Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category

Originally I was going to write about how to submit your sites to search engines. Today, with almost real-time indexing of the web, this is no longer necessary. Get one link back to your site from another server and your site’s being indexed. Search engines can index your site, but what’s going to bring people to you is your content?

Step 1 – What’s your Niche?

If you sit back and look at the internet as a whole, what segment takes more traffic than any other industry? Yup, that’s right the “internets” were built for PORN. If you take a quick look at the Google Trends chart of Sex, News, Porn, Games, Dating and Religion, you’ll see that the ONLY one of these items that out-ranks Sex or Porn in search volume was games. And these look as though they’re closely related with Christmas (One can assume new computers and people looking to play).

Sex & Porn are constantly one of the top searches on the internet at any given time. This means you can learn from people whom produce these sites. What’s their secret? I have one word for you: Niche Content.

If you’ve ever met those shady porn producers, (I know many and they’re not really that shady) you’ll know that they do four things that you’re not doing. First of all, they are constantly producing new content. Erotic stories, New Photos, New Videos, Games (yes, games), Interactive Forums, chats, etc. In a nutshell they  produce content each and every day. Many time, multiple times a day to make their visitors and potential customers happy.

Secondly, they do something that most people don’t get. They fill a niche or multiple niches. People in the porn industry know that consumers are fickle and they only want content that appeals to them. They know that they don’t find their market, their market find them. This means they fill a vertical market needs by producing content that caters to something very specific. The people whom produce porn come up with the most outrageous ideas to create content. You know, Something like: A One Eyed Harry Midget Wearing a Diaper (I’ve always wanted to say something like that in a post). There’s probably a porn for that. Not everybody is going to want that, but there is SOMEONE in the world whom has that particular need to be fulfilled.

Third, they’re giving away a taste. Much akin to going to the supermarket where they’re providing samples of their products to their potential consumers. They’re testing to see if you have a hunger for their content. They’re putting those samples out as wide and as far as they can to reach as many potential customers that they possibly can.

Finally, the send those potential customers off to someone else if they know that they can’t fulfill the need. Yes, many of them have learned how to monetize the traffic exiting their site, but they’re sending a potential customer to someone else that can fulfill that need.

What vertical market are you trying to fulfill? Once you know the answer to this question, you’ll be ready for step 2.

Step 2 – Come up with Subject Matter

Now that you know which markets you’re going to serve, you need to decide what sort of content you’re going to produce. I typically work with clients to create 50-100 subjects that they can blog about. While I encourage them to produce content that relevant to your industry or niche, I’m also a stickler at staying away from BORING content. Just because it’s interesting to you doesn’t mean isn’t going to be interesting to everyone else.

I can’t tell you how often I have to tell a client that their posts, videos or other content are just plain boring, stuffy and stiff. Create content that is exciting and varied. Variety is the spice of life. A good exercise would be to get out a whiteboard with a few people and brainstorm some future subject matter. Get a few beers or a few glasses of wine in your confidants and they’ll really help you come up with some subject matter that’s not BORING.

Start with these general categories:

• Lists
• Reviews
• News
• Press Releases
• Opinion
• Humor
• Yes even Shameless Self Promotion
• Comparison
• How-to

When you’ve come up with a minimum of 75 subjects, you’re ready to start producing your content. Run your Subject matter by typical consumers of your product to see if they’d be interested in what you have to say. Don’t run it by your fanboys. They’ll always want to hear what you have to say.

Step 3 – Start producing Non Boring Content

Simply put, get up off your ass and start producing. Don’t worry if you produce the very best content in the world. Just start writing. If you plan to do videos, create the videos. If you are doing a podcast, start producing the podcast. You will get better with time. Blogging is probably the easiest and least time intensive method to create content.

Make it a goal to sit down and write EVERY SINGLE DAY. Make it part of your morning routine. I promise you that the millions and millions of people a day whom are producing content didn’t go to journalism school to get it done, they just did it. Don’t spend a huge amount of time in editing, just shoot from the hip. If you do this every day for 30 days, you’ll get better and better at producing the content.

Type up the list of blog subject where you can access them on a daily basis. Keep the list handy, on your phone, one your laptop or in a notebook near you. If you come up with a new idea add it. When you’re not feeling the creative vibe, refer to your list and write about your subject matter.

