Our latest feature to the website, the CSP Blog will be bringing you tons of industry related articles, tips, ideas, etc. This is going to be an incredible resource tool for people looking to learn new ways to improve their functionality, customer base, and get over all tips from other industry professionals. Stay tuned as is will definitely be worth your while. New content is coming soon!
-The CSP Team.
It takes some knowledge of basic psychology and human behavior to succeed at marketing. People buy things to either meet their needs or satisfy their wants and desires. As a marketer, you are looking not at what your product has to offer, but at what is motivating your target audience to buy your product or service.
For example, people aren’t buying perfume because of the aroma. They are buying romance. The new exercise machine doesn’t sell because of the latest features, but because the customer is buying a healthier, perhaps thinner look. The end result of a product or service is what it does for buyers — how it makes them feel, look, or act. Even children are looking to have the same games as their friends, not just to play with, but to be popular and fit in. Therefore, you need to keep broad motivational reasons in mind when planning your marketing campaign.
There is also a psychological aspect to establishing trust and forming a relationship. Most customers have been burned, treated badly, swindled, or disenchanted at least once. They will not necessarily jump at the opportunity to buy something unless they have a sense of confidence in the seller. In an age where people are tired of receiving spam and a glut of marketing materials, the modern consumer has become savvy and somewhat cynical. Only a company with a strong proven reputation will gain their trust. You, therefore, want to always build a level of trust through quality of service, and this should be reflected in your marketing.
Finally, there are practical factors that enter into marketing. If it is simply inconvenient for a customer to purchase from you or you simply cannot satisfy their needs with the product they are seeking, then don’t attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. Too many sales are lost by trying to do so. More importantly, you may risk ending a future relationship with the customer by losing their trust.
In the end you want to sell customers by gaining their trust and building a relationship based on customer satisfaction and by being honest and not trying to be everything to everyone.
With more than a decade of experience in marketing, ranking from pay-per-click to direct mail, I’ve seen a lot of failures and far more successes when it comes to marketing.
Today, the art of marketing is far more complex than it once was. However, many of the same basic principles still apply. Too often, professional marketers and small business owners overlook the basic techniques that have separated successful campaigns from those that never turn a profit. Here is my all time list of effective marketing tips.
1. Know your audience. Successful campaigns get that way because marketers know their audience. They fully understand their needs, how to help meet those needs and how to create demand. Knowing and understanding your audience through proper market segmentation means a well targeted campaign that generates a profitable return.
2. Focus on the offer. A marketing offer is the driving force of marketing promotions that drive results. In fact, market testing has proven that the offer is the most significant criterion for conversion. Focus on your offer if you want to be successful.
3. Split test. Never ever run a campaign without testing something. One of the most common is a split test which allows you to simultaneously test two versions of something. It can be a web page, post card, or email. Split testing is essential for improving performance.
4. Never work alone. The most creative ideas come from working with other creative people. Don’t feel like you need to have all the answers or great ideas. You may start with an idea, but an open dialog with creative individuals will make it better.
5. Don’t sell on price. I’ve seen so many marketers fail because they sell on price alone. This leads to a discounting war, lower profitability, and often bankruptcy. Rather, focus on creating so much value that the perception of price becomes insignificant.
6. Consistent messaging. Consider the entire user experience before you launch a campaign. From email to website to offer, is the prospect having a consistent user experience? If they are, your campaigns stand above 98% of others.
7. Create value after the sale. As marketers, it’s our job to understand our market segment and build relationships, not dump people off at the front door of our store and walk away. Focus as much of your energy on building relationships with customers as you do prospects.
8. Test. Test. Test. In addition to split testing, you should consider multiple forms of testing in each marketing discipline. For direct mail, test headlines, offers, copy, time of direct mail drop, etc. Consider testing a life long mission.
9. Integrated Marketing Works Best. You can’t rely on one form of marketing to carry you to success. It’s okay to generate most of your leads or sales through PPC marketing if you will but what happens when that dries out? Use multiple media sources to meet your goals.
10. Nothing can replace experience. You can run out and hire all of the best consultants in the world, but you still have to do the work. Nothing can replace actual experience. It will make you a stronger marketer and more successful in the long term.
Apply these helpful marketing tips if you want to be truly successful. These techniques and tips are applied by successful marketers on a daily basis. The result is an ever growing success rate of marketing success.
SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you’re running first it’s sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you’re not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.
Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.
So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.
Let’s Talk Competitive Link Research
Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.
Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.
Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.
Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site
Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for
link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or
link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html
and so on.
Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links
You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let’s exclude the internal ones.
You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in:
link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com
and you’ll get a list of external backlinks only.
There’s a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.
Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains
The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add -site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.
You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:
link:http://www.cnn.com -site:cnn.com -site:en.wikipedia.org
Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in
link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.gov or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov
and you’ll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.
Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer
Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s so add a -site.com modifier and you’ll get lots of new link data.
Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks
Try link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
Or link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org
Give it a thought and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of ideas. Feel free to share your findings in the comments.
Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines
Don’t limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn’t give you link data, so forget about it) but then there’re Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, get rid of the the duplicates and you’ll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor’s links to study.
Note: Some search engines have a different set of operators so you’ll need to type domain:instead of link:.
Getting It All Done Fast
This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT’s a lot of work.
I’m too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That’s why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don’t even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.
SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:
• Google PR of the domain and linking page
• The URL and title of the linking page
• The anchor text and description
• Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will
think it’s there till they reindex the page).
• Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
• How many other links are on the page
• How much link value the link passes
• And some other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.
If you want to do competitive link research seriously, I’d strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.
Note: This article first appeared on Site-Reference.com
About The Author
Get more link building advice and SEO software to help you implement it. Richard Gilmore is an Internet marketer, freelance SEO, author and addicted guitar player.
Back in June, Adobe announced they were providing technology to Google and Yahoo that would allow the search engines to crawl Flash content. While this isn’t new news, it’s really cool to finally see this in action. A new client of mine has a web site with the entire navigation system embedded in a SWF Flash banner. With the help of Adobe’s Searchable SWF Library, Google crawled all the pages in a matter of days without me having to add a text-based navigation system anywhere on the pages. Quite often it isn’t feasible, or visually appealing, to clutter up a Flash site with text links at the bottom of every page just for SEO purposes.
The indexing was achieved by Adobe providing Google and Yahoo with technology that allowed the search spiders to navigate as a virtual user. It would see the same content and links you or I would.
One important item of note, however, is that Google still cannot index Flash content if the SWF Flash file is loaded by JavaScript. JavaScript still presents a wide range of problems for search engines and should be used with caution on web sites.
This new ability to index more content has a twofold effect: First, suddenly there is more content available to search engine users that was previously hidden. And second, webmasters won’t have to sacrifice the look and feel of web sites anymore by shying away from using Flash.
Click here to see the official announcement on Googles blog.
When I sit down with new clients and discuss the status of their new or existing site they are often shocked when I am forced to inform them that their site is not search engine friendly. Encountered with a blank but slightly shaken look I then explain that this means their site has a particular problem that is hindering search engine rankings. Often this is represented by an inflexible design, overuse of advanced web technologies, or simply a weak navigation scheme. As a result, if they were to continue with the site as it stands they are unlikely to attain competitive search engine rankings.
The following is checklist designed to help you gauge the search engine friendliness of your website and, if you are in the midst of planning a website this checklist will help you avoid the common pitfalls of unfriendly designs.
Technologies
First consider what technologies your website is using. There are certain technologies that require a little more hand holding than others to ensure search engine compatibility.
1. FRAMES
Lets start with this oldie. Luckily, frames are becoming a way of the past what with the use of DIV layers and the slow onset of incredibly flexible AJAX coding. The long and the short of it is that if you have Frames on your website then you are starting off at a disadvantaged position that cannot be truly search engine friendly no matter what you do. There are, however, some remedial fixes that will tie you over until you can redesign your site; yes I said redesign. The fix that I recommend is to use a noframes tag whereby you place another version of your web page inside of your framed page. This ‘backup’ page is what the search engines will view; here you can place relevant content and navigational elements so that the search engines can at least navigate portions of your site that are (hopefully) not framed.
More info on the no frames tags.
