Archive for the ‘Promoting your site’ Category

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A marketing check list for launching your new website on a budget

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Directory submission
Directories are not an effective method to build quality incoming links but they will build volume and are a good way to get the ball rolling. Most will have a low Page Rank and pass very little link juice on, but when added all together, it could be enough to get you up to PR1. Rather than try to submit to each one manually it is quicker and just as effective to use a bulk submission service. A quick search for “directory submission” will bring you back a list of potential suppliers. If you know of directories that deal specifically with your niche, make sure you manually submit your site to these as well to build relevant incoming links.

Twitter
Make it easy for your visitors to retweet your website/ articles with a retweet button. Also set up your own account to push news items, blog articles, and special offers to engage with your site’s users on a one to one level. Twitter exclusive offers or resources are a good way to build your follower base quickly.

Social bookmarking
Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Reddit, Sphinn, Design Bump… there are dozens and dozens of social bookmarking sites, some broad others targeting specific niches, and they have the potential to be major traffic drivers for your website. Submit your site yourself and provide visitors with the ability to submit directly from your website as well.

YouTube channel/ videos
A marketing tactic long used by savvy affiliates, this is starting to enter the main stream for small budget websites looking for free traffic. Create a short video about your target subject using your keywords in the channel description, title, video name etc. Make sure your URL is used in your description and is visible in the video. Your video will then be shown in searches on YouTube and viewers can then follow through to your website.

Community
For every possible subject imaginable there is a community online supporting it. Sign up with related forums and engage fellow members to raise awareness of your website amongst your target audience. This will drive traffic and help generate incoming links from related websites. Leaving comments on related blogs is another tactic that helps to achieve the same end goal. In both cases use your domain name in your signature and become genuinely involved with valid comments, don’t just leave comments that simply state your URL and special offers you have on, it will have the opposite desired effect.

Google universal search
Google is much more than just web search, and for many keywords they will show results from blogs, images, video and product searches on the web search results page. These are often ignored by webmasters when it’s comes to SEO and can be a back door method to getting on to the first page. As with 99% of all SEO, it is all about your use of keywords, here are some quick tips (these are by no means exhaustive).

  • Images:  Alt tag, file name, anchor text
  • Video: Channel’s title and description, video title and description
  • Product (sign up here): Product title, product type, description, URL destination, image file name.
  • Blog: Specify it is a blog in the page title, link from home page, update weekly
  • News: Submit a news sitemap, keyword in news title, opening paragraph, outbound links, regular news items

Purchase Email list
Despite the current rush towards social media, Email is still a cheap and effective method for marketing your services. As long as it is well designed, timed and targeted, an Email campaign will provide a positive ROI. Suppliers such as http://marketingfile.com/ will provide you with clean lists at around 20p per record. Services such as www.mailchimp.com will help you build your newsletter and send it out with full tracking services.

Write articles for peer sites
Very labour intensive and you will need to pick a subject that they feel deserves to be covered, but if you have the time, idea and writing skills, submitting an article to your industry’s leading news/ blog sites has many positive effects (e.g. raise your profile, incoming link and referral traffic). For example if I had a web design service or blog I would approach sites within the smashing network to write an article.

Buy low cost advertising
Purchasing advertising directly from appropriate websites can be cheaper and is often much more effective in driving converting traffic and developing your brand. Contact sites your own visitors are likely to visit for their media packs and advertising costs, for example, if you sell vitamins, websites that write about well being and healthy eating would be ideal targets.

If you are looking for a quick intake of visitors without having to wait for your SEO efforts to kick in, if you have the budget, Search Engine Pay per Click (SEPPC) is a good option. Each industry is very different and the costs involved vary a lot so you will need to research the CPC involved and whether you can afford it.

Another option available through Google is to advertise on their content network using text ads are banners. This is traditionally a lot cheaper than the search network but if poorly thought out and/ or left unchecked it can burn through a lot of money quickly.  Go here to read more about advertising on their search network and content network.

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PPC mythbusters

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Following on from the recent post about SEO myths I thought I would expand the idea in to my personal favourite marketing channel, Search Engine Pay Per Click advertising (SEPPC or just PPC to its friends). Below are some of the most common misconceptions I come across when explaining PPC to others or reading articles online.

If you are just getting started with PPC I would recommend you read Google’s beginner’s guides inside and out.