A good guideline is producing between 500 and 1000 words of new content daily if you plan to become a blogger. It’s long enough to be interesting, but short enough that it should not bore your readers to quickly. The average human can read about 250 words per minute. This means that your blogs will take no longer than 4 minutes to read. Once you’ve proofed it for spelling and simple grammar mistakes, get it out there.

Get into the daily habit or producing a minimum of one post a day and you’ll slowly start getting visitors whom are looking for you.

You can’t build a house until you measure the materials. You can’t have an effective website if you don’t set metrics up to measure the success of your marketing efforts. In the real world, you have the ability observer and measure. The internet is a passive medium, meaning that your customers approach you on their terms and not the other way around. After decades of in-your-face adverting consumers now have the option of only contacting you when they are ready to find information, browse your catalog or buy your product.

The once anonymous internet is now filled with technology that marketers use to observe and measure what their customers are doing on the website. You’re not anonymous any more. There is a number of firms out there that are using technology to track your every move. You too have this ability to track  your potential customers and use that information to figure out what they are doing. Analytics, mouse tracking and heat maps are just a few of the technologies that Internet Markers are using day to day to find out what their customers are doing.

One of our core values at Studio 1909 is to use open source whenever possible to accomplish day to day tasks. If you’re reading this, you don’t have thousands and thousands of dollars to spend on marketing tools. You have yourself and your time to do it.

The first task to a better e-commerce site is to set up metrics to measure your success or failure. Sales are the number one metric you’re going to measure, but you’re going to have to learn how to track your customers and find out why or or why not they are purchasing your products. This isn’t a tutorial on how to use the software, but a guide on what to set up to effectively measure your success.

Day 1 – Setup time 2 hours.

Step 1 -  Set up Google Analytics.

This is Google’s own tool. They describe it as, “Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.” If you have a google account you can already get access to this free service by simply pointing your web browser to http://www.google.com/analytics/ to get access to this service. You go through a simple set up procedure and add a small piece of JavaScript to every page you want to track.

Once you have set this up you’ll be able to get detailed reports on where your visitors are coming from and what they’ve done on the site. Your reports are updated once a day. You have the ablity to have them sent to your email each day at a time you specify.

For ecommerce and conversion tracking the most powerful part of this tool is the ability to set up Goals & Funnels. You want to set this up to watch the conversion process and help eliminate dead areas/zones on your website.

We generally like to have our clients set this up as it integrates nicely with AdWords. You’ll easily be able to track your ROI on your website and quickly adjust your marketing campaign easily.

Step 2 -  Install Piwik.

Piwik is self described as, “Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.”

One of our customers said, “It’s almost memorizing to watch customers interact with you my website“.

We absolutely love Piwik here at Studio 1909. While it’s a bit rough around the edges, it’s main strength is the ability to provide real-time or near real-time analytics on your site. You’ll have to be comfortable in setting up open source software or you’ll have to hire someone that can install it on your server. Once Piwik is set up you’ll have the ability to watch and understand what people are doing on your ecommerce site.

Much like Google Analytics, you have the ability to set up and track goals on your website. Using the dashboard, you can see what live visitors are doing on your site and get a slew of standard reports that will give you insight to your customers.

Installing both, you’ll have two sources of reports to compare against each other.

Step 3 -  Install SMT2.

Technology has progress quite far with the ability to track the mouse movements of your customers. You can subscribe to services such as ClickTale to track the mouse movements and generate heat maps or you can use the open source alternative SMT2. SMT2 is has made great strides in giving people the ability to track where people are clicking and how their mouses are interacting with your website.

SMT2 track and saves your customer’s mouse movements and gives you the ability to play back those movements so you can watch how people interact with your website. It’s insightful software that help diagnose potential problems on your site with design or linking.

Step 4 -  Install ClickHeat.

Again you can subscribe to a commercial service such as ClickTale to generate heat maps on your site. ClickHeat is the open source alternative to the commercial versions. You will have to do a bit of command line kung fu, but the prices is right and ClickHeat gives your the same intelligence as the commercial packages.

