some customers. But wouldn’t you rather powerfully persuade some of your market than be overlooked by all of it?
Consumers are aware that there is no such thing as a perfect product. Some marketers have come to the conclusion that they can sell more than one product to the consumer to become more believable. This is widely used in the beauty industry. Look at skin care products, for example. Most products in this industry are sold for specific purposes. The same skin care product ingredients could be sold to decrease wrinkles around your eyes and around any other part of your face. However, it is more believable to sell the same product in different labeling — such as a separate labeling for eyes, forehead wrinkles, neck wrinkles, etcetera.
When newspaper readers first saw this ad, they gasped with amazement. Never before had they seen an ad that said: “Don’t buy.” All previous ads had said “Buy…buy…buy.” Thus the headline of the ad accomplished its purpose. It stopped people and made them read. The ad was so successful in selling desks that it was used over and over again. (pg. 52)
The imperfect compliment should complement
In the above example, the imperfect compliment is used solely to gather attention and readers. There is also a technique used to up-sell products and services.
Pretty ballsy headline for a doctor, huh? Wouldn’t you feel compelled to read more about this doctor with the courage to so brazenly declare what he wasn’t? Having gained the reader’s attention, the body copy further explains: “Neurosurgery is one of the few medical specialties for which I am well-suited. I am not warm and fuzzy. I could never be successful as a pediatrician or in a family practice – no one would come back a second time. But I am very good at what I do.” Dr. Goodman then substantiates his claimed expertise with a list of very impressive professional qualifications and accomplishments, rounded off with some examples of his extreme commitment to surgical excellence and his patients’ well-being.
In summary, the sell by not selling strategy has at least two purposes in marketing: Since people are used to being told to buy countless times in any one day, you disqualify your ad copy by using a non-selling headline (i.e., “Don’t buy X”). This allows people to read your copy much easier if they’re not looking to buy at the moment. You cannot sell if consumers will not read your message. The imperfect compliment makes your copy more realistic and believable. It may also have some effective attention grabbing benefits. Give it a shot in your marketing
While his professional qualifications are truly outstanding, most readers would never have read them without Dr. Goodman’s use of reverse camouflage in his headline. Saying what he wasn’t allowed him to stand out amidst the clutter.
04
How To Make Google local Pages Work For Your Business
In 2012 ‘Google Places’ changed its name to ‘Google+ Local’. If you are a local business with a physical location then this part is something you will want to set up. In essence, it is a Google + Page and has the ability for people to give you local reviews as well. They are very simple to set up so here’s my down and dirty guide to Google Local optimisation. How To Find Google+ Local Pages Any Google search for a business location will now display a result like this in Google Maps. When you click the “More Info” button, you’ll visit the new Google+ Local Business profile.
At the bare minimum, every business location should contain the following information:
by Neil Asher
Business Hours: Business hours are signals of trust to users and search engines. If you don’t want to share your hours, Google might list your business as “closed.” It doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s been known to happen. Pictures: You should have at least one image larger than 250×250 but less than 1024×1024 and under 1MB. This square image should be your logo or a picture of your place of business. Each page allows you to upload 10 images. By default, if you upload one image or less, the page will display a map of your location along the photo strip of Google+ (which I think looks pretty epic). What’s frustrating about uploading images is that Google doesn’t give you the option to rearrange photos or select a photo as the page image. Sometimes it doesn’t show your photo at all (we’ve been having issues with the roarlocal images for at least a week).
nb I’m in Sydney at the mo setting up ROARlocal Australia so scuse the sydney references
Suggested Information
Or, sign in to your Google+ profile and click on the new “Local” tab. Then, search for your business name and city.
Business Name: This should be the official business name, as it would appear on everything from phonebooks to business cards. It shouldn’t contain any keywords or local describers, unless it’s part of the official city name for that location. Address: Write out the full address of your business and use the second address line for suite numbers, etc. Also, double check your map listing to see if Google placed your location pin in the correct area. Local Phone Number: The “main” number should always be a local number, not an 800 number. If there is a non geographic type number (free phone, 0845 etc) number, add it as an “alternate phone.”
Tips to Optimise Your Google+ Local Page When it’s time to update your Google+ Local page, your dashboard will look exactly the same as it did for Google Places. Most of the local business optimisation tips rely on the phonebook rule, which means all of your business information that appears online should appear exactly as it does in the phonebook. Since you’re not 65 and don’t have a phonebook handy, just make sure all your online and print business listings are congruent.
