While web analytics can certainly lead to lucrative results, your stakeholders may still be hung up on the cost of integrating web analytics within the company. The best way to combat this doubt is to highlight projections of lost potential gains by not streamlining and tracking your site’s activity. It’s your responsibility to emphasize that the cost of Web analytics will be dwarfed by the loss of potential sales. Accentuate that analysis costs will be recovered and profited upon once these Web metrics are implemented. You need to show how this process will inevitably illuminate performance indicators. And for added clout, employing the services of an analytics consultant is a way to develop custom measures that can be applied throughout your organization. Entrench Web metrics within the company’s system.

Be sure to show due diligence to the bottom line. For example, heavily romancing your Google PageRank can be a red herring in your metrics, causing your business to concentrate on numbers that flatter the image of the company, but don’t actually help drive its conversion rates. So, you’ll want to make sure that you discuss how these analytics are measured against your company’s bottom line. Because Web analytics is still evolving, you have to empathize with your stakeholders and be prepared to address skepticism of its concrete usability and its ability to be indicative of market and consumer trends. A full-bodied Web metrics approach will prove that you have a comprehensive, trust-worthy strategy that considers all aspects of your specific type of website and intended market; not just page visits and log files.

Lucrative and Direct Research Tool

You need to stress that Web analytics is a direct research tool. Client-based surveys are essential for gathering opinions and can lead to productive insights. However, the statistics gathered from these surveys can be skewed by any number of outliers. Most importantly, a survey is only answered by those who choose to, which automatically infers some degree of polarized subjectivity; void of universal trends that can be accurately and repeatedly applied to your market plan. The beauty of Web analytics is that the consumer is unaware that as they surf your site, they’re actually creating unbiased metrics; a blind study. Your site is a testing ground for analyzing visitor paths, effectiveness of copy, accessibility of information and promotions, poignancy of new advertisements and products, and gauging visitor reactions.

Present the ability to make informed decisions. Through discovery of referral forces, you’ll understand how and why your prospects are being driven to your site. With this knowledge, you can implement a campaign with stronger focus. Concentrating on a spectrum of metrics as well as the energy behind them allows you to apply a disciplined budgetary plan. In regards to fundamental business, retention of customers is more budget-friendly than obtaining new customers. Qualify metrics that are specific to your site and industry, and learn what trends succeed in higher rates of retention. The company’s bottom line should be at the top of your interview topics. When you express the ability to fatten the bottom line, present the need to improve the site little by little, constantly adjusting according to visitor behavior. Don’t wait until your site is grossly out of date and inefficient. Continue to tweak so that it is riding the crest of the market wave, and not getting trounced upon in the trough of the wave.

Be a Teacher

You need to teach the higher ups. They are far removed from website management and the integral importance of Web analytic technology and benefits. The importance of Web metrics’ ability to generate revenue can not be stressed enough. Maintain your analytic goals but present them so they directly align with executive goals; discuss much more than click-thru rates. Who wouldn’t agree to a goal they’ve already agreed to? It’s necessary not only to study the trends of your customers, but also of your stakeholders. Make yourself aware of what internal objectives they’re harboring. What makes the management manage a smile? But you’ll need to do more than point out a trends in your own company and website. Give your argument added credibility by pointing out specific case studies of other businesses’ successes; especially if it’s a competitor. Once more, your data shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Create an entire microcosm of Web metrics, so the executives will be hard pressed to ignore the positive implications of proper Web management. Who doesn’t love a good success story?

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

photo credit: Iversonic

That aint no filet mignon.

The trends and information you garner from your website should not only be considered a valuable measurement for internal business, but should also be used as a convincing tool for presenting to influencers and stakeholders. As we all know, going beyond unfounded claims and collecting data that can actually be pointed to will always achieve a degree of authority and persuasion. Don’t tell me why I should invest with you, show me why.