You need to be number 1
Research has shown that the top position does receive more clicks than any other, the 2nd ad slot the 2nd highest and so on (Source: Enquiro research), however being top is not always the most cost effective place to be. If your PPC strategy is based around direct sales (the alternative may be a branding strategy where direct CPA is less of a concern) the CPA in position 1 is unprofitable then you are running at a loss no matter how many you sell. Lower positions may drive less traffic but at a price you can afford.

PPC is a short-term quick fix until organic traffic turns up
This is a common stick thrown at PPC by SEO professionals with a bit of a chip on their shoulder that PPC takes the lion’s share of search budgets. The reality is the two should be viewed as part of a joint strategy and combining the two together increases both of their respective click through rates than if they were run separately.

PPC is fire and forget
I would argue that PPC requires more attention than your SEO. Any changes you make have an immediate impact and this goes the same for your competitors. The PPC market place is constantly shifting and optimising and reviewing your campaigns is a daily effort.

Broad match will bleed you dry
If you advertise through search engine pay per click and use nothing but exact matches you will be running a very tight ship but you will also be missing out on a lot of potential (and relevant) traffic from keywords you haven’t thought of. With 25% of all searches thought to be completely unique (i.e. they have never been used by anyone ever before) you can’t possibly cover every single search term as an exact match.

On the other side, if you use broad match and phrase match keywords you run the risk of seeing your advert triggered alongside a keyword that isn’t actually related to your site. For example, if you bid on ‘web banner design’ as a phrase match you would also be shown for ‘FREE web banner design’. Common sense may suggest you change it to an exact match but you would then miss out on ‘GOOD QUALITY web banner design’ etc. Negative keywords act to prevent this from happening and don’t be surprised to find your negative keyword list is much larger than your keyword list (for one of our campaigns we have just under 600 negative keywords).

Read more about negative keywords http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=6100

Your website is independent of your campaign
This certainly used to be true but since Google introduced on-site factors as part of the quality score algorithm PPC advertisers must consider the landing pages with regards to its relevance to the keywords and advert. Is the keyword in your page title, the page URL, the H tags, the main body etc?

Click here for more information about improving your quality score through your landing page: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&lev=index&cbid=-guigqu8731em&answer=6141&src=cb

PPC has an influence on natural rankings
No. Spend as much money as you want, it’s not going to happen.

PPC is all about directly measurable ROI
There is an increasing step change in advertiser’s attitudes to measuring PPC. The previously held belief that PPC is 100% about directly attributable ROI is shifting as we start to appreciate that a customer’s journey is varied and takes in multiple marketing touch points and online marketing uses a “last click wins” model.

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SEO myth busters

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

SEO is an area that all website owners are at least vaguely aware of and most know they need to do certain things to help get ranked higher. Despite the importance and size of the industry there are myths that persist surrounding SEO I want to look in to.

Meta keywords matter
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords here”/>
There is absolutely no harm in adding this information to your site but it won’t help either. Thanks to spammers over using it to artificially get high rankings in non relevant searches it hasn’t been used in search engine ranking factors since the turn of the century.  BuySellAds is so confident of this they have the following…

One of the few practical uses they still have is for webmasters conducting competitor research to view which keywords their competitors are targeting!

In fact Google have even come out themselves to say they take no notice of them! You can read the article here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Meta description doesn’t matter
<meta name="description" content=”Information on egg production, recipes, egg sizes and nutrition.”>
Again, no longer used for ranking purposes but this time it is still worth writing a strong meta description. This is the information search engines use in the results page underneath your title. It won’t get you ranked higher but it could increase the amount of traffic you get.

Buying links will inevitably get you blocked from Google
One of the most prominent members of staff at Google is its head of web spam Matt Cutts (his blog is here).  He is often the face of Google when any changes are made and at exhibitions/ conferences regarding search. He is also very vocal on Google’s attitude to buying links and how efficient Google is at finding out when this has happened and punishing sites as a result.

I have seen websites (and they are pretty big brands in their industry) I know buy links disappear from the organic results but equally there are others I know buy links extensively that are very well ranked.  If you are found to have done this aggressively you are leaving yourself open to be being removed from the results index, however I would argue that their system of discovering link buying is not as efficient as Google would have you believe. My advice here would be to approach with caution and not be surprised if you do get slapped down!

