• Update Your Pricing. If your prices are significantly higher than other stores, then there may be an even bigger gap when specials come out. Conversely, you may be leaving cash on the table if your prices are super-low.
• Test Your Shopping Cart. Make a few test transactions, or actually buy a small item on your own credit card, and see if there are any issues that might prevent a shopper with marginal online skills from making a purchase. Carts that appeal to basic internet skill levels can make more sales and gain more loyalty.
• Consider shipping cut-off dates. Many people who run drop-ship ecommerce sites can have a high return rate if they don’t announce the last possible day some items can be shipped, and if it is possible to ship next-day, there is a sweet spot of last-minute shoppers who can enhance the profit margin in the last few days before Christmas.
• Send Coupon Codes to Past Customers. Whether you use email or post cards to send out collateral material, the cost of an online discount code is still usually less than the cost of pay-per-click advertising to new customers. The conversion rate is generally higher for these customers as well.
• Train Your Staff. In many ecommerce companies, everyone becomes a customer service agent during peak buying times. Training your staff in advance, and soliciting feedback from experienced employees, can smooth out some of the inevitable bumps in the road that come during peak performance dates.
• Prepare For Information Technology Issues. Do you outsource your IT, or pay a local agency to do it? Chances are, your professionals will be working on quite a few critical issues for big clients at this time. Companies with big IT staffs often implement a code freeze on sites just to make sure new bugs aren’t introduced that may take negatively affect the online store. Therefore, the best time to address any website functionality issues is today, before your programmers become distracted.

Holiday shoppers can be the difference between a year’s profit and loss for many online sellers as well as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Whether economic times are good or bad, there is still more shopping in this time period, and it pays to be prepared for all the things that can happen. There are always a few surprises with vendors, shippers, the weather, and other events, but they seem to become more concentrated during the hectic holiday season. By minimizing issues with your website and your ability to get orders out the door, your level of anxiety and exhaustion can be significantly reduced.

Comments

Are you promoting yourself via social networks, or are you leaving that to your readers? Do you make sure potential clients know about your blog, if you’re using it as a business platform?

Are you simply using the standard sharing options – Twitter, Facebook, etc – or are you thinking of ways you can be a little creative when it comes to sharing your blog socially?

Let’s face it, if you’re using your blog as a business platform then the more eyeballs it gets, the better for finding potential new clients or customers. Even a personal blog can benefit from extra visitors.

So here’s a few ways you can get outside the normal views of retweets and shares, and promote your blog to a bigger crowd that may miss it otherwise.

Social Sharing Groups

The most oft-used method of sharing a blog post is via social sharing buttons on the post itself.

These are either located at the top and/or bottom of the post, or to the side. I use a mix of both – Digg Digg to offer the floating share bar to the left of this post, and Share This at the bottom.

But why not take this a little further, and create a social sharing group?

For example, one of the best resources for traffic to this blog is Stumbleupon. This is a great social sharing platform that lets you “stumble” the web, and allows you to give either a thumbs up or down to the site you’re currently on (you can also leave a review if you like).

What happens then is that the site is put into the Stumbleupon library, so anyone else using the stumble option could land on your blog. If they then like it, they give you a thumbs up and your currency increases on Stumbleupon. It’s easier than it sounds, and it’s a great passive traffic generator.

So create a Stumble group.

Grab about 10 of your online friends, and help promote each other’s blogs. Anytime a new post is published, have one of the group stumble it, then you can give it a thumbs up.

You can then take this idea to other social bookmarks – Reddit, Digg , Sphinn, etc. Just make sure you also highlight a lot of other great sites too – don’t create the group just to promote your work, that’s just spammy.

Turn Posts into Ebooks

You blog. You write. A lot. Depending on whether you’re a niche blogger or not, you might have a lot of posts on similar topics, or even run a blog series of interconnected posts.

So why not turn them into an ebook?

The market for ebooks is huge, and offers a great way for you to either give back to your blog community for reading you, or sell them as part of your business offerings.

Write a crafts blog? Put together some of your favourite tips and publish as an ebook. Chef? Collate some of your favourite recipes and sell them via your blog. And so on – the possibilities for what’s in your ebook are endless.

I put together a bunch of my short form posts on Posterous as a free ebook with some simple marketing ideas, and so far it’s been downloaded just over 2,000 times. So ebooks are definitely a great way to both give back and get back.

Turn Your Blog into a Slide

One of the best platforms around at the moment is Slideshare. Essentially taking PowerPoint presentations to the next level, Slideshare also allows uploads of PDF’s, documents and other presentations.