Website: If the business has only one location or if the location pages contain little or no content, the URL should point to the homepage. However, if the business has two or more business locations and the website has devoted pages to each individual location that include 5-6 sentences of original content, then the URL should point to that location page. Categories: You must have at least one category description tag by default, but every business should have five (it only displays two at a time). Category description tags are sorted in order of importance and you should use one of the preferred, pre-populated categories whenever possible. The categories should not contain any local describers.
Your Google+ Local Dashboard has areas to submit additional information. It isn’t required, but this info might improve the page user experience in the future. Description: Your Google+ Local page will add a “from the owner” box under the business hours. Use this opportunity to add a short sentence or two about why you’re special. Email address: Your email isn’t currently displayed anywhere on the Google+ Local page, but it does appear on a Google+ Business page, which means Google may incorporate this into the listings in the future. Videos: Videos will enhance your “profile completion percentage,” but videos do not show up on a Google+ Local page. Since Google+ Business pages do incorporate videos, this might be another feature added later. Consider this your bare minimum and remember that Google plus pages rank VERY well for your main buying keywords. This is a must for any business, and I’ve seen examples of affiliates using Google + pages to rank well for keywords for affiliate offers… a hum Want us to look after your web strategy? Then check out what we can do for you here
05
Does Your Business Suck?
by Neil Asher
Burying other features into sub-menus like “Extras” or “Goodies”.
Every now and again we get someone approach us to look after their online marketing for them whose business plainly sucks.
Removing other features from global navigation UI.
Usually it’s because they’re in a dying niche and they’re trying desperately to hold on to it.
Rewriting headlines to de-emphasise unneeded features, or removing text about them from landing pages, bulleted lists, etc.
It’s always sad for us as entrepreneurs to let a business go to the grave, but sometimes that’s the only thing to do. Here’s some of what we’ve learnt about trying to save good businesses in sucky niches.
The combination of all of the above – either by making the main feature more prominent, or the burying the secondary features – should help the goal. You can A/B test these, primarily focusing on new users, to see what the effect looks like.
Adding more products won’t save your business Everyone’s worked on a business that’s failing despite a tonne of work behind it. It’s not for lack of great ideas, or a lack of bright minds working long and hard on it. In the start-up world, often this comes because after a new business is launched, there’s a point where, out of desperation, new service features are added to try to reignite things. After a few months of this, and a few shifts in direction, it’s easy to get a business that tries to be all things to all customers and ends up being boring as bat shit. At this point, adding new features won’t help. What’s broken is at the core of your business, not out on the edges. Adding more to edges won’t do anything, because most of your customers aren’t even getting there. Eric Ries has a great term for what to do here, which is to consider a “zoom in pivot.” He talks about it in his book Lean Startup, as a kind of pivot you can do if your product isn’t gaining traction. (Kudos to Nicola my biz partner for getting me to read this book!) The idea of the zoom in pivot is: A single feature in a product becomes the whole product, highlighting the value of “focus” and “minimum viable product,” delivered quickly and efficiently. The question is, how do you pick the feature you’re going to zoom into? And how do you validate that it can work as a standalone product? And how do you execute the pivot itself and what metrics can you look at?
what’s actually getting enough usage to actually execute the “zoom in” pivot. After all, if you zoom into a smaller feature set that isn’t being used currently, that’s obviously much riskier than noticing that out of 10 features, 1 or 2 are getting all the usage, so then you dump everything else. Based on developing a product/niche strategy, and looking at current usage metrics, you can develop a hypothesis for what a smaller product might look like. You can also create some goals you want to hit as far as the metrics are concerned. Obviously the usage of the zoomed in feature should be much higher, but by how much? And the usage of the secondary features should become zero or minimal – are you OK with that? The next step is to test it. Iteration and testing It should be easy to test a “zoom in” pivot- just default the navigation and the description of the product to focus on what you’re zooming into. You can even test a few ideas simultaneously if you want to. Here are a few high-impact places to test: •
Changing all the URLs and landing page where new prospects arrive to reflect the new positioning.
•
Taking customers directly to the product after they pay (if poss), so that you are defaulting to that usage.
Picking the new business niche The actual process of picking the new niche is the same as picking any new idea for a start-up. Ultimately it still has to go after a huge market, it has to be differentiated against competitors, and have a distribution model. You have to be passionate about it. Etc, etc. All the standard strategy issues apply. In terms of tactics though, the big thing from a metrics standpoint is to try and figure out
•
Using modal lightboxes or other highly prominent UI to channel users into the zoomed in feature set.
