You are sure to have heard: “There’s an App for that!” A clever, recognizable, rhythmic sounding catchphrase that sent droves to the iPhone and an AT&T carrier contract.

Then along came Verizon heavily advertising the newly launched Droid as a better phone on a better network!” After hammering the iPhone with ads pointing to some of Droid’s killer features, Verizon followed up with an ad campaign for its massive 3G network coverage. The ads show maps – fulsome red for Verizon and sparse blue for AT&T. Verizon’s catchphrase? “There’s a MAP for that!”

Pretty good theatre so far, huh? But it gets better. Next, AT&T filed a lawsuit against Verizon to cease and desist with their ad campaign, saying that the information in Verizon’s commercials was misleading and damaging.

AT&T didn’t dispute the coverage issue, but claimed that the Verizon commercials implied that AT&T customers couldn’t use their mobile phones or surf the web outside of an AT&T 3G area. An Atlanta federal judge disagreed, declining to grant AT&T the injunction which would have forced Verizon to drop or suspend their ad campaign. So, it would appear that Verizon has won round One.

AT&T, however, vowed to continue pursuing legal remedies and hit back at rival Verizon with an ad campaign of their own. The 30-second spot features well known actor, Luke Wilson, who asks the question, “Who offers the best 3G experience? Let’s compare.” He then proceeds to do so, placing X’s on an orange display board next to features supported by AT&T and then one lonely X in the Verizon column which fails to stick and clatters to the floor. Amusing. Expect more to come in this purple drama. And yes, look for it to stretch into a rather long and drawn out back and forth with more clever catchphrases flying about.

How about this one: “There’s a laugh for that!”

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

AT&T vs VERIZON… GREAT THEATRE!

That’s the primary takeaway from a study just released by Weber Shandwick showing that while many of you may tweet a good game, the vast majority of you may think you do, but you don’t. Seveny-three percent of you have a Twitter account — in fact, among that 73%, there are 540 Twitter accounts; however, 76% of Fortune 100 tweeters don’t tweet much, and 52% are not what Weber defines as actively engaged.

Fifty percent had less than the 500 followers, which is even much less than a certain Social Media Insider I could name. Fifteen percent were completely inactive, with Twitter accounts acting either as place-holders — so that some rogue tweeter wouldn’t get to a corporate name first — or simply abandoned after a particular promotion had run its course. (Fine friends those accounts make; sure, just drop the tweeting once your needs are no longer being served!)

No wonder Weber is calling for big business to have, as the report is called, a “Twittervention.”

What is to account for all this tepid tweeting? Looking at the data more closely, it seems that most corporations, used to communications by PR or ad blast, don’t understand a central tenet of social media: it’s a conversation, stupid. More than three-quarters of corporations surveyed had 500 tweets or less — though a particularly chatty 1% had more than 10,000.

I’d love more detail about that data, such as how long the Twitter accounts have been active; it would be better to analyze tweet data within the context of individual accounts. However, one thing should be clear: conducting social media as a conversation automatically leads to more tweets, so the number of tweets is an obvious indicator of whether the account is being used to converse.

I’d also speculate that the people running the active accounts are the same people who have a relatively unfettered ability to tweet. It’s pretty hard to have a conversation when there’s a CMO looking over one’s shoulder and a lawyer looking over the other. Not surprisingly, many companies aren’t willing to give their employees that degree of freedom.

Yet more evidence that many big corporations don’t know how to converse in social media: the Weber data says that slightly more than half of Fortune 100 tweeters are bbbbooooorrrrriiiing. Fifty-three percent “did not display personality, tone or voice.” The good news is that roughly a third did.

So, corporations need to learn how to turn marketing communications into marketing conversations. We may have known that already, but it’s always a help when someone puts data around our gut feelings. The next question: Where does it go from here?

I wish the simple answer was that the tepid corporate tweeters could take a few social media courses, and suddenly, they would become the kind of Twit-izens that gain followers, brand advocates and essential learnings. But it’s not that easy.

The deceptive thing about Twitter, and other social media tools, is that they actually have two learning curves, something I’ve become much more aware of lately as I’ve started to conduct workshops in social media. The first learning curve is easy, and logistical: becoming educated about followers, hashtags, retweets, how to create an account, whom to follow, and so forth. The second learning curve is much, much harder: that one is concerned with how to conduct oneself, and especially one’s company business, in a social media environment. With individuals, it’s still fairly easy to explain that you should act in social media as you do in any social situation, like a cocktail party. Most of us wouldn’t have the temerity to start handing out business cards the moment we walked into a mixer.

But, historically, corporations haven’t been invited to parties. Thus, for most of them, turning communications into conversations is a much, much harder concept to grasp. Cheers.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Why the Fortune 100 Is The Land Of The Tepid Tweeters

One of the most important numbers we need to always be mindful of is the “Cost of a New Customer” or “Cost of Customer Acquisition”.