It then turns these into slideshows that you can either grab the embed code for or download to your hard drive, as well as the normal sharing options on Twitter and Facebook.

You can even add audio or talk tracks, or turn your slides into mini-movies.

So working from your ebook idea, collate some of your best posts on a topic and create a presentation. Edit the posts accordingly to make the best use of Slideshare’s capabilities (perhaps a connecting image, statistic or similar), and then upload and choose your sharing settings.

If folks like it and decide to embed on their own blog, you instantly have a new audience. That could go one step further, and businesses could pick up your kick-ass presentation and use it as a training resource.

The next potential step from that is to bring you on board to expand on your initial ideas – so now your original blog post has become both a training resource and a client lead.

Just Getting Started

These are just three ways that you could take the normal social sharing option, and add a little extra to help promote your blog.

You could also use the WordPress application on LinkedIn, or Networked Blogs for Facebook as another couple of alternatives. Or you could re-purpose old posts for publication elsewhere.

The thing is, just because you already have sharing options in place doesn’t mean you need to stop there. The great thing with blogs is that they can be essentially timeless, given the right post and topic. Why not use that?

How about you – what are you doing to extend the reach of your blog? Feel free to share your tips on what works for you in the comments.

Comments

Nobody forced companies to get involved with their customers in this way. There was no law, edict, or pitchfork-wielding band of angry citizens. We just did it voluntarily. And for what?

Certainly not because of the math.

A new research study of 1,400 U.S. consumers from ExactTarget and CoTweet (they are clients) called Twitter X-Factors shows that just 5% of Americans follow even one brand on Twitter. By way of comparison, that’s approximately the same size as the Asian American population, and you certainly don’t see the media coverage, software development, conferences, and general hullabaloo about marketing to Asians.

Put another way, the Twitter audience that’s connected to brands is just slightly larger than the population of Illinois. Can you imagine an “Illinois Marketing for Dummies” book? Or CEOs having thoughtful retreats in exotic locales to discuss their “Illinois strategy”?

On the surface, the time and effort we’re spending cultivating our Twitter followings is flat-out ridiculous. But, dig a little deeper into the behavior of the core Twitter audience, and the perspective changes.

Here are a few reasons identified in the study that the focus we put on Twitter may be entirely appropriate, and perhaps not even intent enough:

The Iceberg Effect. The actual reach of Twitter is actually double the user base. Due to embedding of tweets, people scanning tweets but not actually having an account, and tweets being picked up by search engines, 23% of consumers read tweets at least monthly.

Interaction. Customer prefer Twitter as the mechanism to truly interact with brands and learn more about them. Facebook is preferred for information about the brand’s activities, and email is preferred for product updates. Think about that for a moment. Customers follow you on Twitter not to be informed, but to be interacted with. They follow you because you answer back and treat them like an individual, if only for 140 characters. But yet so many companies are using Twitter as a post-modern headline news service. Wrong approach.

Overwhelmingly, respondents in the study prefer interacting with official, branded accounts rather than personal accounts from employees. (think @ford vs. @scottmonty) Consumers believe branded accounts are more reliable and accurate. Twitter gives you the opportunity to make your logo more than a logo, providing compassion, insight, information, and even entertainment in bite-sized chunks. Try that with a press release…

Nowhere to Run. Startling to me, but less than 1% of the participants would use Twitter as the first way they’d contact a company when they need customer service. However, consumers are much more likely to use Twitter as an escalation, meaning the people with whom you’re interacting on Twitter may already be frustrated with your organization.

Said one respondent:

If I don’t get the support I need through phone or email, I use Facebook and Twitter to voice my complaint, since a ton of people will see it. The company can’t ignore me then!”

Influence. The online population that’s creating the content that’s influencing the rest of the world is on Twitter, period. Daily Twitter users are 300-400% more likely to write a blog, review products, upload videos, and every other social behavior, than are non-users.

In fact, the research shows that 72% of daily Twitter users write a blog, 61% write at least one product review per month, and 53% upload videos.

This research raises two interesting questions:

- Forrester published research earlier this year that said Facebook users (rather than Twitter users) were the source of much of the New Influencer population. Which do you believe?

- Even though the numbers are small, is the Twitter effort worth it?

Check out the Twitter X-Factors study here.

Comments

The more serious the sport required of the athlete the more throughout the checkup and the list of recommendations for training and nutrition increased.

Answer These:

Is your website in the right shape to take on what you need it to do?

