Issue 003 | October 2012 by ROARlocal.com

October 2012

DIGITAL MARKETING INSIDER

HOW TO BUY A BRAND NEW PORSCHE WORTH £100K FOR £15K HOW TO PICK UP WOMEN ONLINE 7 THINGS DAVID OGILVY CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT ONLINE GRAPHIC DESIGN HOW TO BECOME AN AMAZON BEST SELLING AUTHOR

Contents

02 / A Note From The Editor. 03 / How to Buy A Brand New Porsche Worth £100K for £15K. 05 / How To Pick Up Women Online. 07 / 7 Things David Ogilvy Can Teach You About Online Graphic Design. 10 / How To Become An Amazon Best Selling Author. 11 / Get In Touch.

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.

Our team is different, we live in the UK so we understand how & what brits love to buy. We’re successful online entrepreneurs, world class copywriters, website optimisation specialists, online advertising mavericks and the geekiest SEO people!

A Note From The Editor

“ Neil with his daughters Isabella and Charlotte.

Remind your staff how much you value them.

”

First a warm welcome to Octobers’s edition of the Digital Marketing Insider, produced by ROARlocal.com. 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. First some news... I’m a Daddy! (again) Yes on Saturday the 9th of September at 9.09 am my wife Natasha gave birth to our second child, she’s a beautiful healthy little girl whom we’ve called Charlotte. So as you can imagine my month has been very busy, it’s reminded me of the importance of having brilliant people in your business. Without my team we’d have no business and so consider this a reminder to tell your staff (the good ones anyway) how much you value them. We’ve had some brilliant wins for our clients this month from setting up a full traffic and conversion campaign for a new client in America selling natural organic products to an Australian client whom we’ve added £50,000 a month to his business using our proprietary traffic and conversion techniques. I’ve also started a new online business with my operations head Nicola in the strangest niche I’ve ever been in... Spider catchers! BUT it’s showing all the signs of being a huge success. One of the things we do for our clients is build them complete online businesses, so the spider catcher business is officially our craziest niche :-) I hope you’ll enjoy reading 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.com

How to Buy A Brand New Porsche Worth £100K for £15K By Neil Asher

First up, forget about the Porsche, the car is simply something I want, that happens to cost £100K, however what I’m about to share with you will work for anything, car, house, holidays, lifestyle…… anything.

First a tiny bit of back ground, Chris has been a client of ours for some time, he owns a business that was doing OK until he brought it to us and we got to work on it and tripled it’s revenue and quadrupled his profits in 9 months. Anyway, over our fortnightly meeting (we meet all our “Outsourced Marketing Department” clients regularly to discuss the next steps for their business) I mentioned my Porsche 911 is my daily driver and that my daughter Isabella loves it… she calls it her “scream machine” car due to her giggling fits when I take her for a drive. 1. mentioned I’d love to get a new 911 and he suggested I set a goal for it… so I did. 2. weeks later he comes back to me and says he has a great way to get the new Porsche for £30K… naturally I’m interested. So here’s how it works:

(Nicola suggested the ladies might like to put a deposit on an investment property, pay a years worth of private school fees for their little darlings, buy a holiday home in Greece or take four stonking holidays a year!)

Natasha and I went to my local Porsche dealer and test drove my dream Porsche, the Porsche in the spec I want costs a total of £103,114.00 so just a tad over £100K The finance to buy said porsche is “zero down” and £1854 per month (before any finance people scream at me, I normally pay cash for my toys and buy my cars 2 -3 years old, this will be my first new car). So he asked me a great question “Neil, what can you buy that gives you an income of £2000 per month?” The natural answer is an online business, so I started to research online businesses for sale. A cursory glance on Flippa shows that a business that makes £2000 per month can be purchased for 1.5 net income so 18 x £2000 = £36,000 now that, in and of itself, would fund a new porsche for me/you. Saving me £64,000… that’s a great start don’t you think? But I thought £36K to buy a business making £2000 per month was too high.. so I put it to him that my team at ROARlocal could build a business for £15K that would make £2000 per month, all I needed was an idea and they’d do the rest. I like the idea of investing £15K to make £2000 per month (£24K P/Year) so I went away and thought about business niches and started doing my research.