Understanding Customer Acquisition Costs

If you are unfamiliar with this concept, let me give you a quick tutorial on this advertising metric.

Suppose you run an advertisement in your local newspaper for your furniture store. Suppose for the sake of this example that you paid $1000 for your display ad in the newspaper.

Now, suppose your advertising brought 4 new customers into your store, who bought from you. Suppose also that the average spend for each customer was $1500.

With the example I am drawing, your $1000 display advertisement in the newspaper brought in 4 customers who spent a total of $6000 in your store.

I am going to keep this example simple, so that more people can keep up with the numbers.

On the basic premise of our example, you generated 4 customers after an outlay of $1000 in advertising. So your basic Cost Of Customer Acquisition was $250 per customer.

If your business received fewer customers, from your outlay of $1000 in advertising, then your Cost Of Customer Acquisition is more expensive.

But, if your business earned more customers who spent money, then your Cost Of Customer Acquisition would be much smaller.

In its simplest form, the Cost Of Customer Acquisition is the money spent to get the customer to your store divided by the number of new customers acquired. We will look at this in more detail, later in this article.

The Best Way To Measure Sales And Marketing Performance

Entrepreneur Magazine in a 1999 article reflected on the Cost Of Customer Acquisition in the dot com world. The article suggested, “the cost of new customer acquisition is one of the best ways to measure sales and marketing performance.”

In 1999, the Cost Of Customer Acquisition for the following companies were:

• BarnesAndNoble.com – $42
• Amazon.com – $27.60
• Priceline – $32.30
• Beyond.com – $29.30

On the surface, these numbers may seem small. But, Amazon’s Average Sale is in the $17-range! This makes the challenge that Amazon and other major retailers face fairly transparent. If these retailers could only count on one purchase from the newly acquired customer, then these businesses would be losing money by the truckload.

Fortunately, Amazon continues to perform well in Repeat Business from a single customer. The following calculations reflect additional numbers that we business people should also factor into our Cost Of Acquisition metrics.

The Real Value Of A Customer

Amazon’s first-sale may only be $17, but in 1999, Amazon’s Average Sales Per Customer was $116, up $10 from the previous year. Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t very forthcoming with these numbers, so after two hours research, I was unable to come up with more up-to-date numbers for you to consider.

The point of mentioning this is that it is important for business owners and managers to recognize that the Value Of A Customer is not how much sales revenue is derived from the initial purchase, but more importantly, from the Lifetime Value Of A Customer.

If we looked at Amazon’s Cost Of Customer Acquisition only in terms of that first sale, then they will be losing money hand-over-fist. With a Cost Of Acquisition of $27.60 and the first sale of $17, Amazon could not stay in business long if they were continuously producing numbers at that level. However, once you factor in the Lifetime Value Of A Customer, then Amazon is spending $27.60 to acquire a customer that is worth $116 in sales for them. Therefore, by measuring the Lifetime Value of a Customer, Amazon is spending only 24% of their revenue in order to acquire one customer.

Few businesses invest 24% of their revenue in advertising, but Amazon hopes that the Lifetime Value of a Customer will eventually exceed the $116 value, known to have existed in FY2000.

As the Lifetime Value of a Customer increases, the overall Cost of Customer Acquisition will fall, as an overall percentage value of Cost Of Acquisition divided by the Lifetime Value of the customer.

The Compounding Lifetime Value Of A Customer

If you have a hair-cutting salon and your advertising budget for one month is $1000, and you get 30 new customers through the door, who will spend an average of $20 for a hair cut, then your basic Cost of Customer Acquisition is roughly $33.34 to gain $20 in new sales.

But if only half of your 30 new customers become regular clients, then you can anticipate 15 of those customers coming to your hair salon at least once a month for the remainder of the year. Therefore, the first 15 customers will be worth $20 each, and the next 15 customers will be worth $240 each over the course of one year ($20 x 12 months). All told, your first 15 customers will put $300 in your cash register, and the next 15 customers will put another $3600 in your cash register.

Thus, in the hair salon example, your $1000 in advertising could generate new customers that will generate $3900 in new sales. Once you start to consider the Lifetime Value of a Customer, within the Cost of Customer Acquisition, then you will realize that the Cost of Customer Acquisition – although it might be higher than the initial sale – holds out the possibility and promise reducing itself as the Lifetime Value of a Customer increases over time.

As the end of the year winds down, you will be able to see that a $1000 expenditure was turned into $3900 in new revenue. In essence, for every dollar you spent on advertising that month, your return value was $3.90 over the course of one year.

In the second year, if only half of the original 15 regular customers or roughly 8 people stay with you for the full course of the second year, then the $1920 in revenue (8 people X $20 each X 12 months) you can expect from those customers could almost be considered free money. Of course, you will still have service fulfillment costs, but that second year will give you nearly $2000 in revenue that you will not have to chase.