Make sure your Web information is distributed equally within your company. The more teams you involve, the stronger your attack will be. This serves to root the necessity of Web metrics further into your company. Demonstrating the benefits of Web analytics is obviously what we’re striving for here. But if you can prove that it’s actually an integral part, if other teams outside the Web management branch can also attest to the integrity of your tactics, then you’ve attained an undeniable presence. Forming a cooperative approach between your analytics and e-commerce systems incubates your forecast egg, proving to be an additional dimension to your accounting and accountability.

Remove the guess work from your numbers and you’re sure to impress your audience. Take care to avoid becoming confident with hollow numbers. It’s most necessary to completely understand what your numbers signify. Telling a stakeholder exactly how many times the promotional page was and is foreseen to be visited is fine and well. But leave no shadow of a doubt. Include ramifications, theories, and projections that bolster these page visit statistics. Streamline your analysis so that it’s completely clear, causing decision making to be a process built on concrete; not wetlands. Those who are far removed from the Web management side often perceive the online aspect as lacking solidarity. They’re locked into the classical school of thought, perceiving revenue as produced only through core business. Thus, ensure to base your presentation on precise, detailed goals and correlations.

Vacuums Are for Cleaning

Apply your findings to trends in the market place, global happenings, or the results to Monday night’s football game. The point is, your Web analysis shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Form a regular course of action where your data is studied and given depth. Depth is an essential ingredient here. Remove your data from the two-dimensional world of the spreadsheet, understand its behavior, and give it a personality. Surely, this palpable form will be much more appealing to those involved in the interview process. This degree of organization grants exponential levels of confidence for your influencers and stakeholders. Harnessing the activity of your website will inevitably lead to hard evidence of how your company is generating wealth, and more importantly, how it can improve.

Clearly define your objectives and activities. A stakeholder should be presented with exact goals that the website is to achieve. With these goals in mind, you can clearly illustrate the significance of your Web analysis, tying together click-thru rates, and forming a prospective customer’s path to and through your site. When such a path is demonstrated, the stakeholder understands exactly how their investments will be applied; with measurable projections. This way, the overall analysis dataset can be deconstructed, so that individual data packets can be applied to varying levels of strategy and planning.

Always Keep the Consumer in Mind

Let’s not forget that all your demonstrated data is consumer-driven. Yes, there are real people behind those clicks. Setting up a customer forum where marketing communications can be carried out is vital. This enables an understanding of your numbers. Again, we want to provide our stakeholders with reasons. Explain how your Web metrics are leading to a greater understanding of prospective customer behavior, thus conquering one of e-commerce’s inherent evils, shopping-cart abandonment. Direct consumer communication can answer these abandonment questions. From this, you can develop ways to reconnect your lost prospect to your site. In basic psychology terms, remembering something is always easier than learning it for the first time, using the synapse formed from the initial point of discovery. You’ll want to capitalize on this and demonstrate that you are dedicated to recapturing these lost targets.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

Assume your prospect is just as busy as you. Provide concise material that maintains the core principle of your product at all times. Of course you’re proud of your product, however, it’s extremely important to stave off the desire to illustrate in depth the many benefits of your product. With the Internet’s growing rate of saturation, it’s understandably tempting to rely heavily on intense graphics or creative copy. Remember, unless you’ve recently invented your product, your busy prospect will be anxious to quickly scan your site and then move on to other sites for comparisons of your product. Your site is not a public speaker with a captive audience. It’s more similar to a mother tending a child’s birthday party; your message will be immersed among other appealing imagery and information where you have no control over the other appeals being made. With a bold, simple message, you’ll retain the attention and interest of your audience.

Don’t Overwhelm Your Prospects

Make your site as efficient as possible. Make sure you thoroughly represent your entire product line or service in a succinct fashion. You have them on your site, now capitalize and deliver the whole pitch. Here lays a caveat though, don’t overwhelm them. Too much information or too many products thrown at the prospect will scare them in the direction of a less-cluttered site. Think of the feeling you receive when walking through a flea market with products and deals being shouted at you from every angle. It creates a bargain-bin façade where you find yourself walking faster to remove yourself from the situation. Again, deliver your message efficiently, with a clean, professional appeal. A clean site will inherently lend itself to easy-to-measure variables, ultimately making it easier to track and forecast your site’s usage by prospects. Respect your visitors by recognizing that they are intelligent consumers and will ultimately become skeptical of product pitches heavily laden with persuasion.