You’ll find this valuable in seeing if people click on banners, promotional images or links on the site. You can gain immediate knowledge on what is going on with your site. Future Direction will include integration with Piwik. This will give you an amazing ability to see and track what your customer is doing.

Today you’ll probably see, hear and watch 10-20 message on how you can make millions online. The truth is actually quite opposite, many people end up spending more money than they take in because of inflated expectation. People make money online because of their perseverance on marketing themselves and their products.

A typical scenario of my clients before they hire Studio 1909 for online marketing consultation goes something like this:

They’ve got a great product. They’ve done their research, understand their potential clients and are ready to launch their business. Once the business has been launched they can’t figure out why nobody is buying their product? In reality, it’s crickets on their website and they can’t figure out why they can’t make money doing e-commerce. They’re not marketing like they would in the real world.

After extensive consultation, I typically put together a 30 day plan for them to drive traffic to their online store. Just like in the real world, you need to spend time marketing your products and getting the word out before you can make your millions selling your products.

We’ve decided to put together a 31 days of blogs on how to improve the traffic and sales on your ecommerce site.

Day 1 -  Set Your Metrics
Day 2 – Content, Content, Content
Day 3 – Test your e-commerce system
Day 4 – Set Up Primary Tier PPC Accounts
Day 5 – Go Local
Day 6 – Get Social
Day 7 – Trust Me!
Day 8 – Optimize your Website
Day 9 – Compare your Stuff
Day 10 – Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
Day 11 – Submit to Useless Directories
Day 12 – Survey Says….
Day 13 – Write what you know
Day 14 – Set up a Weekly Newsletter
Day 15 – Go Live
Day 16 – Can you spell BLOG
Day 17 – Traditional Media
Day 18 – Community Development
Day 19 – Stay Alert!
Day 20 – Join the conversation
Day 21 – Answer the Damn Question
Day 22 – Video Me
Day 23 – Get Rated
Day 24 – Organize an Event
Day 25 – Provide an Online Seminar
Day 26 – Pod Cast
Day 27 – Share some Photos
Day 28 – Participate in Social Bookmark
Day 29 – Get Syndicated
Day 30 – Create an Editorial Calendar

One of our products of choice is the Magento platform for eCommerce development. Recently they’ve announced an application for mCommerce. They’re touting it as the newest hip application for the iPhone and the iPad. Let them manage your store and you’ll be rich!

Yawn. Ok, I’ve said it. They’re touting this as a revolutionary way to promote your brand as a native store front. I’m calling BS. This is not revolutionary… it’s a step backwards in development. Maybe a future version might be better, but we’ll have to wait to see.

I’m not a typical technology user. Using Rodger’s Bell Curve of the Diffusion of Innovations, I’m right there in the early adopter/innovator portion.

I have an iPhone and an iPad. I refuse to put applications on them that do not offer something that has a useful function; a game, a productive application, or a reading program (I absolutely LOVE the Kindle app). I’m not hyper loyal to places that I shop online. I’m always looking for the best deal I can find for the products I need. Does anyone really think that I’m going to want to browse through 52 different apps to find the best price on a product? I think not.

Do you really think that I’m going to put 52 different “Mobile Shopping” apps on my device so that I can shop at company A or B? Really? Even though I purchased the largest iPad that Apple offered, I’m not going to waste space with apps from the Gap and Wally World. This is NOT going to happen. Is this type of mobile shopping experience better than shopping with Safari?

Varien is somewhat of an open source provider. I personally don’t really care for their model, but they have produced a very nice platform for eCommerce. They keep very tight controls on the community edition of the software (community means Varien, not outside developers). They’ve started to accept changes to the code base, but as of yet, I’m pretty sure they haven’t released it to the generally community. Their driving the direction of their “revolutionary” application without input or feedback from the OSS community that has made their product what it is today.

Even if Varien opens up the Mobile Software to it’s very large base of installers and developers, I still stand by that people are not going to want to download hundreds of apps to shop from their mobile device. They’re going to want a richer experience with HTML5 and access to millions of shops that Safari can offer versus the tiny cookie cutter niche app that this type of mobile shopping app represents. Again, we absolutely love their main Magento platform for eCommerce development…it’s one of the best and most complete solutions available today in the open source community, but we have doubts about their mobile solution. Perhaps time will tell…

What do you think?