Even if half of the customers drop off during the following calendar years, then a 50% customer attrition rate will allow you to have customers that could stay with you up to five years. Calculated against a 50% decrease in customers over each calendar year, your $1000 investment in advertising may translate into $7500 in revenues over five years ($3900 + $1920 + $960 + $480 + $240 = $7500), from the initial investment of $1000 in advertising.

The interesting thing about this scenario is that it is based on an advertising budget of $1000 ONE TIME. But, most businesses will continue the advertising process every month in every year. Therefore, the above example could compound month-after-month. Every month should bring the same or similar results to your business for the month and year.

Advertising Is A Process, Not An Event

Many small business owners have a dire misunderstanding of the nature of advertising and the value to be received from the advertising.

When business owners or managers fail to track and measure the new business generated from the advertising, then the business owners and managers will fail to see that advertising is an expense that can return huge dividends to the business.

When businesses fail to track and measure advertising successes, people tend to only see the money leaving the business without every seeing the reward coming back into the business. As a result, many business managers will employ advertising for a short time, then cancel the advertising, under the false belief that the advertising was not returning value to the business.

When businesses fail to understand the Lifetime Value Of A Customer, it is hard to appreciate any advertising method that fails to pay for itself in its first cycle. If Amazon was to only look at the initial sale generated by a new customer, they would quickly cancel all of their advertising efforts. Fortunately for Amazon, its management understands that the initial $17 sale is not the measure to use to determine the value of Amazon’s advertising efforts. Amazon’s management understands that the true Cost of Customer Acquisition should not be measured by the initial sale, but by the Lifetime Value of a Customer. In doing so, Amazon has ensured that it will continue to be one of the largest and most successful retail outlets on the planet.

When business managers fail to understand the Lifetime Value of a Customer, it is hard for them to appreciate and understand the compounding nature of the revenue stream for a business. It is hard for them to understand that money invested into advertising today, can deliver huge rewards over the next several years.

A Wake Up Call For Small Business Owners

According to Scott Shane, author of “Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths that Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By“, only 29-in-100 businesses will remain in business after ten years. That means that a full 71% of businesses started in any calendar year will be out of business in only ten years.

It is sad to say, but the reason most businesses fail is that business owners and managers fail to understand the nature of advertising, the importance of tracking and measuring advertising results, the Lifetime Value of a Customer, and the compounding nature of the revenue stream.

I don’t want to see your business on the trash heap of yesteryear. So, it is my hope that you will take this article as a wake-up call, as to the importance of advertising and its potential to lift your business into profits.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Track And Measure Your Advertising, Customer Acquisition Costs, And The Lifetime Value Of A Customer

A racist photo of Michelle Obama, showing as the #1 result, was pulled off  Google’s Image Index last week. It was deemed offensive, yet broke none of Google’s Three Guiding Rules. Justifying such action was, to say the least, shaky, in that they justified the ban on the grounds that “the host site was serving malware to users”.

Interestingly, according to searchengineland.com, the malware sweep did not reach Google’s main web search index and the site itself is still listed in their search results with no malware warning. However, Matt Cutts said the site was violating Google’s webmaster guidelines: “…that page did violate our webmaster guidelines because it was serving malware to users, which violates the quality guideline that says ‘Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.’ I believe that the Images team did a general anti-malware sweep.” Apparently, Google does indeed work in mysterious ways.

A Twitter chief recently told Murdoch that his internet paywalls idea will not work and that charging to read news content is like “putting the genie back in the bottle”, even though over the past month or so Mr Murdoch has launched a series of scathing attacks on Google and the BBC for breaking one of his favourite commandments: Thou shall not steal content created from my titles, most especially the Times and the Sun. In doing so, it will bring forth my wrath and will resolutely be devoured by fire. After retreating mildly at one stage, he was back the next week reaffirming his commitment to the erection of online paywalls next spring (or is it next month, or next summer?).

Reid Hoffman of networking site LinkedIn, joined the fray and added: “I am sure that during the transition from horses to automobiles there were some people bemoaning the loss of horse transport.” But, I guess, they were not Mr Murdoch’s mules.

Google’s critics then called into question the “favouritism” shown towards them by the Obama administration, and have been quick to point out its ties with Washington DC; the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was the fourth-largest corporate contributor to the Obama Presidential Campaign.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson is seeking to amend copyright law in new crackdown on filesharing. There, an unelected representative of an unelected prime minister, Mandelson is to amend laws on copyright and give the government sweeping new powers against people accused of illegal downloading.

Internet Service Providers were aghast and warned that such a move would be both unworkable and unlawful. While these proposed changes may seem trivial they are also wide-ranging, given that even minor copyright infringements for photographs and text will be severely punishable, even though the law is hugely complex on the issue.

But did Lord Mandelson’s move allude to any personal business interests? According to the Daily Mail it did. In a recent article, “Mandelson goes to war on teenagers downloading their music and movies…just days after dining with anti-piracy billionaire”, the piece states that the business secretary “ordered officials to draw up the draconian regulations days after dinner with David Geffen, who founded the Asylum record label which signed Bob Dylan…The pair dined on 7 August at the Rothschild family villa on Corfu, while Mandelson was holidaying on the Greek island.”