Does your site meet the requirements to get the job done?

I get it. I can picture most of you thinking. “Well, maybe the site needs a face lift.”

Could you imagine if a kid went into the doctor for a sport physical and the doctor took a look at the kid dangling his feet on the examination table and said “Nike shoes, ooo nice color! Oh yea, great blue basketball shorts, and that t-shirts looks comfortable. You are good to go!” and sent the kid on his way? No way! Crazzzy talk! However, in the business world, people okay pretty websites everyday that don’t meet even the basic requirements to get the job done.

[Hops on soap box] Frequently I shake my head at local business websites with gorgeous websites that are stuffed with fancy bells and whistles but forget the simple requirements of what they want to communicate and the funnel they want their customers to start down the path of.

1. Way to contact the business on the home page: Phone number should be at the very least posted in a location that is easy for visitors to find.
2. Slow loading flash splash page: Delete it, doesn’t work on mobile devices and there is nothing on this splash page that does anything but delay the visitor from DOing what you want them to do. Like call, email or buy.
3. No SEO: Basics – unique title tags for pages, meta tags/description, alt text for images, links with titles, the basics here buddy the basics.

[end rant]

Wearing fancy clothes is not going to make someone any more in shape as slapping a bunch of new fancy design on a website is going to make you more money.

Think Simple:

Filter down the requirements of your website. Start with the very beginning, because it is a very good place to start. What do you want a visitor TO DO when they get to your site?

1. Contact you
2. Buy something
3. Sign up for something
4. Interact with the content
5. Share the content

DO = Action. Beyond just read and say “oooOOOooo… AwwwWWWwwww.”

Write a list steps a visitor would need to take to accomplish what you want. No more than 5 things you want someone to DO when they come to your website. For most small businesses they want to start the visitor down the tunnel of a purchase.

Once a year at the very least have a website physical, have a review done by someone that can offer insight on what you can improve on and make your website a better experience for your visitors and a greater positive impact on your business.

Comments

The current iteration of what we all call social media has been around for at least 3-4 years but apparently brands are still irrelevant on Twitter and companies continue to blunder on Facebook and show a lack of understanding of what makes social media conversations succeed at reaching business goals.

Part of the problem is that most companies are not inherently “social” to begin with. It’s not in their DNA to understand what it means for individual employees to start having conversations with the social web at large as representatives of a company personality. Marketing is about many things including connecting audiences with products they want to buy.

Marketing on the social web is less about the tradition of packaging and distributing information and more about companies being able to connect with customers in ways that are both meaningful to those customers and to the goals of the business.

Cisco’s attempt to leverage their take on the Old Spice campaign didn’t work so well (6,900 views).  However, Brigham Young University did a parody of the Old Spice campaign and nailed it (1.8 million views). Why was that? Was it in the execution? The production? The relevance to the audience? One could argue that there is probably more resonance between the Old Spice brand and students at a University than with a company that sells routers. Just because a campaign that used social media channels worked well in one situation does not mean it’s a universal formula.

That’s a big part of the problem. Companies that are trying to understand how the social web can work for them are looking for specific formulas like we’ve been able to do with Email, Direct Mail, Advertising and even Search Marketing. The idea that a particular promotion worked for one company, therefore it should work for us too, doesn’t hold water. Companies need to figure out what works best for the social channels, media and content that best resonates with their customers.

While it’s fun to brag about, getting a viral hit on YouTube does not define success on the social web.  Creating trust, connections with a relevant community and ultimately an increase in business goals like revenue is what really matters.  The Old Spice YouTube channel not only racked up 50+ million views, but the company reported sales doubling.

To me, the issue isn’t about sucking at social media, it’s about failing.  Companies should not fear taking risks and trying new, creative ways to connect with their customers. Some of those efforts will succeed and many will suck.  Failing at social media is more about choosing NOT to:

• Listen – Social media monitoring.
• Create – Content that customers actually want.
• Engage – There is no substitute for direct participation with customers in social communities.
• Be open – Stop deciding what’s best for your customer and be open to letting them show you how they’d like to engage.
• Be brave – Show leadership in your social participation.
• Test - Moving corporate mountains is tough, so try proof of concept campaigns, run business case examples and get your feet wet.
• Change – Organizations can only be social if leadership buys in and a commitment to change is made.
• Make money – Don’t be fooled into thinking social media is all about kumbaya with customers. It’s about creating opportunities to connect and influence sales: indirectly and in some cases, directly.