The natural answer is an online business....... saving me £64,000… that’s a great start don’t you think?

Now before I go any further, stop and think! Right now you can quite easily buy an online business that will make you a great income, so if you get nothing else from this article remember that. Anyway, after a couple of days of research I had a short list of 15 businesses that I could start and build that would make £2 – £5K a month no problem. So one Monday morning I told my team we have a new client… ME! I outlined the business to them and let them get to work and they’re building my business as we speak, I have no doubt they’ll build me something that will make enough cash to fund a new Porsche 911 for me AND stop my wife divorcing me for spending £100K on a car!!! So there you go, that’s the smart way to own a brand new Porsche worth £100K for £15K

All Done For You! Build A Real Business Workshop Hotel + Map

Join RoarLocal and see how Neil Asher and Nicola Cairncross can show you how to maximise a business’s online presence with this one-day workshop!

London Southwark Rose Hotel on 20th October 43-47 Southwark Bridge Road London SE1 9HH, United Kingdom 9.30 am - 5.30 pm in the Shakespeare Room *Biscuits and tea available We regret there can be no admissions on the door due to hotel policy. You must book now to reserve your seats. Limited numbers only!

01273 78 21 44 / patricia@roarlocal.com Do you have an idea for a business? Do you have a product that you’d love to get online? As a special treat I’ve got a free webinar showing you step by step how to build your own £2 – £5K a month business. We are also going to document the process my team uses to build the business as we go. If you’d like to watch that webinar fill in the form found @ www.roarlocal.com/how-tobuy-a-brand-new-porsche-worth-100k-for-15k/, you’ll notice I ask a few business type questions, including if you have an existing idea for a business, so let me know and I’ll give you my honest opinion of if it will work and if it will we’ll put together a plan to get it to market for you. In the webinar will show you a few business niches that you could get into too. The webinar costs nothing to attend and your worst case scenario is you’ll know for sure if you have an idea that will work. To Freedom and Success!

How To Pick Up Women Online By Neil Asher

First up, get your mind out of the gutter, I am (of course) talking about the main sites where you can get your message in front of (hot sexy) women. Women constitute 80% of Pinterest’s userbase and 75% of them are between the ages of 25 and 54.

Who’s your perfect woman? >

Aged 25 – 54?

Are you into Mums ? Are women typically the ones making the decision to buy your products and services? If so, then you just might need Pinterest for your company. What is Pinterest, you ask? If you’re a man, chances are good you have never set your eyes on the virtual pinboard featuring images of puppies, cupcakes, sunsets, LOTS & LOTS of shoes and Fiats. But women have found it so addictive that they are drooling over it. That is why I refer to it as VCC – Visual Chick Crack. Pinterest shows you all the perfect things you want to buy, captured in the very best light, separated into categories for easy sharing. Who exactly is using Pinterest currently? Women constitute 80% of Pinterest’s userbase and 75% of them are between the ages of 25 and 54. The average annual household income is £36,000 to £70,000. Sound like your target audience? I thought so. So, you are itching to court these women and to bring them home to your website, right? Is Pinterest really the way to do it? Well, if your company manages to get pins that are visually appealing, your dreamy target audience will flock to your brand and love it till death do you part. It may seem that the only things pinners care about are fashion, puppies, and do-it-yourself tips, but if GeneralElectric can find success, chances are there is a niche for your company here too.

And along comes the next question. What is the ROI on Pinterest? If you’re doing it well, it is pretty darn high. In fact, Pinterest has actually surpassed Twitter for online referral traffic for some industries — more than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined (data from Shareoholic). This means Pinterest can get people onto your website, and if your website does its job, get you more customers. AND

Pinterest has actually surpassed Twitter for online referral traffic for some industries

according to comscore pinterest earnings per user is HIGHER than facebook… now you’re interested ;_) We’re just building an ecommerce websitefor a client and we’re basing the entire marketing strategy on pinterest for her. All our research shows us the website will do very very well. So break out the Champagne and head on over to Pinterest. Don’t be shy! It might be just the time for your company to start picking up chicks online.