Even the Tory Opposition’s backbencher David Davies, said: “It does seem a remarkable coincidence. Peter Mandelson should be forced to reveal the full extent of his meetings with wealthy friends on holiday and, in the name of openness, disclose exactly what they discussed.”

In conclusion, are these “interventions” at government level merely conspiratorial or is self-interest driving them to introduce new laws and protocols that are having a direct impact on what we can read, watch and say?

John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build and an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Disturbing self-interested political manoeuvrings in the Digital Age?

How To Think About Webmedia

We’ve all seen Web video campaigns and television commercials that we actually enjoyed watching, not once, but over and over again. Whether it’s the Mac Versus PC ads or the thoroughly entertaining Visa Pizza Twirling Commercial, great campaigns are as memorable as great movies or television shows. When commercial presentations meet that standard, they transcend mere commercial status, and reach the level of Experiences.

Killer Campaigns is all about marketing campaigns that are memorable experiences, but why is that important; why should you care? Well if you want to grow your business, create, establish, or enhance a brand, or just plain sell more stuff on the Web, then you have to learn how to turn “advertising into content and content into an experience.”

What We’ll Show You

Each segment will feature an example of what we consider a great campaign that achieves memorable experience status. It may be a television commercial, a YouTube video, or even a video microsite, but whatever form it takes it will be worth watching, or more to the point, worth experiencing.

But just watching excellent advertising is not enough to understand why and how it works. You have to understand the technique used, and why it’s effective. In some cases we may
even show you failed examples of the same technique used, and explain why one campaign worked and one didn’t.

Our Perspective

We start with a particular point-of-view. You may agree with it or you may not, but by the time you’ve been through several segments of The Killer Campaign series you will at least
understand how to think about great marketing concepts, and you will watch webmedia from a whole new frame-of-reference, and with a more critical eye.

Our perspective is deceivingly simple: we create marketing communication, that’s video campaigns, websites, and video microsites based on the notion that Web traffic is an audience, not prospects, clients, or potential suckers, but an audience.

The Technique and Why It Worked

The analysis we use to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques is based on the preceding perspective of treating website traffic like an audience. Why you may ask don’t we do what everybody else does, and look at the numbers? And the answer is simple: numbers lie. Numbers themselves don’t tell you the whole story.

An effective campaign may fail because of poor implementation or faulty targeting, or any number of other reasons that don’t speak to the creation and effectiveness of the media itself. After all, one of the greatest commercials ever made, the introduction of the Macintosh computer, almost never got shown because certain members of the board of directors got cold feet.

Killer Campaigns: Words & Music

As powerful and important as visual communication is, without finely crafted, supportive words and music, the visuals will fall flat; they will lack the emotional impact that connects you the advertiser, with them, the audience.

The Visa Pizza Twirler Commercial with the Morgan Freeman voice-over is a tour-de-force of commercial communication. Take a look and listen:

Visa Pizza Twirler Video with Sound

But what would this presentation be like without words and music? Here’s a video of the filming of the pizza-tossing scene without any voice-over or music. The pizza-chef is brilliant but without the words and music it’s merely a pleasant distraction without emotional or commercial relevance.

Visa Pizza Twirler Video – No Words and Music

The Web and television are both multimedia communication venues that rely on visual impact and sound design combined with the element of performance, but at least one major difference makes commercial presentation on the Web a more difficult challenge: television watching is a passive exercise, while Web surfing is a proactive activity. You’ll suffer through bad television commercials to watch your favorite program but on the Web, people won’t tolerate it. That said, there are some great commercials that do get it right.

HTC You Campaign

The HTC You Campaign hits the proverbial marketing nail right on the head. This is a company that communicates the right message in the right way, because the message is not about the phone, it’s about what you need in a phone. Just listen to the tag line: “you don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you, and you, and you, and we are HTC.”

This is a presentation that transcends commercial status. At the heart of the video are words and music that form a hypnotizing poetic social commentary on our over-stimulated hectic lives, and it provides a human solution, not a technical one. The concept is brilliant: this is not a product, it’s a life enabler, and who couldn’t use one of those. There is no discussion of features or price.  It’s not even about the phone; it’s about making life easier for you, and it does it with a brilliant script and a hypnotic musical score.

HTC You Campaign Video

Conclusion

In order for a commercial, a website, or a webmedia campaign to attain the level of an effective content experience, it must connect with an audience on an emotional level, the level at which decisions are made, and actions approved.

The HTC You Campaign illustrates how poetic words, delivered in an inspiring voice-over, supported by a hypnotic musical score, with associated images, turn advertising into content and content into an experience.

Does your website presentation or webmedia marketing strike this kind of cord with your audience, or are you still trying to win the hearts and minds of your audience with just another feature or price adjustment?