A site with stunning imagery and creative copy will still fail to convert its visitors if the following basic page physics are not incorporated. As mentioned before, a site must maintain momentum through clear content, obvious headlines, and simple navigation buttons. The rate at which your pages load is also a quintessential element. It’s been proven that a significant loss in visitors occurs when page loading times exceed 8-10 seconds. This may seem ridiculously impatient, but why wait when there are thousands of other similar sites that can be viewed? The most browser-friendly graphic files are GIF, JPEG, and for post-1997 browsers, PNG. Limiting the size of files, quantity of graphics, and using browser caches will also aid faster load times. Unless your graphics are of your products, or you are a graphics service, know that less will be more. Otherwise, you’ll slow your pages or simply confuse the visitor. Besides, the Poynter Institute released an eye-tracking study showing that website visitors’ eyes were drawn to headlines, article summaries, and captions much more than the page’s graphics. In addition, your style format should always consider accessibility aspects for people with disabilities. There are many resources available that educate how to tailor your site to be manageable by all. The entire site should flow like a single, cohesive body of literature, leading from one page to the next, even if the visitor jumps between pages that address different products or aspects of your business.

It’s actually best if you assume that your visitor will not view your site in a linear fashion. This way, you’ll be able to structure the site in a fashion that provides an obvious, all-inclusive message on each individual page. Be careful not to include vital information or selling points below the fold of the page, the point where you need to scroll down to see the rest of the page; the 300-pixels mark. Studies show that a significant amount of visitors never scroll below the fold of the page. Remember, visitors are using the Web for convenience and expediency, model your site with this in mind.

Attention to Emotions

You’ll also want to pay attention to the emotional aspect of you site. Due to today’s dangerous level of viruses, piracy, and spyware, many people are using the Web simply as a research tool without intention to buy online. Your site needs to provide constant means of reassurance by presenting security certificates on credit card input screens, discussing privacy policies when asking for their e-mail addresses, guarantee a hacker-safe environment, and promise information encryption. Who doesn’t get that warm fuzzy feeling when reading security certificates before entering credit card information? Certain credit card companies already offer temporary, virtual account numbers that link to people’s actual card number. But not everyone is savvy to this and it would be a good idea to include a short blurb explaining this option. By including these security tactics, you’ll not only please your customers, but you’ll also be certain that your own data will be protected and remain accurate for your metrics.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

photo credit: Mykl Roventine

There are people behind those numbers.

Incorporating fundamental advertising approaches with your Web analytics is a valuable way to fine-tune your audience. Use the funnel model for your site, and begin with the broadest stage of identifying your audience. Understanding your acquisition channels is obviously the most appropriate place to launch your attack. Keep in mind the power of the individual, and that visitor conduct is distinct within each of the stages of the conversion funnel. It’s vital to dissect the conversion funnel at each of its stages as well as studying it holistically. This way, you’ll be able to identify points of potential progress in areas such as returning visitors and new visitors. By developing target-visitor plans, you will better understand your acquisition channels and campaign sources as an undeniable tool for getting to the root of your prospects’ behaviors; their motivations. We’re all familiar with the importance of establishing ourselves as a niche market or company. The site should clearly communicate a unique value that is easily distinguishable by the visitor.

Following suit and using general industry indicators will, at best, paint a blurry picture of your demographic, failing to illustrate an intuitive approach for analyzing your data sets. To best analyze your target visitors, gear your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) towards the specific objectives of your company. This will augment the measurability of your metrics and the degree to which they can be applied to your company’s conversion rates. The executives in your company will most certainly want to know that their organization’s goals are being specifically addressed. Continuously track these KPIs over time to improve the overall site performance. After a change is made to the site, check to see if it drove performance in the direction you expected. Utilize KPIs agreed upon by the entire organization; constructed by people with different functions within the organization. It is imperative to have everyone on the same page.