The above suggestions focus on making the zoomed in feature more prominent, but you can also make the other features more secondary. You can do the following:
From a metrics standpoint, I think as a baseline you’d want the zoomed in feature to increase significantly in usage, and for the secondary features to go to zero or nearly so. You also want to make sure some of the aggregate stats around frequency of use, time on site, content shared, etc. to be stable depending on what you care about. Choosing a feature After this iteration process, picking the zoomed in feature should be easy. You may have to go through an A/B testing process to smooth the transition from the old featureset to the minimalist one, but over some period of time you should be able to make the metrics move in the direction you want. If it turns out the metrics are stubborn and some important metrics go down, then that’s much more problematic. It might turn out that the zoomed in feature you picked is somehow not right enough. Or maybe the userbase you’ve amassed isn’t right for the pivot. Or maybe you need to develop the featureset a bit more, in the direction you’ve pivoted, to get to the right product. For all of these, the Plan B might be to either accept the new featureset and deal with the reduced numbers, hoping to fix them later. Or alternatively, the Plan B might be to pick a new featureset or continue iterating on the zoomed in featureset, until it works. That’s all gray area. I’m aware that was a pretty intense blog post but the key takeaways are this: 1 / If what you’re trying to sell is not selling, do something different. 2 / When you do something different remember to ASK what people want. 3 / Trying to be all things to all people is a loser’s game. Want us to get to work on your business`? Then get in touch here
06
A Special Contribution...From John Davy Tried and Tested Conversion Tools and Resources
When it comes to web tools, there are more options than you can count - free apps, paid for software, books, how-toguides - the list is endless.
Visual Website Optimizer www.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com
Picking what’s right for your needs and what will work best can be an endless task and an impossible decision, with the potential of making wrong and costly choices.
Owning and making the best out of a site means you need to know everything about your users habits, where they go on the site, how far they scroll, where they click, and it’s vital to know what they notice and what gets ignored. Three great choices for your Heatmap and Scrollmap tracking are Clicktale, Mouseflow and Inspectlet.
Here we discuss tried and tested tools to help you select the best and sidestep the rest. A/B testing and multivariate testing tools are an absolute must have for website owners. There are lots of options out there to pick from, including extremely advanced to complete novice programs. Of the three, we would recommend is Visual Website Optimizer, as this is very easy to use and will cater for all your A/B testing needs. And, you don’t need a degree in web management to utilise its capabilities. You can orchestrate an in-depth and complex series of experiments, almost effortlessly, which is a testament to how intuitive the user interface is. This also comes with Plugins for WordPress and Magento sites, making it a very popular choice. Other options are Optimizely and Convert. com, both of which are leaders in the pack. Optimizely was the choice for the Obama and Romney camps during the presidential campaigns, and Starbucks, MTV and Fox also turn to Optimizely. Convert.com is a newcomer to the A/B testing world, but is becoming quite a trailblazer.
Optimizely - www.optimizely.com Convert.com - www.convert.com
Clicktale is a favourite of organisations like O2, Groupon and Hallmark. It’s not a budget option but comes with heavyweight support. Mouseflow is a great resource to track the activity on your site, including visitors, keystrokes and form fills, and isn’t as pricey as Clicktale. Finally, Inspectlet is the tool to fit all budgets, but it doesn’t lack any punch for the SMBs. Clicktale - www.clicktale.com Mouseflow - www.mouseflow.com Inspectlet - www.inspectlet.com Another key fact-finding expedition all websites need to journey on is usability testing to find out how easy it is to navigate the site, how simple it is to find the information the visitor needs, how pleasing to the eye it is etc. If you’re lacking in this area, it could result in poor conversions, so we recommend trying out UserTesting.com, Open Hallway, TryMyUI or Ethnio. All these sites give you access to real people to test out your site and give you honest, open and direct answers.
Depending on how much testing you intend on doing will determine your choice. Open Hallway for example gives you unlimited testing for a month’s subscription and TryMyUI gives you the opportunity to get endless testers to check out your site. Want to pick your own testers to recruit? Then Ethnio would be the choice for you. Usertesting.com - www.usertesting.com Open Hallway - www.openhallway.com TryMyUI - www.trymyui.com Ethnio - www.ethn.io By now I think it’s obvious that knowledge is power and analytic tools give you a whole arsenal of weapons to tackle your website’s progression. The obvious choice is Google Analytics, which everyone will turn to first and for good reason, but we recommend also taking a look at KISSmetrics to learn more about your customers, and if you’re techy minded, then the most advanced tool out there has to be MixPanel. MixPanel does need to be configured yourself so possibly not for the faint hearted. As you develop a thirst for data and become more comfortable with metrics, you may find yourself stepping up the game entirely and building your own set of reporting tools using the Google Analytics API.