The Web is a different kind of communication venue. The old broadcast scenario of repeat, repeat, repeat, until they say your brand name in their sleep, just won’t work on the Web. You may only get one shot at any individual audience member, don’t screw it up.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Killer Campaigns Volume 1

If this is you, then you will love this article template. I’m about to tell you step-by-step how to go about creating your next article–a “Top Mistakes” article.

Most likely you’ve noticed mistakes that clients, customers or people interested in your niche make on a regular basis. When you notice these you probably think, “I wish I could tell this person the right way to do this–it would make their life so much easier!”

You have just bumped into a prime teaching opportunity–why not craft a helpful article that will alert your readers to common mistakes that they very well might be making, and then gently steer them back on the right path?

You’ve probably already created tons of “Top Tips” articles–it’s time to approach your next article from the opposite side and focus on some things your reader should avoid.

To make things easier, here’s a template for creating a “Top Mistakes” article:

1) What mistakes do you notice people making repeatedly in your niche?

These could be misconceptions in thinking or mistakes in behavior. As an expert in your niche it is your role to educate people–if you notice someone doing something wrong or making a faulty assumption over and over again, you really want to help and set the record straight.

Don’t think of this as focusing on the negative–many times people don’t realize they’re doing anything wrong until it’s pointed out to them!

If they can see your list of common mistakes, it will be a powerful learning experience. Think of a “Top Mistakes” article as being a preventative measure with positive results for your readers.

2) Write out each mistake and offer a solution. Focus on the instructive part–the mistake is really only an opportunity to teach the reader an important truth. So, briefly describe the mistake, and then quickly move into the solution.

It helps to be encouraging–assure the reader that many people are making this same mistake, and that it can be quickly remedied with a change of thinking or behavior.

3) Place a number in front of each of the mistakes so that the reader can easily keep track of your list (and this will also help in creating your title–more on that later).

4) Write an introductory paragraph that explains why these types of mistakes are common. Explain what the reader has to gain by avoiding them, and what they have to lose by doing them.

5) Write a concluding paragraph–this could just be a sentence or two. Reaffirm what the reader has to gain by avoiding these mistakes. Be positive!

6) Create a title that uses a number–whatever number of mistakes you’re covering. So, your title could be “Top 5 Writing Mistakes” or “7 Common Writing Mistakes of Newbie Article Writers”.

“Top Mistakes” articles are some of the easiest to write because you have likely already noticed common mistakes that people make in your field. Your article can be a powerful teaching tool–sometimes the best way to learn is to see what not to do!

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Article Template: How To Write A “Top Mistakes” Article

Equally they may insist or the consultant may offer monthly report to show that rankings have moved up (and sometimes down) but feedback shows that many business owners do not really understand the report they are getting, as they are expecting a definitive (the search engines are anything but) report, so when they check their rankings they are different but they don’t understand why.

This can lead to a level of distrust on occasion between parties but in reality it is merely a misunderstanding of the natural ebb and flow of the web from the business owners perspective, or perhaps a failure by the SEO consultant or link building company to fully explain the natural state of things to their client before the start of the campaign.

The purpose of this article is to provide business owners with a generic non technical third party perspective on the natural noise of the net,as well as highlighting a number of questions that they should be asking themselves before placing too much emphasis on a simple snapshot of time as the measure of success of the SEO campaign.

Variations in Google (and other search engines) happen on a constant basis which all affect ranking to one degree or another, for example these variations could include: which data center is serving your results (Google relies on a number of different data centres not just one), or what is today’s or even this hours Google algorithm variation that is being used to shuffle and sift the billions of pages in the index to give you your results.

Equally the discovery of a new page on a site or even a link pointing to a site can make a difference as can variations in your page content, and (simplistically) based on this Google does its shuffle and produces the search results that you see.

Are the results the same hour by hour or minute by minute? Well the answer is a definite no and due to these factors two people conducting the exactly the same search could see a different result at exactly the same time, a situation that is further clouded as more localised results are presented in the search engines. Additionally even if you were to conduct exactly the same search an hour (and sometimes minutes later) the search result can vary.

So does this make a ranking report a wasted piece of paper? This will depend on your perspective and understanding of what you are getting so the answer is yes and no.

A ranking report in whatever form you receive it (generally the more you pay the more elaborate it is) is merely a snapshot of time which is subject to a huge amount of variation. In my opinion it should be used merely as a yard stick of performance over time and at best should be used to monitor the trend of the SEO campaign (which could last from a few months to over a year depending on the competitiveness of the clients market) not be seen as a definitive performance metric.

The other interesting fact is that many ranking reports are produced using software that actually violates Google’s terms and conditions by automatically querying the search engines, so to get round this often the report is produced by querying the search engines anonymously from behind something known as a proxy server.

This fact alone can equally skew the reports findings depending on the proxy servers worldwide location.