Creating content purely with the user in mind will get you ranked highly
The following quote if from Google’s search engine optimisation starter guide…

“Even though this guide’s title contains the words “search engine”, we’d like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site. They’re the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines.” http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

They are essentially saying not to think about SEO when you write your website content and if your site is relevant for your readers it will also be relevant to Google. Unfortunately from my personal experience in the hosting industry this is not the case. Content stuffed full of keywords that is difficult to read and offers no or little useful information for the reader helps a lot of sites get ranked very well, in fact I personally own one website (unrelated to web hosting) that saw a big jump in rankings when I stuffed it full of keywords!

SEO is influenced by PPC
Not at all. Not even slightly. You can spend millions a year on PPC and get no SEO benefit or spend absolutely nothing and be ranked #1 in the organic results.  Simple!

A Google SiteMap will get you ranked higher
A Google SiteMap makes it quicker and easier for Google to learn about your site’s structure, which in turn will allow them to improve their crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future.

“Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site they might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.” http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184

They are definitely worth having to get your site indexed quickly and more of your pages indexed. However, having one does not mean your site will get an extra ranking boost over any site that doesn’t have a SiteMap.

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Blogging your way to success

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Blogs are a great way to increase traffic to your site but only if they are given the same amount of attention as the rest of your marketing.

The power of a successful blog is well documented and the promise of more traffic and brand engagement draws in countless webmasters every year. At Heart Internet we first started our blog in 2007 instantly making the same mistake many other businesses have made when it comes to blogging; we didn’t know why we wanted one, we just knew they were the fashionable thing so we needed one! The posts were irregular and were often just product updates or press releases. At the turn of 2009 the blog’s existence was called in to question and it was agreed we needed to make wholesale changes or remove it altogether. Since then we have seen a 400% increase in traffic to the blog and a marked increase in reader engagement thanks to a fundamental shift towards providing our readers with useful content to help them make the most of their website, encouraging comments and a conscious effort to market our blog as resource.

Content is king
What you say, how much you say and how you say it should all be constructed with your target audience in mind. The two big questions to ask are “Why should anyone read the blog?” and “Why would they want to come back and read it again?” Corporate press releases or staff hires are fine in moderation, but not if that is all the blog is about, people simply won’t read it. To gain traction with a reader a blog post has to be informative, interesting, amusing, original or shocking. Committing yourself to this long term takes a lot of time and effort. If you approach the blog something to be done when you get a spare minute, it will fail.

On the flip side, It is just as easy to fall in to the trap of sacrificing quality for quantity under the misconception the more posts published the better, regardless of what they say. Jakob Neilson’s site www.useit.com has a relatively small number of articles published each month but each of them brings some useful insight in to usability for webmasters to apply and as result is a respected source of information. Popular topics to try include top X lists, Interviews with known industry figures/ site owners, competitions, “How to…” guides, free resources and biting industry commentary.

Gaining and keeping your readers
Writing a blog no one is reading is a depressing affair. You spend hours writing an insightful article that you are genuinely proud of and your analytics shows a big fat zero for page views. If your blog is part of a larger site, prominently linking to the blog from the home page will deliver instant results and you should also consider adding a feed to the home page to show the latest posts. If you send out newsletters, link to stories from your blog to help drive traffic and avoid duplicating work. If you have a standalone blog, attempt to capture your reader’s contact details through any means at your disposal e.g. user registration, competitions, twitter followers etc. and then use this data to send alerts or monthly emails/ newsletters listing your blog’s new posts to proactively pull in traffic.

Rather than attempting to build your own community from scratch consider engaging with existing communities, be it forums, niche networks or leaving post comments on popular blogs. If you are confident in your writing skills and knowledge, approaching sites to write for them is a great way to gain exposure, position yourself as an expert and get a high quality link to your site. For example, if your blog was about search engine marketing www.searchengineland.com would be a logical site to approach with an idea.

When you get started out it is vital you treat every reader like gold dust replying to every comment they leave, and just as importantly, replying as yourself and not ‘The Website’. Personalisation shows your readers the human side of your blog and using author photos, comments from other team members, and your name rather than a generic name (e.g. Admin) encourages further engagement with you personally rather than a faceless website. www.seomoz.org is a great example of using personalisation to create a community based around their blog.

