If you’re running a business online, then sooner or later (probably sooner) you’re going to have to start registering users, and building a database of registered users. This is both a blessing and a curse. For one, having a database of registered users is an invaluable resource. It means that you have a (hopefully) long list of people who were interested enough in your product to purchase it, or to at least sit down and provide you with a lot of information about themselves.

On the other hand, studies show that up to 10% of potential purchasers will leave at the point of making a purchase because they felt that the registration process was overly burdensome.

So today we’re going to look at how you can make your website’s registration process more streamlined and efficient; in order to capture get the greatest number of users registered while scaring away as few as possible.

Add Value

Explain, in clear and simple language, why your users should provide you with their valuable information by registering for your site. Will it provide them with access to new material? Lowered prices? Secret information?

Newsweekly The Economist allows registered users access to twice as many articles per week as non-registered users, while language learning website Livemocha makes its chat and social networking features available only to registered users. Thinking along these lines, what can your website offer to users in exchange for their registration.

Simplify and Partition the Process

The next step is to simplify and break down the process. Begin by eliminating as many forms as possible. Consider how much less painful it is to fill out a raffle card than it is to complete an insurance application. Think about your website registration in the same terms. What is the least amount of information that you can take from your customers?

That is how many fields you should have in your registration form. If you’re asking for too much information, then you’re losing customers and leads. Whether for reasons of boredom or concerns about security, people do not want to fill out too many online forms.

The next step is to break things down into steps. If you have a long registration process, don’t just put it all on one form. Break it into several steps, and clearly indicate to your customers how far along they are with the entire process.

By making your registration process simpler and more attractive, you’ll have more potential customers completing it, and ultimately more sales.

Thanks!

 (Image by David Castillo Dominici)

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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As the most popular social networking site and the second most popular web site in the world, I don’t have much need to introduce Facebook here.

The brainchild of Mark Zukerberg while still a student at Harvard, Facebook started the social networking revolution, and has since made Zuckerberg into the youngest billionaire on the planet.

But as I like to ask, how can you turn this into extras traffic for your site, and extra customers coming through your doors?

The main draw of Facebook stems from its 800 million plus users. 800 million! That’s over 10 times the populations of the United Kingdom. If you can get even an infinitesimal fraction of these users on your site, and even a fraction of them buying your product, you can start thinking about moving up your retirement date.

But that’s the hard part. Let take a look at a few of the best ways to engage the Facebook community with your own site, and with your products.

Socialise

The first step to bringing in traffic from Facebook is by understanding the nature of the site itself. It is a social network. Which means that you, the internet marketer, needs to leverage socialisation. And you need to network.

What do I mean by this?

Consider again the 800 million users of Facebook. All of them are linked to one another in some way, most likely as friends, but also as people who like the same fan pages or use the same applications. Now, all of these people are constantly updating the site with new comments, pictures, videos, and whatever else they feel like sharing with the world.

This means that you can’t handle all your marketing yourself. Everything that you post to the site is going to be lost immediately in the stream of updates.

However, by socialising, you can get the network to market for you. For free. Share posts of value and interest, and people will start re-sharing them and re-posting them. In effect, you post will go viral. However, note that I do not mean of interest to you. I mean of interest to your users.

How do you figure out what is of interest to your users? Ask them. Not only does this make your readers and customers feel appreciated, but it also provides you with the best market research you could possibly get your hands on.

Two of the ways that I’ve been getting in touch with my readers lately are by asking them  questions about their interests, especially as those interests pertain to the marketing industry; and by asking for feedback on my products or sites.

By getting involved with the Facebook community, and dealing with such that you leverage its strengths and minimise its weaknesses, you’ll find that you not only an entire world of free advertising, but ultimately an entire world of paying customers as well.

Thanks!