2. FLASH
There was a big brouhaha that Flash had become search engine indexable and you no longer had to worry about its search engine issues. Frankly, I have not seen the fruits of this ‘improvement’ to a respectable degree yet so I still consider it a kiss of death for websites designed solely in Flash. If you have a Flash-only website then I recommend one of these two options; one is to design an html version of your website and make the home page of your website html rather than Flash where you can then allow users to choose between html or Flash. The second option is to redesign the site so that it mixes both html and flash together. For example, this might mean implementing Flash amidst content on an HTML page as you would an image. I realize there are certain limitations to this option but if you can create a slick site in this manner then you will have the best of both worlds; clean search engine friendly content along with an interactive, multimedia feel. Just remember that the majority of relevant text should be in HTML format for the search engines to index.
3. Search Engine ‘Unfriendly’ Dynamic URL’s
Unfriendly dynamic URL’s are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind. Here are some examples of some unfriendly URL’s:
Sample 1:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts.php&354=prod333&subproduct
Sample 2:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/
filename.php?id=F98ZF4&productId=39222§ion=wicked&brand=582&template=532
These URLs are problematic because a search engine may consider these addresses too complex to spider. Why too complex? Suffice it to say that the more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content too dynamic to read; it changes too often to be valuable to a search engine.
The way around these types of URLs is actually not so difficult; it may only require a small investment of time and money. The ‘time’ will be required when researching which URL fix is right for your system. The money may be required to pay a programmer to implement and test the new URLs. Here are how the URLs might look once they are fixed to be search engine friendly:
Sample 1 Fixed:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts/354/prod333/subproduct/
Sample 2 Fixed:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/
board532/
These URLs are better because they do not include the extraneous characters that are so telltale on dynamic websites. In addition, the URLs are designed to appear like normal website directories when in fact they are dynamic URLs.
Important: it is vital that you minimize the length of the URLs that you use. Search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories. The samples above show fixed URLs that have about as many subdirectories as I would allow (4).
Design
This section focuses on the overall layout and usability of your designs from the perspective of a search engine robot. Search engine friendly design is occasionally quite complex so I have provided a list of the most common issues to consider.
1. Menus
Are the menus on your website spiderable? If not you may be hiding major areas of your website from search engine spiders and missing out on additional search engine rankings.
The fact is there are very few menus out there that a search engine will have a problem following, but there are definitely some worth avoiding. For instance do not use a JavaScript Jump Menu (example) as the core mode of navigation of your website; search engines cannot index this type of menu. Also be careful of Flash menus, they look slick but they will impede the progress of a search engine spider especially if they are the only means of navigation within your site.
General Menu Rules
The ideal menu would be text based and each text link would include the keywords you are targeting on the destination page. Setting up a menu with this much forethought requires that you determine the layout and content for your site before web design begins. Once you have a clear picture of the content for each page you can then research the keywords that are best to target per webpage. This essential keyword research can be done in house easily enough using systems-like keyword research tools that provide you with a glimpse into how your customers think by showing how many searches there are per month (or year) for a particular term.
Remember, almost every page within your site has a very real opportunity to gain a top ranking; all you need to do is ensure that the design, content and site structure is optimized. Ensuring that the menu is carefully thought out and designed is a crucial step for top rankings.
Finally, if you are at all uncertain whether your menu is search engine friendly then be certain to back it up with a text menu in the footer of your page using the same keyword targeting principles noted above.
Tech Advice: a simple text menu may be less than desirable for you; in this case I recommend DHTML menus. These menus use text but in a manner that is quite appealing and very search engine friendly.
2. Sitemaps
Sitemaps can dramatically help the visibility of your website by allowing search engine spiders easy access to all of the pages in your site. Place a link to the sitemap on every page within your site to ensure easy access no matter where a search engine or user enters your site.
Sitemap Tips
Just having a sitemap will help but how you build your sitemap will also play a role in how well the search engines catalogue it. For example, if you have a twenty-page website it would be ideal to create a sitemap where each page is represented by a title along with a short description. Ultimately, the page may be a bit long but it will have content that the search engines like to index and it will boost the relevance of the linked pages because the titles will accurately represent the content. So in effect, you will now have more than just a sitemap; you will have a table of contents for your site that has the potential of getting a ranking and provides an extra boost to the ranking worthiness of each page.
Google Sitemap
Google Sitemap is an additional design element that you should consider adding.
3. Layout
How you layout your page can make a significant difference in how well your site ranks and ultimately how search engine friendly it is.
Tips for Layout
Search engine robots read a webpage from the top of the source code (the programming that made your page – see “view source” in your browser) all the way to the bottom. As a result, it is important to ensure that both of the following elements are found as close to the beginning of code as possible:
A) A short sentence introducing the topic using the keyword targets you have chosen for the page.