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Setting up and running your own affiliate program

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

In previous posts we have looked at methods for making money as an affiliate such as Identifying, researching and targeting a niche to earn revenue as an affiliate, Making money from your existing website and Creating a website to make money

But what if you sell a product and/ or service and whilst you don’t want to advertise other people’s goods on your site, you do want to get involved in earning money from the affiliate marketing channel? In this post we will look at successfully launching your own affiliate program without having to spend thousands on setting it up. Affiliate programs are not the preserve of large websites and you could have your own affiliate program up and running for under £100! The affiliate networks require £000’s for set up and monthly fee’s however with your own in-house run program you can be up and running with minimal investment.

Why have an affiliate program?
An affiliate program is essentially the online equivalent of having a sales team out there driving traffic and sales to your website. Because affiliate marketing is pay per performance it is one of the most cost effective marketing channels available, especially when compared to other forms of online marketing such as display (e.g. banners) and pay per click advertising (e.g. Google AdWords).  With a set cost per action (CPA) determined by you, you always know what your ROI is going to be and you can ensure each sale will be made at a profit.

An affiliate program…

  • Increases your reach
  • Provides more control with your ROI
  • Is purely performance based
  • Can be tailored to your requirements e.g. pay per sale or pay per lead

How to set one up?
A search on Google for “affiliate software” demonstrates how big in-house run affiliate programs are with dozens of software solutions to choose from. We can’t recommend any specifically but if you do your research you will soon get a feel for which have the most comprehensive features, are the best value and the most flexible. The key features to look for (in my opinion) are:

  • Adaptable payment options (e.g. choose from pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sale etc)
  • Tiered groups to put affiliates in based on their performance
  • Unlimited collateral (e.g. text links, banners, text ads etc)
  • Anti-fraud solutions
  • End user area customisable
  • No ongoing monthly fees (if hosting it yourself)

Once you have researched, selected, purchased and integrated your affiliate software the work has just begun! Now it’s time to create your banners, set your commission, recruit affiliates and start making sales.

Banners & text links
Not every affiliate’s website is the same so you will need a good selection of banners to choose from, ideally with one batch that is colour neutral (e.g. white background) to cover your bases. It is also a good idea to provide a selection of the most common banner sizes from big to small e.g. 468×60, 120×600, 200×200, 125×125 etc.

Banners are not everyone’s cup of tea and with banner click through rates (CTR) falling year on year, you will also want to offer text links to your affiliates. Text links allow for more integration in to the affiliates’ website and typically have a greater CTR than banners.

Your commission schedule
How much you pay out per action completed (be it a sale, lead, download etc) is one of the most important decisions you will make. It needs to be attractive enough to make it worth an affiliate’s time to promote you on their website over another brand but also provide you with an acceptable ROI. If any of your competitors have an affiliate program, sign up and take a look at what they pay. Aim to at least match their payments to ensure you are attractive enough.

The most common mistake I see with in-house programs is them being far too stingy with their payment options. One train operator I saw paid out £2 per sale regardless of the sale value! How many affiliates do you think were willing to send sales in excess of £150 for a ticket to get £2 back?

Signing up your publishers
The first place to start is with your existing customers and mailing list. Send out a dedicated email announcing the affiliate program’s launch, why they should sign up and how they can be part of this great opportunity.

A dedicated affiliate page on your website is a great way to get across all the advantages of joining your program and how easy it is to make money. Because affiliates don’t have to exclusively be your customers, put aside some real estate on your home page to link to your affiliate pre-sales page to drive traffic to the page and increase sign ups.

The largest affiliate community forum is www.affiliates4u.com and it has a section for independent programs to post announcements and chat to affiliates (http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/independent-programs/). This is a great way to get involved with the affiliate community at large and raise awareness of your program.

Publisher relationships
The best affiliate programs are those that have direct relationships between the affiliates and the publisher’s affiliate manager. Affiliates like to know they are dealing with people and not a faceless company; it develops trust and increases the likelihood of you being put in a good position on their site.

Send a welcome email upon sign up using your name in the footer along with direct contact details. Also, reply to any emails promptly and personally and encourage feedback on how you can improve the program.

If you are planning any new products, features or promotions give your affiliates plenty of notice so they can use it to drive sales on their site. You should consider sending them details along with web copy they can use/ adapt for their own purposes.