Respect Your Website

After examining entry conduits, you must respect your website as a living, breathing organism, exemplifying a natural locomotion, moving the prospect through your site with a fluid motion. The site should act as a virtual guide, directing your prospect during their entire navigation, keeping them informed of exactly where they are within your site with clearly marked labels and navigation buttons. The design and information of the site should follow a sequence that is friendly to a full spectrum of visitors. Consider all points throughout your site where potential pitfalls may occur; where visitors may become disorientated or overwhelmed by too many offers or dizzying visual cues. Make sure that you include a conversion-to-sale point on each page, but keep it concise, avoid causing confusion and detouring from the path to the point of sale. Your site should answer all the prospect’s questions as if they were talking to a live representative. This will support a precise, assessable metrics.

Of course, your website may include colorful copy, but the site that maintains momentum is one that practices clear and concise terms, keeping the purpose of being there extremely clear. Good copy is often underestimated. Poor copy is hazardous to your product’s health. It’s a major risk to think that simply having a solid product or service is sufficient. For example, today’s high-end electronics boast terrific technology. But the products are too often displayed through feature form, excluding benefits and daily applications. One of the most prominent features for speakers is the measure of ohms. Now, if you don’t have your physics book next to you, and don’t quite know how to decipher ohm’s law, then you’d probably appreciate knowing what the difference is between four and eight ohms. Why would a prospect opt for the more expensive product when they don’t understand the difference between features? They will be grateful for the education. They’ll also be deterred by grammatical errors and poor sentence structure. Your copy is your voice, and should command respect and emit an undeniable air of friendly expertise. To reiterate, provide continuous reasons for the prospect’s purpose on your site. Good copy creates pure metrics, making it possible to rule out copy as a point of failure in the conversion to sale.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

photo credit: lumaxart

Money Making Metrics

Another valuable set of metrics is click-thru rates. Despite this, blindly relying on click-thru rates can dangerously inflate confidence levels. Analysis of the prospect’s path before and after certain stages of “clicking thru” will come to represent a mother reading a story to her child. For a mother who has repeatedly read the same story to her child, she’s eventually able to recite the ending of the story. For example, it’s easy to attribute a higher click-thru rate to a special Web promotion. However, evidence of the prospect’s failure to follow through to the close of sale would leave you baffled. But with astute, regular examination of your website, you gain the ability to understand and better predict the outcome of your sales drives. Inspecting exactly where the prospect detoured from the sales path would deliver vital tells. You might discover that your promotion copy delivered in e-mails differs from the copy on your landing page, allowing you to doctor your copy and remedy your overall conversion rate. Direct comparison of initial ad click-thru rates to the rate of actual conversion will inform you of the cohesiveness of your Web page. Don’t be fooled, the truth will be found in the kernel of this data. The entire purpose is to thoroughly understand the customer’s activity by deciphering a common psychology.

Key Performance Indicators

Clear-cut messaging and conversion points bolster the ability to accurately speculate about a prospect’s movements and decisions within your site. A major reason people utilize the Web is for convenience. Don’t get caught up in distinguishing your site so much that it becomes a puzzle found in The Davinci Code. Here, we see a positive duality. Making your site easier to navigate and understand for your prospects, in turn, makes it easier for your company to gauge prospect trends, cluing you into best time-management practices. A mother who diligently disciplines her child fosters one that is easy to manage. Provide your site with these fundamental navigation tools for a well-managed Web experience. And just as a mother should monitor her child’s report card, your site should be continually providing measures of progress, creating an ongoing, virtual forum for recommendations towards its own improvement.

Lock on to Customer Longevity

A website with a comprehensive set of metrics will be able to provide measurement to all departments in the company. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) measured for leads and buying customers inform about the sales value, inherent costs, and potential earning. They are direct insights to what works and what doesn’t work. Your company can then draw on these indicators to foretell customer longevity, customer value, and customer costs. If the path to the point of sales, or equivalent based on the type of site, is segmented, then crucial personal data can be attained, such as e-mail, physical addresses, or the industry that the visitor is involved with. This information is perfectly pertinent for future marketing to well-defined target areas; geographic or demographic.