Instead of watching for potential website ranking changes try to spend the time adding or organising more pages or relevant content to your site, as this will be much more beneficial both in the short and long term.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

The Ebb and Flow of The Search Engines And How This Affects Ranking

However, in my not-so-humble opinion, for pure longevity and cost effectiveness, one method stands head and shoulders above all others – article marketing. Let me rephrase that – correctly applied article marketing. Because there’s a right way, and a wrong way to do article marketing. But I’ll get to that later.

So what exactly is article marketing?

In a nutshell, article marketing is a form of advertising in which businesses write articles relevant to the nature of their business, and/or the products they sell. These articles are then distributed and published in the marketplace.

An article generally consists of a byline and/or resource box that includes a brief description about the author’s business or offer. If what you’ve written is interesting, readers will be compelled to click on the link in your resource box, which takes them to your website or a landing page of your choosing.

So what makes article marketing the greatest advertising method ever?

Well, there are several things:

1. Credibility

Well-written articles that actually help the reader solve a problem, have the potential to establish you as an expert in your field, and give you an important edge over your competition. This added credibility can have a profound effect on your bottom line. Because as consumers, we tend to buy from companies we know and trust. That is why brand names are so powerful. They’ve earned our trust over the years, and as a result, we’re willing to pay more for brand name products.

However, psychologically, it goes much deeper than that. Over time, prospects have become increasingly suspicious and distrustful of advertisements. So when they see an advertisement, their defensive shield automatically deploys. Getting past that shield can often be difficult, and can have a significant impact on your conversion ratio, as well as your ROI.

On the other hand, when prospects read a well-written, informative article that they themselves sought out, their mindset is entirely different. Their defensive shields are down, because they’re not reading an advertisement – so there’s no reason to be on alert.

As a result, when prospects arrive at your website, they are more relaxed and less apprehensive because they arrived willingly – without sales pressure, trickery or hype. And because they just read your article, there is a certain degree of familiarity and trust already established – greatly increasing the chances that they will purchase whatever it is that you’re selling.

2. Branding

Small Business Expert, John Jantz (Duct Tape Marketing) describes branding as “The art of becoming knowable, likable and trustable.” And while that’s an extremely simple definition, it’s also profoundly accurate. Because while branding has a variety of definitions, they all have the same end game – the same goal. And that goal is to become well known, well-liked, respected and trusted.

So how does writing articles pertain to branding? Each time you write an article, and readers click on the link in your resource box and visit your website, you are building your brand. Because through your articles, people are getting to know you, and hopefully getting to like, respect and trust you. And if you consistently write quality articles that actually help people solve their problems, that will go a long way toward gaining their trust.

3. Targeted Traffic

All traffic is not created equal, and the best kind of traffic is quality, targeted traffic – which is exactly the kind of traffic article marketing generates. Let me elaborate on that: People generally gravitate towards information that focuses on the subject matter that they’re interested in.

For example, people who own tropical fish will read information related to tropical fish. Food lovers will read information about cuisine, and so on and so forth.

So when you write articles on a specific topic, readers of your articles are already targeted. And if your proposal is at all relevant to the subject matter of the article itself (which it should be), you have a better than average chance of converting readers into customers.

4. Search Engine Optimization Benefits

Article marketing has several important SEO benefits. First of all, if your article is well-written and offers real value (which it should), it will be linked to by many quality, relevant websites. These links are known as inbound links, and are important because they’re among the principal criterion that search engines use to rank websites.

In theory, the more quality, relevant backlinks you have pointing to your website, the higher your site’s ranking within the search engines. Again, in theory.

Speaking of ranking, have you noticed that whenever you do a search for information on a particular subject, most of the top search results are usually articles?

That’s because search engines love content, and prefer a page full of relevant content, as opposed to a page full of links, banners, images or Adsense ads. If you would like to rank highly for specific keywords, article marketing can help you achieve that goal.

By including your keywords in your article’s title and throughout your article, depending on where your article is published and the popularity of your keywords, it could very well end up on the first page of the search results.

That being said, I want to make something perfectly clear. By no means am I advocating creating content specifically for the search engines – quite the contrary. When writing articles, your number one goal should always be to provide your readers with good, solid information that helps them solve a problem. If you happen to derive SEO benefits as a result of doing that, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

5. Article Marketing is Cost-Effective

Article marketing generates quality traffic that is every bit as good or better than advertising you have to pay for… except you don’t have to pay for it. Unlike paid advertising, which produces only a temporary boost in sales and traffic and then has to be repeated (which can get expensive), articles will remain in the search engines and on other people’s websites for years to come, paying valuable traffic dividends – not unlike how money earns interest in a savings account.

I guess you could say, writing articles is like money in the bank – provided, of course, you continue to write and submit quality articles for publication on a consistent basis, article marketing will produce a constant stream of targeted traffic to your website. I can tell you from personal experience, as long as you continue to churn out quality articles for publication, your traffic well will never run dry.