07
Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics KISSmetrics - www.kissmetrics.com MixPanel - www.mixpanel.com Email Marketing is a tool every company uses, or certainly should be using. Choose from the below sites to ensure you’re using your digital marketing wisely. We recommend two options here that we’ve tried and tested: GetResponse and Aweber. Both are hugely popular with corporations such as Hilton Hotels, GSK and Men’s Health. Turning to GetResponse and Aweber is a highly rated and highly affordable option - although Aweber’s cost will grow with your list size, so try to estimate the cost of growth so that you aren’t caught out. GetResponse - www.getresponse.com Aweber - www.getresponse.com If you run an ecommerce site then one of your biggest problems is probably shopping cart abandonment and how to prevent this lost sale becoming permanent. There are tools out there to help with shopping cart recovery and the three we recommend are Vero, Rejoiner and SeeWhy. These have the capability to send emails to your website visitors based on their behaviour, track shopping cart abandonment in real time, create optimised emails, and much more, in a bid to recover sales with cart remarketing. Vero – www.getvero.com Rejoiner - www.rejoiner.com SeeWhy - www.seewhy.com Landing pages can be a great way to promote on-off deals, competitions and seasonal goods, or to simple advertise a new product. Whether you want to tackle its creation yourself (turn to something like Unbounce), or you’d like to hand it over to the experts (head to Landing Page Makeover), there will be a great option out there for you.
Camtasia Studio - www.techsmith.com/ download/camtasia/ In an age where every customer wants things immediately, having a website that’s not working quickly enough can cost businesses sales. We’ve narrowed the choice down to five, which will keep your site working at its optimum. WP Engine is fantastic for Wordpress sites and has great support, LiquidWeb has a range of hosting options, Storm On Demands is one of the most affordable cloud hosting options and Cloudflare’s CDS and security systems are a great choice for anyone. There’s also Inscapula, which is like Cloudflare but gives a premium level of security and protection and last but not least, Google Mod Page that can be installed as a module onto your Apache web server by your web host.
Unbounce - www.unbounce.com
If you are looking for complete control, along with speed and reliability, then ServInt is a great choice. Their VPS servers are deceivingly powerful for the price, and if you have server admin skills, the sky’s the limit for optimising and striving for peak performance.
Lander - www.landerapp.com
WP Engine - www.wpengine.com
We’re only going to offer one option that we absolutely love for Screencasts and that’s Camtasia Studio. You’re able to edit and customise professional quality videos, all without formatting, and it’s easy, which is why we can’t recommend this enough. However, if you’re a Mac user and you don’t want to pay for capturing, not many people are aware that you can capture your screen directly in Quicktime Player - with easy exporting into iMovie for editing.
LiquidWeb - www.liquidweb.com
Landing Page Makeover www.landingpagemakeover.com
If this article has spurred your desire for knowledge and you want to learn even more about conversion optimisation and all sorts of other great tools to become a Digital Marketer that’s ahead of the pack, we recommend checking out MECLABS online courses. A fantastic resource for online courses in everything you may want to learn more about, and you can do in your spare time. Another option is MarketMotive Conversion Optimisation Training where you’ll get the chance to train with Brian Eisenberg. MECLABS Online Courses www.meclabs.com/training/online-course MarketMotive Conversion Optimisation Training - www.marketmotive.com If you want to further your knowledge with books, then we highly recommend the following: •
How to Build Websites by Peep Laja
•
Your Customer Creation Equation by Brian Massey
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You Should Test That by Chris Goward
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The Lean Start Up by Eric Ries
•
ReWork by 37 Signals
Storm on Demand www.stormondemand.com Cloudflare - www.cloudflare.com Inscapsula - www.incapsula.com Google Mod Pagespeed - www. developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ mod ServInt - www.servint.comhttps:// developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ mod https://developers.google.com/speed/ pagespeed/mod
08
Penguin 2.0: Do You Have a Google Penalty?
If you’ve spent any time recently in the world of SEO, you’ve probably heard about Penguin 2.0 — Google’s search engine algorithm change that was just launched on May 22nd, 2013.
about cooking lima beans could, with a few black hat techniques, climb in the rankings. The search engine doesn’t want that. They want people to have their no fart bean recipe — great content — not just a bunch of ads.