This segmentation details the specific path of navigation through the site by the visitor, pinpointing areas that succeed or fail in maintaining the interest of the visitor. Similarly, if your site includes a greater number of internal links, you’ll achieve a paint-by-numbers status, and be able to see exactly where your visitors have gone within your site; not just general page views. If you address several issues on one page, you’ll merely know a general set of data that your prospect is interested in. But if you provide links that deal with these concerns, you’ll see precisely what is important to them. You’ll gain a definitive assessment of the return on investment (ROI) as well. Additionally, Web metrics enable you to track other companies. There are businesses that follow competitor activity, providing reports to keep you abreast with your industry challengers.

Remember to think of your site not only as a means to an end for your product or service, but also to respect it as a product in and of itself. Always keep in mind that online business is faceless. Your prospects and customers may never meet me you. However, if you’re a good mother to your site, then your prospects will be greeted by a well-behaved child, exuberant to comply and conduct some serious business. With a focused approach to your campaign, you’ll have the ultimate opportunity to sculpt your company’s longevity, blossoming with ever youthful maturity.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

photo credit: christyscherrer

Mother, can I trust the Internet?

You’re excited about your product, great! You’d like to sell it to everyone, not great. Maintain focus on your plausible, potential audience. Befriending Web analytics will empower you to capture and hold your intended audience. A mother with one or two children will be able to provide them with infinite attention and care. Employing Web analytics closely models this. Using vital statistics gathered through careful analysis of your site will, like a mother’s close watch over her children, allow you to concentrate on a particular demographic and actually penetrate that group. If you fail to fully embrace proper analytical procedures, then it’s much more similar to a mother with 10 children. It will prove to be a daunting task, lacking in focus and necessary care for essential components; a useless expenditure of energy, rendering your site ineffective. Carefully decide exactly what you want your site to do for you. Yes, you do have control.

With a funnel approach, you’ll not only drive prospects to the site, but drive them within the site. Recording and collating your site’s activity creates data that can be used for sales projections and future marketing approaches; not just measuring current activity. Mother knows best. She understands every aspect of her child and is thus best-suited for the proper development of the child. Begin with a broad understanding of your demographic, attributes relating to their values, and trends in their actions. Your site should possess a specific appeal to these factors, forming a strong center of attention. With this, you’ll safeguard yourself against detrimental assumptions.

Be a Mother to Your Website

Give it guidelines, curfews, and boundaries. By doing this, you’ll be surprised to see that you’re actually releasing the tethers from your site. Like a child who’s had regimental, intellectual nourishment, your site will eventually achieve a degree of autonomy. Making your site highly “trackable” on the client-side, not the server-side, enables a well-oiled self-automation. Organize and optimize site structure to improve the customer engagement process. Through thorough parameters, you’ll be able to test definitive variables, thus gaining the ability to absolutely attribute conversion gains or decreases to respective variables. Today’s analytic tools take into consideration that we’re not yet at the point of one computer to every person. These tools use a combination of the IP address, the operating system and user agent to gauge a unique visitor count. And every mother knows children love cookies. For more reliable results, it’s suggested to use a constant cookie. This will also allow you to discern who’s just visiting and who’s actually buying. With any statistical endeavor, the statistical significance and level of confidence will be greater with a larger quantity of parameters and acquired data. To have any meaningful implications, it must be replicable and measurable.