P.S Got a great idea for an online business? then check out this video that shows you how to test your idea and see if you can make money online with it. www.roarlocal.com/dmi/real-businessty/

7 Things David Ogilvy Can Teach You About Online Graphic Design By Neil Asher

Your old web designer reckons your site is outdated. It makes you look amateurish. If they’re being honest, they might even say it’s downright ugly and you should be ashamed of attaching it to your brand.

The solution? A redesign, of course. Not just a few tweaks, mind you, but a reinvention, taking your tired old website and bringing it into the modern day.

Many years ago, advertising legend David Ogilvy commissioned research into the use of images. He wanted to be sure that when he wrote ads, the images in them would increase response rates. The prevailing wisdom was that any kind of image would attract attention, and therefore get people reading. But Ogilvy wasn’t so sure.

It’ll have snazzy vector paths, cute cartoon scenes, jQuery carousels, fullpage high-resolution background photos, the works. By the time you’re done, you’ll have a breathtaking design that cost you a fortune to create—but you shouldn’t hesitate, because it’ll be worth it.

What he discovered from testing various kinds and placements of images was quite different to the popular opinion of designers—then and now:

Why?

You might be wondering why you should care about research done in offline advertising. Well, Ogilvy’s ads were specifically structured to look like news articles. They bear an uncanny resemblance to most forms of online content. And the best practices he discovered for images revolve around broad psychological principles, rather than medium-specific tactics. So they apply to all kinds of content—not just advertising copy.

Well, check out these (Graphic Designer) reasons! 1. Sites with images look good, and people enjoy eye-candy, so they’re more likely to browse around 2. Images are attention-grabbing, so new visitors won’t hit the back button 3. An eye-catching site impresses prospects, and impressed prospects are more likely to buy 4. Flashy images show that you’re hip and modern, and people trust hip and modern companies—so you get more sales 5. In summary, for every bit of eyecandy on your site, your sales will increase an average of 16.5%*

Images can reduce readership. Yes, they catch people’s attention. But without some very specific conditions in place, that attention does not translate into people reading the body copy—or coughing up cash.

What Ogilvy Discovered Here are seven principles Ogilvy’s research turned up. If you ignore these principles, your images will generally reduce your readership. If you apply these principles, your images will increase your readership. Of course, they are just best practices—a sensible place to start. The only way to know for sure how they will work for you is by testing. 1 / Placement matters—a lot The natural sequence for reading involves a very specific order. First we look at the image, if there is one. Then we scan the headline. Then we read the body copy (if the headline is interesting enough). An image at the top of the page is a common practice, to catch people’s attention and draw them into the article. But if you’re doing this, you’d better be sure it’s above your headline. Ogilvy found that, on average, headlines placed below an image are read by 10% more people than headlines above. Since reading the headline is a prerequisite of reading the body copy, you’re losing a potential 10% of your audience if you’re distracting them with an image in the wrong place. If you have a large audience—say 145,000 people—then putting your image below your headline could be costing you nearly fifteen thousand potential readers! As Ogilvy sardonically said, that’s not to be sneezed at.

7 Things David Ogilvy Can Teach You About Online Graphic Design

2 / Captions get read more than body copy—four times more An image placed somewhere in the middle of text draws the reader’s attention more than the text itself. It might even draw him out of the copy (see the next point). For that reason, it’s extremely important to have a caption under every image—to press your main point home, and hopefully to get him back intothe copy. Captions under images are read on average 300% more than the body copy itself, so not using them, or not using them correctly, means missing out on an opportunity to engage a huge number of potential readers. (For images above a headline, the headline itself can serve as a caption.) Newspapers have long understood the value of captions for drawing readers in. Yet this knowledge doesn’t seem to have filtered down to web designers and marketers. In copy that aims to sell something, your caption should include a benefit. That way, you have another chance to get your reader interested and to push him back into the copy—or even directly to the call to action. You have to make the most of his brief attention. For other kinds of content, figure out the central purpose of the page itself, and encapsulate that in your caption. It is wise to craft your captions as you would craft your headlines—because they are similar lengths, with similar purposes.