6. Articles Are Viral

Articles are extremely viral, and if people find value in what you write, they will voluntarily pass along your articles to others. I’m constantly receiving articles in my e-mail box from friends and colleagues of mine. Conversely, when I come across a good article I think someone might be interested in reading, I also pass it along.

In fact, many websites that publish articles encourage this type of viral activity, with highly visible “E-mail This Article to a Friend” links.

Whatever you do, don’t underestimate the viral impact of article marketing. If your articles are well-written and present valuable information, they could be passed along and read by hundreds of thousands of potential prospects.

Hire a Ghostwriter

Okay, let’s suppose you like what you’ve read so far about article marketing – but you can’t write. No problem. You can still participate, because it’s possible to hire a ghostwriter for a reasonable fee, who will ghostwrite articles for you, and give you full and complete ownership of those articles. Probably, the best known and most reputable website for article ghostwriting is Bill Platt’s ThePhantomWriters.com.

A Word of Warning

I’m sure you’ve heard the axiom, “You get what you pay for.” Well, unfortunately, that applies to article marketing as well. Believe it or not, there are article writing services that will write articles for as little as five dollars. That’s not a typo. Many of these companies originate in India.

My advice to you is, stay away from those companies. Common sense should tell you that you can’t get a quality article written for five measley dollars – at least nothing a respectable publication would want to publish. You just can’t.

In addition, the people who write those bargain-basement articles usually don’t have a firm grasp of the english language, and often write articles that are incoherent.

If you are serious about article marketing, and you don’t have the ability to write articles yourself, have enough respect for your readers – and for the image of your business to let a professional write your article.

How to Do Article Marketing the Right Way

As I mentioned in the opening of this article, there’s a right way, and a wrong way to do article marketing. I’m going to share with you the right way. The reason I bring this up is because, until recently, I was doing article marketing the wrong way. I don’t have a problem admitting that.

And while I was getting decent results, I could have been getting even better results.

Anyway, what turned me around was an excellent article I read by Mark Daoust titled, “The Misunderstood Marketing Method.” In his article, Mark writes:

“Instead of signing up for the latest article distribution program that promises to blast your article to a gazillion publishers that you may not even want publishing your article, choose one or two initial publications that you would like to be featured in, then work on developing a relationship with them.”

The last two lines of that quote totally changed my article marketing philosophy:

“Choose one or two initial publications that you would like to be featured in, then work on developing a relationship with them.”

And that’s exactly the method I use today. I’ve established a relationship with a couple of select publications, and I submit my articles to them exclusively. If you want to have some control over where your articles are published, I advise you to do the same.

In closing, article marketing requires a commitment of continuous effort. After all, nothing worthwhile comes easily. But I promise, if you make that commitment, the end result will be well worth it!

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

The Greatest Advertising Method Ever

Business growth is easy to accomplish, once you know the secret. The secret is deceptively simple: offer what your target market wants. Easy enough, right? Yet – the only thing that gets in our way is ourselves…

I remember when I was seven I got a race car set for Christmas. After tearing open the package I couldn’t wait to race cars with my brother. But my dad had to put the damn thing together first. I remember interrupting him, grabbing the screwdriver, thinking I was helping and speeding the process along. With all my “input” and interruptions the whole process took hours! (Okay – more like 20 minutes – but at that age it SEEMED like hours!)

Marketing is the same way.

The more we try to get our own hands into the fray, the more complicated we make marketing for ourselves. Almost all your marketing questions, challenges and problems are solved by listening to what your target market wants.

People Buy End Results and Experiences

Becoming very good at marketing is largely about getting out of your head and getting into the world of your target market.

What do THEY want – not what do you THINK they need. The secret is to focus on the results you deliver – not your process to get there. People buy results – and in some markets, people also buy the experience they get journeying towards an end result.

Get in the habit of thinking in terms of the bottom line result and the experience your market gets from using your product or service.

If you apply this way of thinking right now in your business, you WILL see immediate results. As you keep acting from this perspective your business will inevitably grow in the weeks to come.

How We Decide to Buy Things

We see something we want, it triggers something deep inside; we justify why we want it and we buy it. It’s universal. We all act this way.

You know this from your experience too: remember a time when you really wanted something, but you knew you shouldn’t buy it? It’s the different parts of your brain doing what they do…

You see something and BANG! The core of your brain – the reptilian brain – grunts, “Ugh. I want that. I have to have that!” It’s your ‘greed gland.” Next your limbic system – the mammalian brain – gets hit with the emotional desire for the thing. The desire burns deep inside you – out of control if it wasn’t for the next part of the brain…the thought rises to your neo cortex. It’s our logical brain – what makes us think. You find logical reasons to justify the need to buy or not buy the thing.