I consider blogs a big part of social media and we’ve been blogging for well over 6 years. While sites like Advertising Age and Technorati rank this blog pretty high as a marketing blog, it “sucked” for quite a while as content and “voice” were being tested. There’s nothing wrong with testing and failing. But do so after listening and participating with the channels you’ll be engaging. Learn from mistakes, be creative, be nimble, empower employees with knowledge and resources.  Work to make your organization “be social” vs. “do social”.

Have you “sucked” at social media? What did you learn from it? How have you turned your social media failures into successes?

Comments

It’s the same with affiliate programs.

I was looking at developing a new niche and found one with multiple spikes in search volume and transactions multiple times a year. The incumbent had a decent affiliate program though their affiliate management leave much to be desired and training resources? Forget about it.

The problem is that it’s a niche with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of items within the space. Coupled with the fact that these are items that constantly need to be replaced and the consumers have to buy their products from somewhere and it’s not hard to imagine a longterm business resulting from this.

The sad thing is that the other merchants in the space didn’t provide deep links. I was looking for product-specific links because the competition (search results) for some of these terms were in the thousands. So what do you do if the merchant only provides links to their root domain? You could move on, though there aren’t many merchants in this space.

It’d be an unwise thing to link to their root domain via an affiliate link, then expect the lead to somehow figure out that they need to type the product name into the search engine, then click on a result.

If I were one of the users, I’d want to type the product name into the search engine and find a direct link to the product and if the price was right, buy it immediately.

If merchants don’t get the affiliate picture, it’d be smarter to hire an experienced affiliate manager or have an outsourced program manager (OPM) on at least a six month engagement (ideally longer) to get things working. Else you’re just wasting your time, and more significantly, the affiliates.

PS: You might notice that I’ve not mentioned video tools or XML datafeeds, especially with a catalog that contains more than 100,000 items. If you can’t get the basics right, there’s no point trying to run before you can crawl.

Comments

There are a ton of folks that say you shouldn’t be tweeting about what you had for breakfast, or how silly your cat is. Doing that means you’re not using Twitter right.

Then you have folks that say you shouldn’t connect Foursquare to your Twitter account, because no-one wants to know that you’re sitting on a patio having a cold one somewhere, or you’re in Best Buy getting a game for your Xbox 360.

Again, it’s “not the right way” to use the service.

Here’s a little heads up – there’s no right or wrong way to use social media.

There is a right way to use it for you and your needs, though, and that’s different.

To take Chris’s point about Twitter and LinkedIn, I worked with a client in the service industry. They used Twitter to help resolve issues and technical queries. We fed their Twitter feed into LinkedIn and Facebook.

Because of this, they won three big clients who were impressed at how quickly they resolved issues, and how concerned they were for their customers. Where did these clients come from? Two from LinkedIn and one from Facebook. The three new clients equated to six figure contracts – something that would have been missed had the Twitter account of my client not been linked up elsewhere.

As for not using Twitter to share personal stuff? Look at Twitter’s own description of the service – “Twitter is a rich source of instant information. Stay updated. Keep others updated. It’s a whole thing.” Nowhere does it say, “Please keep this business related.”

And sharing what you’re up to on Foursquare allows others to see your tastes. We keep complaining about ineffective advertising – by sharing what we like, we’re allowing marketers and advertisers insights into what we’d like to see from them. Seems like a win-win (as long as they don’t abuse our trust, obviously).

This whole “doing social media right” mindset seems to miss the mark. Who said that using Twitter or LinkedIn should be one way and one way only? Where did these “social media rules” come from? I don’t recall seeing a Social Media Ten Commandments movie. You?

Social media is just like anything else – people will either like what you’re doing or not. They’ll either agree with your viewpoint or they won’t. The ones that agree will be your customers; the ones that don’t probably weren’t a good fit anyways.

And isn’t that the way business and personal relationships have always been anyway?

Comments

Much like the three-month probationary period you would endure with a new employer, the same is advised for any relationship you would engage in with a link-building provider. Not paying attention to their structure of link accrual, if they are paying for links, what types of topic relevance are associated with your site and the sites that now link to you could end up really hurting your site in the end. Site owners who peddle this task out to vendors must initially take their link-building reports with a grain of salt. They need to double check many of the links accrued and assess the relationship of these linking sites, pages and associated links to understand if value is really being passed onto the site.

I can say that I have experienced this first hand as for instance I recently watched a client pay for link-building services from a link-building vendor which resulted in dozens of link-filled blog posts placed on sites of little topic relevance. However, this was not the worst of the situation. Many links were adjacent to non-topically relevant posts such as the posts with links to Russian mail order brides, Viagra and other sites that make your skin crawl.