Not all affiliates are created equal so identify your top affiliates (be it actual sales or potential sales) and make an extra effort to develop a relationship with them through email contact, exclusive offers and bespoke creative. You will more than likely find that 10% of your affiliates contribute up to 80% of your sales. This is typical for most affiliate programs, so make sure you keep that 10% happy!

Promotions
Once you start to see a steady flow of sales coming in from your affiliate program you should consider running a promotion targeting your affiliates to incentivise them to display you more prominently. The aim here is to increase sales, but also once the promotion is over you remain in that prime position. Options include a basic increase in commission for all products, bonuses for hitting a sales target, tiered commission (the more you sell the more commission you earn per sale), and prizes based on performance e.g. free holiday.

Top tips:
In summary here are my top tips for running a successful in-house affiliate program:

  • Do your research when looking for your affiliate software. Take the time to make sure you get the right one.
  • Ensure your commission rates are competitive and high enough to be worth an affiliate’s time
  • Do manual approvals on affiliate applications to keep control over who joins
  • Run regular reports to gauge the program’s performance, do not “fire and forget”
  • Develop direct relationships with the large affiliates on your program
  • Keep affiliates up to date with future product/ promotion plans
  • Get involved with the affiliate community

If you have experience of running an affiliate program and have any tips you would add leave a comment below.

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Posted in Promoting your site | 7 Comments »

6 methods for gaining thought leadership (and why you should want it)

Friday, January 15th, 2010

What is thought leadership?
What sets apart a thought leader from other experienced or skilled people, websites and companies in an industry is the perception that they have a deeper understanding of the market place and the needs of its customers. Whether they actually do is almost irrelevant, it is enough that people believe they do!

Why become a thought leader?
The great thing about being a thought leader is that it honestly doesn’t matter how big you are! You can be a one man band running your website out of your bedroom or a company with a multi-million pound turnover; websites will link to you, quote you, ask for your opinion and generally hold you up as an authority to be consulted. All this leads to more traffic which in turn means more sales or the ability to charge higher advertising rates depending on your revenue model.

Becoming a thought leader
As much as I wish you could (being an online marketer at heart), a strong reputation cannot be built on advertising. Advertising will help raise awareness but to develop trust and build up your reputation you need to create positive word of mouth.

Put a name and face to your website: A cold faceless website is harder for people to associate with than a person and if you want to become known, it makes sense that people need to know who you are to start with! Stu Nicholls does a good of this at www.cssplay.co.uk and even uses his name in the <title> tag.

Set up a blog to share your opinions: A blog is the perfect outlet for sharing your thoughts, initiating discussions (that are under your control) and creating an industry hub for people to visit and interact with each other. Aaron Wall has used his blog at www.seobook.com/blog to position himself as one the leading SEO experts.

Be a trusted source of information & commentary: Becoming an authority on a topic is a major part of developing thought leadership. Being seen within your industry as either a news source or a commentator on the news is a major aid to positioning yourself in this way. www.techrunch.com and www.mashable.com have used this approach successfully (and are in constant competition to get a story out first).

Commissioning original research: Commissioning original research and sharing it totally free kills a lot of birds with one stone. It puts you at the centre of the news, it shows you are helping advance understanding in your industry, it creates content people want to read and content they will link to.

Go to exhibitions: Every industry has its core group that knows each other and reference each other on their websites etc. Going along to exhibitions and events and creating personal relationships with others in your industry brings you closer to this group and eventually maybe even becoming part of it.

Speak at exhibitions & seminars: Obviously this takes a lot of confidence and you may have to start small and work your way up e.g. approach local “business link” events before pitching to talk at the major exhibitions in Las Vegas! Search executives from www.bigmouthmedia.com speak regularly at econsultancy seminars which positions them as an expert search agency.

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Identifying, researching and targeting a niche to earn revenue as an affiliate

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

The affiliate industry is big business

The affiliate marketing channel is an important part of most businesses online marketing strategy, estimated to be worth approximately £3.82bn with £227m paid in commissions and fees to affiliates and networks in 2008 (source: Econsultancy). As with any channel there are established players and saturated markets that are difficult for new players to enter and make a profit. Generic affiliate verticals such as dating, gambling, telecoms, voucher codes etc are so competitive that typical sized affiliates are increasingly looking at niche markets with minimal competition or barriers to entry in order to earn money.

What do I mean by the term “niche”?