(Image by Sean MacEntee) 

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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Some internet marketers would take one look at this title and declare me insane. “Making money with Google Adwords – give me a break, it’s not 2005 anymore,” they might scoff. And they would have a point. It is much more difficult to generate revenue from Adwords marketing than it once was. However, it is by no means impossible. There is a lot more competition, but most of the competition has no idea what its doing. As with anything else, generating sales through Adwords is simply a matter of really understanding the format, thinking creatively, and outmanoeuvring the competition.

AdWords 101

Most of you probably already have a pretty good grasp of what AdWords does and how it works, but we’ll have a quick refresher course here anyway.

AdWords is the premier advertising service offered by Google, and  it generates the majority of Google’s yearly revenue. It was the original super-targeted advertising service, and allows you to create advertisements which pop up when someone searches on Google for the keyword which you’ve bid on. Its an invaluable service, and many internet companies use it as their primary source of new customers.

The AdWords War

The problem is, since AdWords is so easy to use and can potentially generate such great returns on investment, it is no longer solely the domain of small business owners and independent marketers. Large corporations have gotten involved, and have sent their marketing departments, with their nearly unlimited budgets, to scoop up the prime real estate.

Since keyword prices are set by competitive bidding, dealing with a large corporate marketing department in the mix can quickly put you out of the running.

So, rather than trying to take them head-on, the key to success is making a strategic pivot and seeking out better real estate.

Find Your Advantage

The easiest place for you to find your advantage in the AdWords world is to realize how much flexibility your business really has. Keyword selection is the obvious place to start. Look at alternative keywords that you could advertise for. You can probably drive your advertising costs down by focusing on less expensive keywords, and then improving your conversion rates in order to make up for the lost visitors.

The key to driving up your conversion rates is creating a landing page that works. Consider – you’ve already got a potential customer on your site, so you know that they’re at least marginally interested in your product. Moreover, you’ve already paid the cost of getting them there, so you need to sell them the product at that point.

Go back at look at your landing page, the first page that the customer sees when they visit your site. Does it elicit a strong, visceral, emotional reaction? Does it create a need for your product? If not, what can you do to make it stronger? If you want to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive AdWords environment, your landing page needs to convert as much as possible.

The main take-away here is just to consider your customers, and consider how you are advertising to them. And remember that with any pay-per-click advertising, the price of the advert isn’t nearly as important as your return on investment.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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The email list. Every internet marketing and small business owner out there has one, and for many of your it may well be your most prized possession.

The standard internet business model has as its aim 1) acquire email addresses, and 2) send offers to these addresses. Hence the big list – all the email addresses that you’ve acquired over the years, and with whom you regularly keep correspondence, and regularly pitch offers to.

However, you can make your email marketing campaigns so much more successful by learning how to break this list down into relevant segments and then making your product pitches and promotions only to the most relevant sections.

Learn their Preferences

The basic idea of breaking your email list down into segments is to learn the buying habits and preferences of different groups of people on your master list.

So, for instance, say that over the course of several emails to your master email list, you make a few product recommendations. Say you make one for an affiliate’s SEO book, and one for a PPC product. Hopefully you’ll get a few sales out of those recommendations. Now, based on who clicks through and makes a purchase, you’ve got valuable information about several of your readers.

So, for the people who responded favourably to the SEO book, you know that they have a strong interest in SEO. Strong enough to make a purchase based on it. So you put them in a separate sub-category, and when you have another product related to SEO you can pitch it only to them, instead of to the entire list.

Going Forward

There are two major benefits here. The first is that you learn the buying preferences of your customers, allowing you to make future recommendation to them based upon those preferences.

The second is that you also know what they are not interested in. This is arguably even more important than knowing their interests. There are few ways to get people to unsubscribe from your emails faster than by repeatedly offering them products in which they have no interest.

By properly segmenting your email marketing list, you’ll be able to avoid this problem. Over time, as you learn more and more about your readers’ preferences, you’ll be able to make increasingly relevant product recommendations, and your customers will start to see you as more of an advisor than a salesperson.