An image which demonstrates is exactly as it sounds. It demonstrates something you’ve said in the copy. It’s hard to go wrong with this sort of image—the only caveat is that it needs to convey your value proposition or central theme with more force than copy alone could. Product photos, before-and-after shots, charts or graphs showing comparisons and so on all fit the bill nicely. And the higher quality the better—if it needs to be downsized to fit into a fairly narrow column of text (and it probably will), then make it clickable, so readers can see a larger version in a lightbox.

3 / Don’t break the left margin When we read, we rely on the left margin always being there as an anchor, to give us a place to return our eyes to. Without a consistent left margin it’s exceptionally difficult to follow the text. (The reverse is true for text read right-to-left.)

Contiuned on next page

That’s why body copy is never justified to the center or right in the Western world: if the location of the left margin changes, we have to relocate it before we can continue reading. Our eyepath is interrupted, along with our train of thought. Yet you’ll see an awful lot of websites that scatter left-aligned images throughout body copy. If you have a particularly clever designer, copy might even flow around images in an arty way…. yes Graphic Designers LOVE arty stuff… This forces the left margin of the copy to change location—breaking your reader’s flow and forcing him to readjust. Far from helping to keep his attention, such techniques threaten to lose it. 4 / Images without clear relevance are a waste of space If the images you’re using are not clearly tied to your value proposition, or to the central theme of your page, then they will only confuse your readers. At best, they’ll be pointless distractions. At worst, they’ll give the wrong impression and lead readers to feel tricked or disappointed.

7 Things David Ogilvy Can Teach You About Online Graphic Design Continued from previous page.

It’s actually pretty easy to avoid irrelevant images just by using captions. If you can’t come up with a good caption for an image, it’s probably because the image has no place on the page. The best kinds of images fall into just two categories: 1. Images with story appeal 2. Images which demonstrate An image with story appeal is best for putting above your headline. It evokes a strong sense of curiosity in your reader. He wants to know what’s going on in it—so he reads your copy to find out. But these kinds of images are not very easy to come up with. Most of the images I see at the beginning of web pages are obviously taken straight from some stock photography site, and have at best a tenuous connection to the content on their pages. Not only do they have little story appeal, but when I see them, I immediately suspect the story they’re telling is not the same as the story in the copy. 5 / Images that turn readers off They will distract your readers with their visual dominance, without the benefit of interesting your readers with their content. And very often they will convey the impression that you are incompetent, thoughtless about your page content, or just unable to come up with anything of real quality. Stock photographs that are obviously stock photographs—their generic dullness and lack of imagination rubs off on you. Just because a stock photo is attractive doesn’t mean it will be effective. Poor quality images of any kind—better to not show anything than to show something pixelated, over-compressed, badly resized, of a low resolution, or otherwise shoddylooking. Crowd shots. Try to use photos that have a single main subject—people find crowd shots boring because there’s no one to focus on. Bigger than life-size images of faces. According to Ogilvy, readers avoid them because they seem slightly grotesque. Historical subjects—unless you’re catering to an audience of history enthusiasts, it’s a safe bet your readers will find historical shots boring. 6 / Every image must be worth its page weight in gold Lastly, while you’re mulling over whatever fancy graphic your web designer wants to sex your page up with, mull over this: page load times are still the number one criterion for maximizing readership. For example, a few months back Google discovered that a loading time increase from 0.4 seconds to 0.9 seconds decreased traffic by 20%. Needless to say, images increase page load time.