In this context I am using the term to refer to a few different things…

  • A niche market (e.g. party accessories),
  • A niche product within a market (e.g. invoicing software for web designers)
  • Targeting a specific product/ model rather than the entire brand or product range (e.g. “Pink 8gb iPod Nano” rather than “iPods”)

Identifying a niche

I am going to take your level of interest and/ or motivation to work on a website in the subject at hand as red. Without it your site will fizzle out in a matter of weeks. Beyond personal drive the factors to look at whilst identifying potential niches include:

Keyword search popularity: Using a service such as Google’s keyword  tool type in your generic keyword and look for how many informational and transactional searches are made (not navigational) that are further down the buying process and will have a higher propensity to convert. Unfortunately there are no hard fast rules or magic thresholds I can share that makes one niche better than another but you will soon get a feel of those that are worth targeting and those that aren’t.

Merchants: Take a look in the affiliate networks merchant directory to see the number of available merchants and their affiliate commission rates. If there are only a couple of available merchants or their payment schedules are low is it worth your time?

SERP organic competition: How deep does the competition go in to the SERPs and how strong is their PR for your keyword of choice?

SERP advertising competition: Competitive verticals will force affiliates to advertise to get on to the top Google pages. If all the advertising slots are taken through to page 2 you know it’s going to be tough to make an impact.

Researching a niche

Once you have picked a niche you think will deliver a good amount of converting traffic and will pay out enough commission to make the ROI on effort worth while it is time to look at the market in more detail…

Existing affiliate websites: The best place to start with any venture is with people who have already done the work! (Note: This isn’t to suggest you should copy any design work or web copy just take inspiration from what is good and fill any gaps you see.)  Unless you are first to market you will be competing with other websites for people’s eyeballs and loyalty. To avoid reinventing the wheel take advantage of their hard work and have a look at what they have done and sign up to any newsletters/ marketing emails they have. How have they structured their website? What tone of voice do they use? What services/ extras do they offer? What can you do differently/ better? How do they promote themselves (new and existing visitors/ customers)? To see how active they are in marketing themselves and gaining brand exposure use Google’s web search, news search and blog search. To find out which sites are linking to them use Yahoo’s site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)

Choosing your merchants: Which merchants pay the most, have the best creative, are known for good communication with affiliates, are active in the affiliate industry…? Take the time to get to know them and pick out the best ones for you.

Targeting a niche

Choosing your keywords: As well as using the keyword tool, it is also worth looking at other site’s meta-description and meta-keywords. Although they no longer influence the large search engines some sites still add them. From this you can see which keywords they deem to be most important and then use that information on your own site. Take a look at the keywords any existing affiliates and merchants (they will become your competitor too now) are using in their Meta data and on the site.

Domain name: You’ll find a warehouse’s worth of content online offering advice and guidance about choosing a domain name, but to be frank it’s not that hard. The difficulty lies in finding one that is actually available!  Ideally you should choose a domain name with your main keyword in it to give you a nice boost in the SERPs for example if you are going to create a site promoting budget priced beds you would want a name along the lines of “cheap-beds.co.uk”.

Building your website: Unless you have the HTML/ CSS skills of a ninja who can create sites from scratch in the blink of an eye, you will probably want to use a CSS template to get started or a CMS such as WordPress, Joomla or Expression Engine. If you fall in to the latter make sure your website’s template design fits in with your target niche and visitors feel there is a connection between place and product at a glance e.g. don’t use a bright purple dance music theme if you are promoting Oak cupboards etc.

SEO: SEO is the most valuable marketing channel to affiliates so it’s important you understand it. Briefly, using your chosen keywords put them in…

  • Title tag
  • H tags
  • Image alt tag
  • Image file name
  • Internal link anchor text
  • Internal link alt tagMeta description
  • Site map
  • First paragraph of copy
  • Page URLs
  • Strong tag in copy

Taking a short cut and buying links directly from sites or through link farms/ brokers can be very tempting when you first start. It is important you understand Google takes a very dim view of this practice and will punish any sites found to be guilty of this. The punishment can vary from having the link juice removed through to your site being excluded from their search results altogether.

PPC: If you have found a profitable niche that has little competition it may be cost effective to advertise on Google’s paid search through Google AdWords.  If there are only a couple of advertisers you may find the CPC can be as low as 20p. Keep any eye on the CPC though, if other affiliates start to appear it can soon become very expensive.