Personalize Your Website

Amplify the measurability through personalizing your site. Dr. Kamran Parsaye, president of Intelligence Ware, Inc., writes that personalization comes about as a reaction to individual information, dividing personalization into customization, individuation, and group-characterization. If a site is engineered so that visitors can select personal preferences, then not only will the site more accurately cater to their needs, but it will give us a more exact idea of what our prospects are like. Based on the behaviors and activities that people exhibit on your site, you can generate a game plan with greater detail because they can now be seen as people; not just numbers. Departmentalizing visitors’ experiences on the site eventually tells us how to best corral them through the site with real-world assimilation. Prospects will readily perceive this personalization, leading to higher repeat business and retention. The more you know, the more you grow. But even with these vital datasets, you won’t grow if you don’t fertilize. Make sure personal information is updated regularly. A stagnate knowledge pool will most definitely lead you astray. Make the most of the energy spent on collecting and sorting this information. If personalization isn’t feasible for your type of site, then offer a reward or promotion for personal information. Believe it or not, current studies show that pizza is the most desired reward for IT folk.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

Don’t leave your new product or service high and dry after an initial introduction. You must promote it like there’s no tomorrow in order to achieve the sales you’ve always dreamed of. Of course, we’d like to think that our business offer is attractive enough on its own and can magically magnetize paying prospects to our virtual front door. But you have to remember that without actively promoting your business offer it’s like a ghost ship in the vast ocean, it’s not coming up on anyone’s radar. However, actively and consistently promote your business offer and you’ll create lucrative pings on everyone’s radars and make your offer extremely real.

Serious Money in Series Marketing

One of the biggest causes of failure for any size business is inconsistency in their marketing efforts. Fortunately, the flip side of the equation can be very lucrative. Market your business offer with consistency and you will significantly increase exposure and vastly improve your chances of your product or service showing up in front of your prospects.

First, we’ll clarify that just because you regularly market your business does not necessarily mean that you are being consistent. It is important to note that you will need to consistently market each individual product or service! If you are trying to sell any product or service that requires more than a $100 for the prospect to purchase it then there is a good chance that you will be battling at least some degree of procrastination or doubt; regardless of the state of the current economy. A prospect who’s not ready to buy after the first offer doesn’t mean that they’ll never be ready to buy—you may simply need to continuously market to them until you’ve built up enough value and sound logic to bring them from their point of procrastination to a point where there’s no doubt in their mind that their lives will be better with the help of your product or service.

Marketing each of your offerings only occasionally is like firing a buckshot at a target 10 yards away—sure, you may spray the entire target, but you won’t cause much damage. But if you fire that buckshot at pointblank range then you’re sure to get the sales-kill. Make sure that you prevent your marketing efforts from getting too spread out.

Some of the absolute best marketing tools for series marketing are e-mail campaigns, article marketing, and blogging. These tools are all very easy to manipulate in a manner that allows you to schedule out marketing messages on a regular (very regular) basis. Simply create an introduction/overview piece to send out first, and then consistently follow that intro piece up with a series of feature/benefit pieces, making sure to build off of each preceding piece. Make sure to never leave features stranded on their own as this will hurt the overall value and integrity of your product or service.

Chinese Marketing Water Torture

Sometimes businesses feel afraid that they’ll annoy their prospects if they market to them too much. While quality business owners will of course want to avoid sending out spam-like materials to their prospects, if you offer a product or service that can truly improve other people’s lives, then you should market boldly and with full confidence, without worrying that you’re going to annoy people.

Countless businesses have been able to achieve record-breaking sales through drip campaigns. These campaigns are usually marketed to people who have opted in and requested additional information regarding a particular product or service but can also include general leads you have collected through your website.

These drip campaigns often feature an automated series of emails, which do not require any ongoing maintenance once they’re launched and are highly effective at building an unbreakable case regarding your product or service. Not only do you continue to build value with each drip, a highly targeted marketing message that features a portioned segment of the product’s overall features, you also keep your business offer in the front of your prospects’ minds so that they think of you first before all the competing offers.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

What’s one of the most effective ways of doing so? Be OUTRAGEOUS. Get in their face. Hit them over the head with your marketing! Tame the wild beast that is guerrilla marketing and you are sure to turn heads and capture attention for your business like never before.