Trust me when I say that gaining this level of trust from your customers is one of the smartest business decisions that you can make.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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This week, YouTube celebrated its 5^th birthday, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to pay homage to a site which has revolutionised the way people share videos and broadcast themselves online.

Here are some interesting facts and figures about YouTube you might not know:

• YouTube gets over 2 billion views a day – YouTube Press Statistics
• A whole 24 hours’ worth of video is uploaded to the site every minute – YouTube Press Statistics
• It is said that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up” – YouTube Press Statistics
• The first video on YouTube is of one of the co-founders talking about elephant’s trunks titled “Me at the Zoo” – YouTube Press Statistics
• Google bought the site for $1.65 billion in November 2006 – YouTube Press Statistics
• The longest Video ever on YouTube is 48 hours – - YouTube Press Statistics

It’s hard to believe when you look at those statistics that the site has only been in existence for a mere 5 years, as YouTube has completely changed the way people can access video online.

Not only this, but YouTube has made it possible for ordinary people to reach a worldwide audience they would normally not have been able to connect with – which makes it a very powerful marketing tool in the right hands.

Furthermore, YouTube has actually helped propel aspiring musicians to fame over the last few years. Teen pop sensation Justin Bieber was discovered through his YouTube channel, and even the almighty Lady Gaga first tried to launch herself via YouTube before she was able to secure her first record deal.

Through YouTube you can literally promote yourself and your company to the world, without having to spend a fortune on expensive advertising campaigns.

So, I’d like to wish YouTube a happy 5^th birthday and I look forward to seeing where the next 5 years the site will take us.    

Thanks!

Sean

(Image  by www_ukberri_net)

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Social media engagement is crucial to any internet marketing campaign. However, it can be difficult to know where exactly to begin engaging the social network. A Facebook business page is a fantastic place to start promoting your business and leveraging the power of social media today. Its straightforward, beneficial, and free. Read on to see how you can get started taking advantage of this excellent opportunity, and how to optimise your page so that you can get the most out of it in the long run.

Get Started on the Right Foot

Now that you’ve hopefully decided that a Facebook business page is definitely a step in the right direction for your business, get started with filling out all the relevant information about your company.

To start, you’ll have to select from one of six categories, including: Local business or place; artist, band, or public figure; company, organisation, or institution; entertainment; brand or product; and cause of community. For our purposes, you’ll most likely be choosing local business or company. Make sure you select this properly, as the category which you select will prompt Facebook to offer you different information fields when you finally get a chance to input more detailed information about your company. Perhaps more importantly, once you select your category, you cannot change it without deleting the entire page. Choose wisely.

Fill in The Gaps

Following this you’ll be prompted to add more detailed information about your business. What you need to add depends on your particular industry niche, but remember as a general rule that the more time and effort you put into the page, then the better it will look, and the better results it will yield.

So really take your time and fill in all of the categories. Put up a few pictures of your business place, of your products, or of yourself with community leaders or satisfied customers. Make sure to put in an email address, and if you have a physical business location, make sure that you include the address and hours of operation. The key to social media marketing is connecting the dots.

Socialise

Once you’ve filled in all the information for your business, you can start sharing your creation with the world. Begin, of course, by sharing your new page with all the friends who you’ve already connected with personally on Facebook. Beyond this, leverage the power of social networking.

Update your status regularly, and update it will valuable and useful information, so that the people who have already followed or liked your page will repost your status updates. Additionally, cross-link your new page to existing business media, such as your blog and your business website. Make sure that visitors to one are able to quickly and easily access the others.

Additionally, be sure to take advantage of a feature on Facebook business pages called Insights. Insights allow you to see how many people visited, liked, or followed your page, and allows you to break these down by time frames so that you can judge the relative effectiveness of your marketing efforts over specific periods of time.