Social media: Twitter is all the buzz and if you have enough to say on a regular basis then it certainly helps to keep in touch with your followers but don’t discount some of the social media ‘oldies’ such as Wikipedia, YouTube and a Facebook page. Don’t get sucked in to thinking of yourself as a brand, use your targeted keywords in the profile names e.g @cheap-beds and youtube.com/user/cheap-beds. If you have the content, blogging is worth looking in to as well to generate regular keyword rich content.

Getting involved in the community: Forums and blog comments may or may not result in link juice (depending on the sites nofollow settings) but they will certainly draw people to your site if you use your URL in a signature plus regular contributions will help position you as an authority in that space, which then leads to incoming links!

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Moving your visitors along the loyalty chain: From prospect to advocate

Friday, December 18th, 2009

There are plenty of articles online about why you should work towards turning your customers in to brand advocates and using customer service to achieve this but practical advice you can apply to actually do this is like finding pixie dust. This post will look at the different steps, from prospect to advocate, and what you can do (beyond “excellent customer service”) to move your visitors/ customers along the chain.

For the purpose of this article we are going to presume you have a strong product and good customer service already. Without them you are unlikely to get someone past being a “customer”.

What is the loyalty chain/ ladder?
The idea is that people can be proactively moved through a series of stages based around loyalty to your brand/ product, from prospect through to a brand advocate.

  • Prospect: Not yet purchased anything from you
  • Customer: Made a single purchase
  • Client: Made repeat purchases
  • Loyal customer: They only buy from you and do not use any of your competitors
  • Advocate: They actively recommend other people to use your product/ service

Terms used
Where we use the term ‘product’ this applies to tangible products (e.g. selling books), paid services (e.g. marketing consultancy) and free resources (e.g. a blog) where applicable.

Stage 1: Prospect to customer

  • Analysing your website’s performance
  • Promotions
    • Price (e.g. x% off)
    • Product bundles (e.g. Buy X and get Y free)
    • X days free
  • Product trials/ money back guarantee
  • Easy to transfer in from other supplier or offer to do the transfer for them
  • Case studies
  • Links to sign up to your marcomms e.g. alerts, newsletter, RSS, twitter etc
  • “Contact us” with very quick response rates (Email, Phone, Online forms etc)

Stage 2: Customer to Client

  • Product meets expectations (Product works and you didn’t over sell at the first stage)
  • Email marketing
    • Introduction pack (e.g. Welcome to XYZ, account details etc)
    • Customer newsletter
    • Monthly offer
  • User guides to make sure they know how to use the product
  • Extensive online support centre for common questions/ issues
  • Cross-selling and up-selling of your other products
  • Identify churn patterns and target in advance (e.g. If you see high churn in month 4, target customers in month 2 or 3 to find out if they need any help with the product)
  • Renewal incentives at the end of the contract

Stage 3: Client to loyal customer

  • Personal interaction
    • Personalised offers
    • Direct Twitter replies
    • Internal feedback mechanism (and replies to their comments)
  • Product development & new features added continuously (extra bonus if based on feedback point above)
  • Exclusive deals for existing customers
  • Customer loyalty programs
    • Reward points based on what they buy
    • Length of time rewards e.g. stay with us for 2 years and get X, 3 years get Y etc
  • Develop a community for your customers
    • Forum
    • Market place
    • Their own blogs hosted with you
  • Free resources they can’t find elsewhere
    • Research
    • Guides
    • Blog
    • Tools
  • Use them as a case study
  • Ongoing customer satisfaction surveys with feedback implemented

Stage 4: Loyal customer to advocate

One you have turned your prospect in to an advocate you need to help them spread the word. These points are based around how to help your advocates tell other people about your products

  • Refer a friend program with mechanism for them to send referral invites
  • Badges for them to put on their website
    • “Partner with XYZ”
    • “XYZ supplier”
    • “Hosted with XYZ”
    • “Part of the XYZ network”
  • Access to marketing material for them to use, display or pass on
    • Your brochure (PDF or printed)
    • Your logo in different sizes and formats
    • Stickers, mugs, pens etc
    • Clothing (e.g. T-shirt)

Do you have any tactics you emply to turn your customers in to loyal customers and empower them to become brand advocates, or have we missed something blindingly obvious? If so and you’d like to share it with us leave a comment below.