Cut through the Clutter

One of the leading reasons as to why guerrilla marketing is so effective is that it slices and dices right through all the clutter out there. What’s clutter in the business world? The thousands, yes thousands, of advertisements and marketing messages that bombard us on a daily basis. The interesting part is that you probably don’t readily perceive this bombardment and that’s because our brains have become programmed to rule out much of this clutter and completely ignore it. Otherwise, we’d all be dancing around the streets as crazy as Ophelia due to sensory overload.

So, it’s your task to reengage the human mind and grab people’s attention through outrageous guerrilla marketing. Take the above picture for example. This was a campaign for the Calgary zoo announcing the arrival of a new baby giraffe! You simply have no choice but to stare at this marketing piece with complete curiosity and learn more about it—brilliant! Find ways to make your marketing messages utterly impossible to ignore.

Mental Permanence

Ever wonder how the number of digits was decided on for phone numbers? Reference the work of the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller and you’ll see that the average human can maintain about seven objects in working memory (plus or minus two); Miller’s Law. While a beautifully crafted sales letter is still highly effective at converting prospects to paying customers, there’s a good chance that your prospects aren’t going to remember all of it. But part of the brilliance of guerrilla marketing is that it’s based on simplicity…it’s like a very friendly slap in the face. It commands their attention through a wild theme and plants itself in people’s minds by conveying a very simple and highly targeted message.

Plus, anytime something sticks out as much as guerrilla marketing pieces do then that subject or material features a much higher likeliness of enjoying easier, quicker recall in someone’s mind. Getting your business to be the first one that comes to mind over all the others is a surefire way to increase sales!

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

You don’t have to be in competition with everyone! Instead, build a stronger business by seeking out companies that share a meaningful connection. Essentially, you’ll gain the power of another marketing team, increase your business exposure and broaden your audience.

The key is to search online for businesses that offer a complementary product or service that in no way competes with your own. It’s like selling a hamburger and then offering lettuce, tomato and cheese through your affiliates.

Those with the Most Allies Always Win the War

You significantly increase your chances of bringing in new business when your name pops in more places on the Internet. Affinity marketing promotes lucrative exposure at no cost—if you do it right. You should approach your affinity marketing with the confidence that your business has something amazing to offer. This will help you feel completely comfortable asking other online businesses if they’d like to enter into this form of reciprocal marketing with you. If you present your affinity marketing offer tentatively then you might run into some fat-headed businesses that will feel as though they have the right to ask you to pay for posting a link on their site. Present your offer with full confidence and your prospective affinity business will think they’re getting an exceptional deal by not having to pay to post a link on your site! (Hint: It will help if you can point to Web analytics and prove that you consistently bring in a significant amount of website traffic.)

Your Name Is on the Line

Since the integrity of your business is on the line when it comes to products or services that you offer it’s a good idea to actually get someone on the phone. You can learn a lot more about the business owner when you take the time to actively speak with them. Have some questions ready that will help you qualify the way they do business. You should also conduct some basic background checks online to see if any negative comments or testimonials surface in forums or product review sites. Beware of any red flags during your discovery process as linking to a dishonest company could bring yours down with it.

Boost Your Search Engine Ranking

Affinity marketing also provides an excellent opportunity to execute effective link building. Search engines boost websites that feature a significant number of inbound links. (Hint: Beware of posting too many outbound links on a single website as search engines may determine that your site is a link farm and will penalize you for it.) You’ll also naturally come up more often in search engine results if you have more active links on the Web.

You will add a great deal of power to your link if you search for businesses that feature a PageRank (PR) of at least 2. This ranking system goes up to 10, with 10 indicating a kick-ass website. You’ll want to avoid linking to those rated at 0 as this could actually harm your ranking. You can either download a quick and simple PR tool bar for your Internet browser or insert the business in question in a dedicated PR checker.

Comprehensive Offers Bring in Bigger Fish

Another reason why affinity marketing has been so successful is because it allows even the smallest shops to offer a comprehensive suite of products and services. You have a much greater chance of bringing in new clients if you have the means of filling gaps in your business offer. For example, even if you offer the best copywriting service on the Web, a prospect may be turned off by the fact that you can’t help them with their video content needs. Since video content is becoming more and more popular on the Web, and more businesses are recognizing how effective this type of online marketing is, you would do well to incorporate video content in your business plan. How do you do this?