It is imperative that you hold your link-building service to a standard when assessing link-building efforts. Start by keeping these questions below in mind.

Topical Relevance:

• Domain Relevance: Is the domain linking to your site hold keyword-rich similarities to the overall keyword theme of the target page on your site? It is much less credible when the red bicycles page links to your red bicycles page from the fordtaurusfanatics.com domain.
• Page Relevance: Does the page hold topic/keyword relevance to the target page on your site. We don’t need links to the red bicycles page from a directory page for Ferrari dealers in New Jersey.

Domain Uniqueness: Social media links to me do not hold true link-building credit. These are efforts in social media marketing. If for the last three months you see links from Facebook, mixx.com, and Digg.com to your site pages, so does the search engines, and maybe you got credit the first month. 20 links from one site are as good as one link from an external domain, regardless if they are to different site pages. If you can understand the relationship than so can a crawling search engine.

Anchor Text: This is common to most savvy internet marketers. The links directing to your site should be anchored on a relevant keyword phrase. It is becoming more important to diversify the text to your site so that you are not getting all your links anchored on the same text. It should be mixed up, filler words, semantic varieties, etc.

Linked Page Associations: Much like the example given above that made us giggle, assess the page linking to your site and see what other links point out from the page. If these are to porn sites, pill sites or gambling sites you should be on the phone screaming your link-vendor’s head off.

While these points are in no way the entire list of considerations for analyzing the link-building accrual methods of your link-building provider, this checklist is a quick way to understand where things may be headed in the future. Having someone send a plethora of junk links to your site can do more damage in the long run than if you would have never hired them in the first place.

Comments

Even though Search Marketing presents an attractive opportunity to grow online sales, many businesses are too busy running their companies to stay on top of future trends. To that end, here are three search marketing trends worth paying attention to:

1.  Online & Offline Marketing Integration - Forrester Research estimates $917 billion worth of retail sales in 2009 were “Web-influenced” in contrast to $155 billion of consumer goods sold online in the same year.  Small businesses must pay attention to customer search online influencing offline purchases as well as the influence of the in-store experience on searching and purchasing online.

2.  Mobile Device and Local Search – Companies must recognize consumer trends towards mobile search with the proliferation of smart phones. The web experience has definitively extended beyond the personal computer to mobile devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and iPads.  Marketers must understand their customers’ use of mobile search and what the marketing opportunities are.

Companies that serve customers in specific regions or with geographically specific needs must be present in local search results, map results and specific geo-location queries. Segmenting potential customers through geo targeting with paid search advertisements will help focus the right ads on the right customers.

3.  Social Media Advertising – Savvy small business marketers are increasingly realizing that the opportunity to reach customers extends beyond traditional paid search into the booming social media space. Having surpassed Google as the most visited website for the week ending March 13, 2010 and with over 400 million registered users, Facebook offers a significant audience that shouldn’t be ignored.  Social networks like Facebook can provide online marketers hyper-targeted advertising opportunities that can tap into new customer segments and serve as a complement to other paid search programs.

Whether it’s incorporating online and offline influences with search marketing, diversifying PPC advertising networks, leveraging local and mobile search marketing or extending advertising programs to include social media, small business marketers that capitalize on these trends will gain a competitive advantage. Of course, if they hire an online marketing agency like TopRank Marketing, that advantage may come even faster.

Comments

You’ve probably seen lots of service companies talk the same way. Home Depot swears that their employee stock program is a big part of what helps their employees care about their company rather than the company.

So what does this have to do with the Internet? Plenty. You might not realize it, but social media is turning every company into a service company. Think about it.

You’re never going to have a blogging department. You’re going to have employees that blog on top of their day job. Maybe it’s that engineer in product development talking about the new technology coming along. Or that veteran sales guy who has forgotten more customer problems and solutions than most people will ever know. That’s who you want writing your blog posts. How do you get them to write things that make the company look good? Treating them well seems like the least you can do.

You’re never going to have a Twitter team, either. Or a message board department. If you expect your customer service team to check to see what complaints are popping up online, you might need to treat them nicely.

Of course, you don’t have to treat anyone nicely. You can just order them to hop to—get on those message boards and monitor those tweets and write those blogs. Then you can sit back and see what happens. But it might not be pretty. Forced social media looks forced. Instead, allow your happy and enthusiastic employees to let their attitudes shine through.

Comments