What is Penguin 2.0?
Thus, they change things deep within the algorithm to prevent those unscrupulous tricks from working. But the slithery lima bean site figures out a new way to slip by the algorithm. And the algorithm figures out another way to block them. Several key points emerge:
To understand the 2.0 of anything, you need to understand the 1.0. The original Penguin is the moniker for Google’s algorithm update of April 24, 2012. When Google tweaked the algorithm in a big way, 3.1% of all Englishlanguage queries were affected by the update. Penguin was carefully designed to penalise certain types of webspam. Here are some of the main factors that Penguin targeted: 1 / Lots of exact-match anchor texts (30% or more of a link profile). 2 / Low quality site linkbacks, including directories and blogs. 3 / Keyword intensive anchors. The aftershocks of Penguin continued long after April 24. Several mini Penguins were released since then, which is why some SEOs prefer to call the coming change “Penguin 4.” The new Penguin is predicted to do the following: •
Penalise paid links, especially those without “nofollow”
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Penalise spamdexing in a more effective way
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Penalise advertorial spam.
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Tightening penalties on link spamming/ directory listings
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Removing hacked sites from search engine results
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Boost ranks for sites that have a proven authority within a niche
Calling this Penguin 2.0 is slightly misleading. We shouldn’t think of algorithm changes in the same way we think of software updates — better features, faster architecture, whatever. Penguin is not a software update. It’s a change in the way that a search engine delivers results to users. Search engines are designed to give people the most accurate, trustworthy, and relevant results for a specific search query. So, if you type in “how to cook beans so you don’t get gas,” the search engine attempts to find the very best site on the Internet to help you cook your (non farting) beans. Obviously, every bean recipe site wants to have the top dog spot on the search engine results page (SERP). Some webmasters will cook up clever tricks to do so. Thus, a site with hordes of banner ads, hordes of affiliate links, and barely a word
1 / Search engine algorithms become more sophisticated and intelligent. 2 / Less likely for sites to game the system. At ROARlocal, we follow white-hat SEO principles. We understand that there are a few tricks that we could use that might bump your site higher in the short term. However, we don’t engage in those practices. We want our clients to be successful for the long haul, which is why we engage in SEO techniques that are truly legitimate. What’s going to happen? Now that Penguin 2.0 is rolling out, one of two things will happen to your site (as Google’s data centres propagate with the algorithm rollout and your rankings are adjusted accordingly): 1 / Nothing. 2 / Your rankings will drop, organic traffic will tank, and your site will begin to flounder. If, unfortunately, number 2 strikes, you may not realise it for a few days unless you are a big site with 10k+ visits and with 30%+ organic a day. In order to answer “what’s going to happen” for your site, you need to understand whether or not your site is in violation of any Penguin 2.0 targets. That question is better answered with an entire article of its own, but here are a few warning signs that your site could be targeted by Penguin 2.0. •
You’ve had unscrupulous link building efforts conducted on your site (we see this a lot).
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You purchased paid links from another site (e.g., advertorials)
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You rely on spam-like search queries (for example “pay day loans,” “cheap computers,” “free gambling site,” etc.).
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You have aggressively pursued link networks listings on unreliable directories.
Each of the above four points are common SEO tactics. Some SEOs have become sneakier than the algorithm, which is why Google is making these important changes.
by Neil Asher
What should I do to prepare or recover? The most important thing you can do right now is to follow Matt Cutt’s advice in his recent video: “If you’re doing high quality content whenever you’re doing SEO, this (the Penguin update) should not be a big surprise. You shouldn’t have to worry about a lot of changes. If you have been hanging out in a lot of black-hat forums, trading different types of spamming package tips and that sort of stuff, then this might be a more eventful summer for you.” Content is the most important thing, of course, but that’s more of a proactive preparation than an actual defense. Is there a way to actually defend yourself from the onslaught of Penguin 2.0? What if you’ve already been affected by it? One important thing you can do right now is to analyse your site’s link profile to ensure that your site is free of harmful links. Then, you should remove and perform disavow requests on the bad links to keep your site’s inbound link profile clean. This is the equivalent of a major surgery on your site, and it could take a long time to recover. Steps you need to take to recover from Penguin 2.0: Step 1. Identify which inbound links are “unclean” or could be hurting your rankings (i.e., causing you to be affected by Penguin 2.0). To do this, you’ll need to perform an inbound link profile audit (or have us do that for you). Step 2. Perform major surgery on your site’s link profile in order to make it as clean as possible. This includes removing links identified in the link profile audit, and then disavowing them as well. Step 3. Build new inbound links using whitehat tactics like guest blogging, while abiding by proper anchor text rules with your new inbound links. Step 4. Establish a content calendar to keep pushing out high-quality content, engage in social media, and avoid spammy techniques of any kind. If you’re looking for SEO help, ROARlocal is here to get you the top spot. One of our major efforts in the wake of Penguin 1.0 was helping sites to recover their rankings and clean up from their past. If you’ve been hit by Penguin 2.0, now is the time to take action to recover your rankings and search traffic. Contact us for a complimentary assessment and action plan. Get in touch for an SEO inventory.