The right image format is quite possibly just as important, here’s a simple rule: For images that need to be sharp and detailed use jpeg for everything else use png. So take a look at your latest graphicallyendowed content. Is that extra weight really helping? Is each image demonstrating your value proposition forcibly, or teasing your reader into your copy with story appeal? Is it positioned correctly and captioned enticingly? Is it worth its weight in gold? If you’re not sure, it’s time to start testing, measuring—and perhaps culling. * Figures are entirely made up for effect. Designers don’t really go this far…but I’m sure some of them want to. P.S We’re in the top 100 affiliates in the world and we’ve build multi million pound business… we know what sells and what works online. Want us to look after your website design for you so it’s a selling machine? then get in touch here

7 / Final Roarlocal point Images matter, in fact they may well be the most important thing on your page for the first 3 seconds and remember that bounce rate for most sites is >70% (bounce rate if someone immediately clicks off your page within 5 seconds).

How To Become An Amazon Best Selling Author By Neil Asher

Marketing is marketing. The same principles apply whether you’re selling software or financial services; films or books on Amazon. So when Rob Moore and Mark Homer from Progressive Property and Robin Shaw of the Humber Property Network, approached us to help them become the No 1 best selling authors on Amazon we applied the same methodologies to that as we would any product launch. Their book is called Progressive In Property. Before I tell you how we did it let me show you our results: Our brief was to hit the No 1 spot for the guys,as you can see… Job Done. We helped Rob become the No 1 On Amazon. The purpose for this book was to position Rob and the guys as the No 1 experts in property in the UK and to sell their services to the buyers of the book, Rob said that the launch had exceeded his expectations and he would make £250,000.00 from it. Not bad considering his budget for the launch of £20K so that’s a healthy ROI.

9 Top Tips To Best Seller Success 1. First thing we realised is no one wants to buy this book for the sake of having the book they want what the book will give them, so just like any marketing endeavor sell the outcome you’ll have as a result of reading the book. 2. One of the things Rob did was to set up some great bonuses for people who purchased the book, so we suggested to Rob that they NOT sell the book, instead they focus on selling the bonuses. This worked very very well. 3. The book is a great read all about people who’ve studied Rob and Marks brilliant material and then gone on to make millions in the property market. One of the hardest things you have to get over as a marketer is the disbelief that it’s possible for people to emulate those results, so we advised Rob and Mark not to focus on how well they’ve done in property (240 houses!) but instead to sell the stories of the people in the book. Thus making it possible for others to achieve those results too. 4. Originally the book was positioned as an inspiration book, we advise them to change the positioning to sell “money at a discount” (invest £20 get £200 back) not inspiration (chicken soup for the property investor is a terrible idea, property investors want money). This had a HUGE effect on their sales. People don’t want inspiration, they want solid actionable information they can use to make money themselves. 5. This bears saying, see who is also launching their book on that day (going head to head with 50 shades of sexy is a bad idea). You can get access to who is launching other books if you know where to look, and were it not for the hype around the mummy porn of 50 shades of grey Rob and Mark would have EASILY been No 1 for MUCH longer. 6. If you’re using joint ventures to create buzz, you must work hard to have the JV’s in place ready to go and be persistent in making sure they will mail at the same time for you. 7. We used a number of sexy advertising strategies including a little utilised one of placing ads on forums, again I’m not going to tell you how to do that but think it through and you’ll get an idea. 8. 99 times out of 100 cpa buys are crap and don’t work. 9. This is a BIG piece of advice for you, do a soft launch so you can test everything BEFORE the launch (copy, headline, price points). This is a pain in the ass to do I agree but the difference it makes is huge. Why launch a big campaign without knowing the best way to make it work?

So there you go that’s how we helped Rob and Mark of progressive property launch their new book and make £250,000.00 in the process If you’d like us to help you launch your product get in touch: www.ROARlocal.com

Get In Touch.

Contact www.roarlocal.com/contact Fill in the form to contact us at any time. We need your name, the domain name of your existing site (if you have one), your preferred method of contact (phone number or email address) and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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Monday through Friday 8.30 – 6.30 and get answers immediately. Admin Office The Sussex Innovation Centre University of Sussex Science Park Square, Falmer Brighton BN1 9SB CEO / Neil Asher COO / Nicola Cairncross

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