By taking these simple steps, you’re putting yourself on the fast track to social media marketing success.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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I write a lot on this blog about generating leads and increasing your visibility. These are essential business practices, and the true path to business success. However, generating leads is easier said than done.  One excellent way to turn site visitors into leads and potential clients is by making them an offer – giving them something of value in exchange for them taking one step towards a purchase. However, there is a right way to go about doing this, and several wrong ways.

What Is an Offer?

As mentioned above, an offer is something that you provide to your customers at no monetary cost to them. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t get anything of value. Typically, offers are provided in exchange for an email address, which allows you to open a direct line of communication with a site visitor.

When you’re designing an offer, you have a wide variety of options to choose from, and what your offers look like will ultimately depend on your industry niche and your personal tastes. Some types of offers that I’ve had the most success with in the past include podcasts and webinars, how-to guides, and ebooks. However, that for my particular industry. You may find that in your industry a free demo or a product trial is more appropriate.

This is a good time to offer a few words of warning about what you shouldn’t consider an offer. Product and company materials, contact information, and customer testimonials and case studies are not offers. They are materials that should be on your website, but they should be freely available for everyone to see. They do more to benefit you that way, and your customers will not be very likely to give you their valuable email address in exchange for something that they consider worthless.

How to Use Offers Effectively

There are two keys to the effective use of offers. First, you need to target the right people with differentiated offers, and you need to promote your offers adequately and effectively. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t.

To target the right people, you should begin by creating several offers – several pieces of material – and offering them to the people who you think can benefit most from each one. This means creating different offers for people at different points in the sales process, and with different buying patterns.

Promoting your offers effectively is mostly a matter of intelligent website design, and knowing where to position your offers in regards to the content that is already on your site. For instance, if you’re offering a free ebook on SEO, you would want to promote it to readers of the articles on your blog that deal with improving a site’s search engine ranking.

Remember, a customer’s email address is a valuable thing – treat it as such. Give them something of value in exchange for the ability to communicate directly with them when you want to. You’ll be happier, they’ll be much more satisfied, and your business will be much more profitable as a result.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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Although we all know how important it is to continuously maintain and improve your social media presence, social media is also notoriously hard to track. In a time when every aspect of a business is supposed to be tracked for how it impacts your bottom line, and how much of a return on your investment it provides, social media is difficult to justify.

So how can we reconcile the centrality of social media with the difficulties of tracking your performance? By learning how to track social media performance!

Of course, this is much easier said than done. The reason that there isn’t a simple way to track social media ROI is because social media is an incredibly complex network. So we’ll have to get a bit creative in order to track how effective our performance is in the social media realm. A couple of decent metrics that we can look at are reach, actions, and costs.

Reach refers to how big a footprint you have in the social media universe. So to determine your reach, you need only look at how many followers you have, how many fans you have, and how many people comment on your posts. This is one of the easiest parts of social media to calculate. However, the difficulty arises in trying to determine how reach affects your bottom line.

This is where actions come into play. Actions refers to traceable behaviours, which customers or potential customers took as a direct result of your social media campaigns. This is the notoriously difficult thing to track. One way to get around it is by using promotion codes or linking to a different landing page. Then when you’re tracking your site analytics as you normally would, you can determine who came from your social media campaign, and who came from your more traditional sources of lead generation.

Remember that when you’re tracking actions, they do not only have to be sales. As with any attempt to determine effectiveness, steps toward a sale can also be counted as proof of effectiveness.

With social media, costs shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Typically, the only real cost is the time of your staff or yourself. That alone is one of the biggest draws of social media. Additionally, the extremely low costs take a lot of the edge off of determining your ROI – even if you only get a few sales from social media, it’s still worth it.

Finally, remember that social media is a tool for socialising, and for building relationships. So more than anything else, your success in using social media should be measured by the number of relationships you’ve created, and the strength of those relationships.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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For all those who may not of grasped it yet, internet marketing is the future. Fact.