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Entrepreneur Insights
This month we are interviewing Rockstar mentor Norman Jackson With big company experience, including Ernst & Young, Scottish & Newcastle and Mobil Oil, Norman has, for the last 30 years, been working with the owners of small and medium sized businesses (start ups with a turnover of £25 million) as an Adviser, Mentor, Strategic Planner, Non Executive Director and Corporate Financier, advising over 1,000 companies in the process. He is currently a partner in JFP Strategic Planning and a Director of Sunningdale Corporate Finance Limited.
What one thing about your childhood, personality or upbringing do you think had the biggest influence on your becoming an entrepreneur? I was fortunate enough to be a good rugby player, and second game out of school, I was playing premiership rugby in Scotland; and, following six seasons with London Scottish, I had spells playing in West Africa, Paris, Tokyo and New Zealand (I met a girl there on a blind date following the British Lions tour in 1977, liked her so much, I stayed on for two years and married her!). The game of rugby (and I am sure it is the same for many other sports), taught me to work with others for a common goal, respect but never be overawed by the opposition, take the knocks (literally), never to give up, and to have fun along the way, enjoying the wins but accepting those painful losses and moving on. Many of these attributes can be found in an entrepreneur. How did you do at school and what did you most love or hate about school? Could have done better – but made it to University. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, our school had instilled in us a joy for learning, which I retain today. In business, it is never possible to achieve the equivalent of Snooker’s 147 or Dart’s 180, as there is always a something new or better to implement. Although now in the autumn of my career, every day I look forward to learning something new in business, or to meet new people. In the words of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” I try to “fill the unforgiving minute of sixty seconds worth of distance run”, and by so doing, every day in business continues to be a true pleasure.
What would you say was the ONE THING that made the difference in your professional success? Without a doubt, networking. For me, this is succinctly put by Sir Ronald Cohen, who as a top private equity professional, has backed many successful entrepreneurs over the years, when he said “Luck is directly proportional to the size and appropriateness of your network”. Now networking is not for everyone – especially for those operating in a small market niche – but for the majority of people, networking will bring big rewards. But when building business relationships, be patient, take your time, get to know your new contacts and the opportunities will arise – perhaps not straightaway – but often many years down the track. What ONE THING would you do differently, knowing what you know now? I would have got myself an adviser. When I set up in business 30 years ago, I had never heard of the term “Business Mentor”. I had plenty of energy but little focus – I learned by mistakes, losing time and money pursuing a couple of ventures, which in retrospect were far too risky. If I had had a Rockstar mentor (or as one of my clients says – “A Critical Friend”), I am sure they would have given me better direction and certainly helped me stay clear of those foolhardy investments. Not that I could ever compare myself with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), but when he was asked a similar question he said “Get a Coach”.
What really gets you buzzed NOW about being in business? What fulfills you most? As a Rockstar mentor, now in my sixties, I work with many budding entrepreneurs who are in the their twenties and thirties and helping them plan and implement their ideas gives me a big buzz. As Sir Richard Branson says “business opportunities are like London buses, there is always one coming”. But that can be the problem. Nowadays many business people can be termed “parallel entrepreneurs” - they have several business on the go – but would they be better of just focusing on one? This is the type of conundrum and challenge that often rises in business, which can usually be resolved by talking to a Rockstar mentor (a problem shared is a problem halved). Last month, I was stopped in the street by a young entrepreneur, whose business is assembling different types of bikes. He had heard me speak at a Rockstar event and had taken on board the need for “focus”. He had consequently reduced the different types of bikes he assembles from 15 to 4, resulting in a significant increase in his bottom line. He was most grateful. To me, hearing those words was better than winning a million dollars. Onwards & Upwards. You can read more about Norman’s entrepreneur’s profile here www.rockstargroup.co.uk/mentors Norman Jackson Or get in touch with him through normandjackson@btinternet.com
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