Posted in Promoting your site | 3 Comments »

Best Free Font Resources

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Below you will find a list of the best free font resources that you can use to add a touch of creativity to your web pages.

blog_searchfonts
Search Free Fonts
http://www.searchfreefonts.com/
Search Free Font’s has an impressive archive of over 13,000 fonts! The sections are well categorised, with the added option to browse by letter. With every font style you have the ability to type your own text to generate a preview of how it renders, which is a nice way to test before you download. There is also the option to rate and review each font style.

blog_dafont
DaFont
http://www.dafont.com
An extensive resource of fonts with various licensing options. I like DaFont for it’s clear layout and navigation which allows you to browse fonts with ease. DaFont has a strong user base with new fonts being added regularly, you also get to make comments and also browse fonts by author. You can preview each font style before you download by adding your own custom text and checking whether it’s suitable or not.

blog_1001
1001 Free Fonts
http://www.1001freefonts.com/
A popular resource of free fonts, each with a large preview of the typeface. 1001 Free Fonts has always been a great resource, but it’s starting to get overshadowed by newer font libraries. If you’d prefer not to spend countless hours downloading fonts, 1001 Free Fonts allows you to download the entire library for $19.99.

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Identifying Fonts – What The Font?!
http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
This is my favourite tool for helping to identify font sets that otherwise would go unfound. What makes it so good is it’s complete ease of use and impressive accuracy on the results. You simply upload an image/screenshot of the font (the clearer the better) and What The Font!? will work it’s magic and tell you what that font set is or its closest match and also how to get it.

blog_sifr
Embedding Fonts
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/
Use sIFR to embed font’s into your webpage, this method uses modern technologies to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in thetypeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. Great if you wan’t to add a touch of creativity to your h1 tags!

Posted in Heart Internet, Misc, Promoting your site, Uncategorized, Web Design, Web Hosting, Your Business | No Comments »

How to increase conversions by reducing your visitors perceived risk

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

danger.jpg

For me, one of marketing’s most important functions is to reduce the level of perceived risk a potential customer may have about your service or product. Weighing up ‘risk’ is a big part of the consumer’s decision making process, sometimes it can happen in an instant (e.g. low cost or regularly purchased items such as baked beans) or sometimes it can take months or years (e.g. one off high value items such as buying a house), and everything else in between.

There are 6 different types of risk:

  • Physical risk (Will it physically hurt them or anyone else?)
  • Functional risk (Will it work how they want it to?)
  • Social risk (Is it socially acceptable within their circle?)
  • Psychological risk (How does the product fit in with their perception of themselves?)
  • Financial risk (Can they afford it?)
  • Time risk (Is the time it takes to buy the product worth the effort?)

Your aim should be to use your website to provide visitors with the information they need to overcome their perceived risk.

Contact us, find us & about us pages
No one likes to spend money with a faceless company with no clear way of getting in touch if there are any problems. Easy to find ‘contact us’ and if you have offices, ‘find us’ pages show people there is someone on the other side. Equally ‘about us’ pages help to put you and your website in to context along with adding a personal touch, especially if you use photos of yourself.

Money back guarantee
The inability to see a product or touch it is one of the major hurdles people have to get over when purchasing online and a product can look very different in the real world to the image on the website. You can help reduce the financial risk by allowing them to return it and get their money back. This also goes for services.

Demo of product
In a similar vein to the point above, screen shots are not always enough for some visitors. Being able to ‘test drive’ the service before they commit to a purchase is a major plus for many visitors and will increase your conversion rate.

3rd party endorsements
Having your product endorsed by a business or personality well regarded in your field will reduce psychological and social risk by creating a sense of trust through your association with them. This can be as simple as listing your blue chip suppliers (e.g. Microsoft) all the way up to getting a celebrity on board (e.g. a football apparel website hiring a footballer)

Testimonials, case studies & customer comments
Being able to see there are existing (happy) customers is important to potential customers because they don’t want to feel they are alone. You can help to Increase the credibility of any comments and/ or testimonials with the person’s names, links to follow and putting the date of their comment to show how fresh they are.

Heritage
The knowledge you are dealing with an established and stable brand is important to customers because they associate that with being trustworthy. Few website owners can claim “Since 1908” but because the internet is so new and sites come and go so quickly, a web site as recent as “since 2004” can feel like an old horse!

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