In your marketing message, you have to hit all three levels of desire. Good marketing happens when you give logical reasons for your prospects emotional buying decisions. All three brain levels are represented in the top eleven reasons why we all buy…

1. Save time
2. Save money
3. Make money
4. Avoid effort
5. Increase happiness
6. Find success
7. Be pain-free/better health
8. Have fun
9. Gain praise
10. Feel safe and secure
11. Feel liked or loved/be popular

Your task is to find which of these matches your product and service. Start promoting these fundamental, universal triggers in your marketing. Grab people’s attention by showing how your offer produces some of these bottom line results and you’ll make your marketing easy and fun forever.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

The Top 11 Reasons Why People Buy From You

Many thousands of internet entrepreneurs have succeeded and attained financial security. So what is their secret? How do they get a steady stream of visitors to their website and how do they persuade them to click the “Buy Now” button? By far the majority of marketers use a combination of Google Adwords and Search Engine Optimization.

Google Adwords carry millions of small ads every day, for every conceivable product or subject imaginable. So it must be the way to go, right? Sure, many people are making a good living from Adwords and a few can make a fortune at it. But, if you’ve tried it, then you’ll know it the true difficulties involved.

Being potentially very profitable, this market is very difficult to break into. First, you have to learn how this thing works, then you have to constantly improve your ads and you will need to spend money before you find the best performing keywords and the most profitable ads. You can set a daily limit to your spending but just twenty dollars a day will mop up 600 bucks in the first month.

Most popular keywords cost anywhere from 50 cents to 2/3 dollars per click, so twenty dollars won’t buy many clicks and, at a click-through rate of two or three percent, you will not get many visitors per day.

There are only about eight slots for ads on each page of Google, so the competition for these slots, particularly on the first page of results, is very fierce and often very sneaky. Each of the eight “tenants” of those valuable places on Page 1 are striving to get to position one, which, on average, gets over 70% of the traffic on that page and the only way to do that is to push the others down. All the Adwords users on the second and third pages are also fighting to climb up the greasy pole.

It is now possible to buy software that will allow you to spy on details of competitors’ campaigns and to see what keywords they are using and even what they are paying for each keyword, so you can potentially bid slightly higher and gain a higher position. If you do get your ad on Page One or Two, someone will be sniping at you with this type of software. Even if you have gained a comfortable position on Page 1 of Google, it is a constant struggle to maintain that position.

There is an alternative approach to running a successful Google Adwords campaign. You can employ a specialist team of experts, with the experience and the time to do the whole thing for you. The problem is, they won’t be interested unless you’re going to be a big spender on Adwords. That’s why I say that Google Adwords may be one of the most difficult ways to make money on line, certainly for a newcomer with little money to risk.

So how about Option Two? Search Engine Optimization. Surely this is the ultimate solution!

You learn how to design and build a web page which meets all Google’s guidelines (and I’ll tell you what they are) and then you get on Page One, with a page which costs nothing to be there and wait for the money to roll in. How cool is that?

This is all you need to do. Find a suitable keyword phrase (preferably 4 or 5 phrases) which gets at least 100 searches a day and which does not have many heavy hitters in the competition. 1,000 searches a day is obviously much better but is likely to have strong, well-established competition.

Then you need to get a domain name which incorporates the main keyword or phrase and build your web page so that it includes the keywords in the Title of the page; in the Description of the page; in the URL of the page; in the Headline of the page and in the Anchor Text of all links to other websites. That’s not too difficult, is it?

Then, to convince Google that yours is an “Authority” site, you need to get multiple links to your page, from other related sites, dealing with the same subject, whether it is Health, or Family, or whatever. The more important these other sites are, the more weight Google gives to these links. I can tell you, getting these links is hard work.

Here’s a real example. My website is on Page One of Google, for the phrase “Stop Arthritis Pain”, out of 2.1 million results. Last time I looked, it was at position 6, on Page One, and has been there for months. The same search phrase is on Page One of Yahoo (at position 2), out of 21.7 million results. Impressive eh?

I’ll bet you’re thinking “that page must be pulling in a ton of money”. Well, it isn’t. The reason is, that keyword phrase is not a popular search term and only gets about 20 visitors a day, so it makes a few dollars a day but nothing significant. Think about those other twenty million pages, who are getting even less traffic than those on page one.

So, if you can get onto Page One of the big search engines, you may make a lot of money but 99.9% of the pages up there are having no impact at all, in terms of making money for their owners. In many cases, it’s a lot of time and effort for no reward.

A well established method, used by High Street businesses for many years, is gaining credibility in online marketing. Make money by giving stuff away for FREE! We’ve all heard of BOGOF – “Buy One, Get One Fee!” How about, “Get this valuable stuff, without buying anything”? Many internet marketers, smarter than I, claim to be making excellent earnings with this method and without the aid of Google Adwords or the Search Engines.

This is a quote from an expert, who has many profitable websites from using these methods -

“There is no more powerful way to sell your product than by ‘preselling’ it with free and useful information, typically with a free ebook.”

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Google Adwords. Goldmine Or Minefield?