With so many channels of information online, numerous social platforms to conquer and different devices to access all of these information streams on you need to ensure you are targeting your prospects through the right mediums.  

Each individual prospect or client will have several factors which make up their consumer behaviour, so the key to keeping onto top of your target market and pre-empting their buying patterns is to connect with them in the right contexts.

Now, their buying behaviour will be a combination of many personal factors which you are unlikely to be able to target directly, especially on a large scale. But there are three contexts which all of your target market will fall under and these are social, local, and mobile.

In order to become a SoLoMo marketer, you need to consider these three areas of your prospects behaviour before you attempt to interact and engage with them.

The Social Context

First of all, consider the platform through which you are attempting to engage with your target market, as way people use different social media platforms is dictated by why they are choosing that particular platform as their medium in the first place.

Facebook is seen as being a literal “social” network, as many Facebook users are looking to chat, “like” and share their personal interests with their virtual “friends” via this medium. When marketing via Facebook you should incorporate this friendly, chatty approach to your campaign in order to get the response form your contacts on the platform.

Twitter is much more about sharing regular and concise pieces of news and content with your followers. On such a vast platform, it’s unsurprising to realise the average shelf life of a Tweet is no more than an hour, so when marketing to Twitter you have to be concise, consistent and attention grabbing to ensure your Tweet gets noticed.

LinkedIn is a dedicated professional platform, where the end goal is to network, inform and advise fellow professionals through distributing high quality content and engaging in business-focused discussions. This again will require a different type of marketing plan in order to reach the right people.

The Local Context

On many social platforms and web devices you can now see where your target audience is at any given time through the use of “Share My Location”. Knowing your prospects real-time local context can be of huge benefit when trying to market to them effectively, as this gives you the opportunity to tailor your marketing to be highly powerful and extremely relevant.

The Mobile Context

The main concept to grasp is that social and local are also mobile, so it is vital that you now start to consider this of great relevance to your future marketing campaigns.

With half of all local searches conducted on a mobile device, and mobile users spending over 90% of their time online visiting social media platforms it’s not difficult to see why Microsoft has recently claimed that mobile internet usage will have overtaken desktop based usage within the next 2 years.  

So if you’re not already mobile enabled with your marketing, 2012 is the year to start.

Considering these three contexts of buyer behaviour before you attempt to engage will ensure that that your future internet marketing campaigns stand an increased chance of success.   

Thanks!

Sean

(Image by DigitalArt)

Internet Marketing Academy

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Understanding who your audience really is, and how they use the internet to engage with your business, is one of the cornerstones of any successful marketing effort. In fact, it could be said to be the first, and most important, step that you should take when designing a new marketing campaign.

Know What Your Target Audience is Doing Online

This sounds self-evident, but its actually a difficult thing to perfect. For instance, how does your target audience get around the internet, and how do they find the information that they’re looking for? If they typically follow links from social media to find new content, then you would not be well-advised to put a lot of time and energy into SEO and Search Engine Marketing. On the other hand, if they typically use Google and other search engines to navigate the web, then your SEO efforts will be much more rewarded.

Additionally, think about how your target audience spends their time on the internet. When a new potential sales lead comes upon your site, will they have been using the internet for work, for pleasure, or for education? This gives you insight into their behavior, and allows you to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.

Look at the Competition

While this is a timeless piece of advice, and you should always know exactly what your competition is up to anyway, its particularly relevant to developing a better understanding of your target audience. In particular, look at the internet marketing efforts of your competitors. Look at their Facebook fan pages, follow them on twitter, and read their blogs. Check out how their audience is engaging with them, and what people are saying about them. Not only will this key you into some industry best practices that you may be missing, but it will also help you avoid the missteps and failings that your competitors are undoubtedly making.

Knowing your audience is to the first step in a successful marketing campaign. Keep these tips in mind to make sure that you know your audience as well as you can.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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