First, as always, think of your friends and business associates—are any of them online video experts? If not, you can easily do a local search for “online video business specialists/services/professionals.” If no one you know has this ability then it’s good to conduct a local search so you can meet face to face and hammer out clear details as to how you’ll market each other’s business.

Once you post a link to their video content services complemented with a brief description of their offer, you’ll now be able to offer a comprehensive suite of content services, making you a much more convenient option for businesses looking for both video and copywriting help.

Finally, maintain a database of all your affinity activity so you can check once a month to see that your links are still live on the sites you’ve traded with.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

There certainly is an excellent variety of online marketing tools that can effectively drive traffic to your website and generate impressive sales. However, the offline world of marketing has almost been completely forgotten about by some companies. Even companies that conduct 100 percent of their business online can still greatly profit from incorporating offline methods in their business marketing campaign. Remember when we told you how putting more marketing lines in the water will help you catch a whale of a client? Employing the power of both offline and online marketing methods will sweeten your arsenal, giving you the fire power you need to blow the competition out of the water.

Build a Sales-boosting Bunker

Combining offline and online marketing will establish a lucrative symbiosis within your marketing—where all your marketing pieces strengthen each other (as opposed to marketing parasitism where one marketing piece simply feeds off the results created by your other marketing pieces).

You will create the most solid marketing campaign if you continuously execute a campaign that ties all of your marketing together. For example, if you’ve created a landing page for a specific product promotion, you can complement this by sending out mailers to your target audience, directing them to visit the landing page online. This combination of marketing can actually be really fun as it adopts the aura of a chess game, putting multiple elements into play through strategic maneuvers.

Sales-generating Seminars

Go public for increased exposure: Informational seminars put another marketing line in the water to attract big fish to your online efforts. Offer a free seminar that will help prospects build their businesses, live healthier lives, have more fun—the possibilities are endless. Just make sure to maintain an information-based approach and keep the sales speak out of it. Presenting a helpful seminar is sure to set you up as an authority!

This is also one of the best ways to simultaneously generate a large group of leads. Presenting a free seminar will make it obvious that your business is the real deal, so you won’t even have to actively pitch your actual business here. Make it very clear as to how they can get more information about your product or service (post your website URL everywhere throughout the room), and then let them come to you. And even if they don’t contact you, you now have their contact information from the seminar and can start email marketing to them or put them into your drip campaign. An easy way to get their contact information is to explain that you need it in order to send them the details about the seminar, such as time and place. Multiply the number in attendance by offering a free gift to anyone who brings 10 friends with them. (Use a simple three-step form: 1) Name, 2) e-mail and 3) Referred By.)

As if these reasons weren’t solid enough, you may also consider hosting a seminar in a vacation destination and writing it off as business expense…did we just write that?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Your Marketing

While it’s always a good idea to be as efficient as possible with your budget, reusing your marketing pieces in the wrong places could end up doing more harm than good. For example, many companies are unfamiliar with the issue of duplicate content on the Web (also referred to as dupe content by extra cool Web techies). Repeatedly posting the same content within your website or across platforms such as on your blogs could end up penalizing you in the search engines. Search engines pick this up as either a form of keyword stuffing or a fraudulent business plagiarizing other people’s content. (Use a professional article distribution service to submit mass articles in a search-engine-friendly manner.)

The good news is that you can reuse your current online articles as much as you would like offline. For example, you can print your online articles and send them out in direct response mailers to your leads. Providing helpful information in your mailers adds a great deal of value and helps establish why your business is the clear choice. Plus, adding an information-based piece in any marketing you do helps soften your sales approach, making it much more attractive than a standalone promotion. Due to a daily bombardment of advertising, people are naturally skeptical about these standalone promotions. When you provide something for free that people can use to make their lives better they’re much likelier to let their guard down and actively consider your offer.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!