B) Your text menu and other navigational aids, or if this is not possible it would be even more beneficial to start with a paragraph or two of relevant content followed by the navigation.
By placing this information near to the top of the page, you will promptly present the search engine robot with relevant text that backs up the page title and backlinks. You will also provide an immediate sitemap of sorts for the search engine to spider, which includes keywords relevant to each page.
4. Splash Pages – ACK!
With the odd exception Splash Pages are a kiss of death for a website because the home page (the first page seen when someone visits your domain), your most important page, is often converted into nothing but an excess entry point with little or no relevant content on it. Aside from reducing your chances for ranking, you are also making your visitors take another step to get to content or sales material in your site. Any additional steps you add will lessen the likelihood of a successful sale.
Please Let Me Change Your Mind
If you think you need to use a splash page then you need to talk to someone who will change your mind. No, honestly, give me a call if you want because there is nothing more painful to a SEO or search engine friendly web designer to see a Splash Page in use. If, in the unlikely scenario your splash page is required, there are ways to make it slightly more search engine friendly.
1) Add a highly relevant and well-worded paragraph to the page so that the search engines have something to index that shows them they are in the right place.
2) Either provide a link to your sitemap or implement a text menu in the footer of the page so the search engines can access the internal workings of your website without having to take an extra step.
In Summary
Creating a search engine friendly website requires a basic to advanced understanding of how a searchengine works, depending on the complexity of the planned website. Complexity aside, the notes above provide a good basis for you to evaluate the friendliness of your website and make changes where necessary. Click here to learn more about SEO and how we can help you.
Article Written by: Ross Dunn
Before conducting any search engine promotion it is extremely important to know the ‘terrain’ of your online marketplace. The following tools will aid you by providing a glimpse into the search habits of your prospective customers.
Need to research a competitor? Are you planning to do this yourself? If so here are three of the top programs you need. Think of them as your personal SEO detective kit.
Not so sure you want to tackle your own competitor research?
Chi-Sky offers basic to advanced competitor analysis services. Click here to learn more about this service.
Keep an eye on your search engine rankings across the major and minor search engines; should you see a drop or increase in your rankings you will be better informed and know how to respond.
PS. Chi-Sky only recommends using the reporting tool not the optimization tools and such that the program also includes.
What, That’s It? Yes, we recommend no other service because we cannot find any that compare! Of all the programs we have tested WebPosition is the only one that has reliable data (more often than not) and has exportable/email-able reports that are actually easy on the eyes. If you would like to submit your software for review please let us know but expect that we will require a full professional copy of the software to test the program.
In many cases website URL’s are the reason that web sites are not fully indexed by visiting search engine spiders. Here are a few rewrite solutions that you can employ to correct your unfriendly URL’s and open the door to search engine spiders:
UNCERTAIN?
Are you unsure if your site uses unfriendly URL’s? Contact Chi-Sky to ensure you have not missed anything else that may be impeding your online success.
The following XML sitemap creation tools are extremely handy for creating and maintaining website XML sitemaps for submission to search engines:
Not sure you want to tackle this all alone? Click here to learn more about how Chi-Sky can prepare and configure your website for online success.
If you think Twitter, Facebook, and other online social media communities are only for teens, you’re missing out on valuable and free marketing platforms for your brand (book, business or product).
Further, if you’re not on social media, you’re risking losing your own potential clients/customers to those smart business people who are utilizing social media.
Which social media platforms you focus on depends a great deal on what your brand is. Here are seven excellent reasons why you must use social media no matter what you are promoting:
The current most popular social media platforms being used for business are free: Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com. (LinkedIn does have an upgrade that costs, but it’s not necessary to get this upgrade.) And this is ”relationship” marketing to targeted markets. “Free” is definitely more cost-effective than spending money on online advertising techniques such as Pay Per Click or banner ads.
The world is now a global marketplace. Why not reach this global market? Many of the most popular social media platforms have this global reach, and you can see this clearly illustrated on Twitter. At any time of day or night you can see real-time “tweets” from people in Japan, England, the U.S., India and many other countries.
For example, if you have a book that might appeal to anyone in the world who reads in English, why limit yourself to just promoting in the U.S.? Thanks to Amazon people outside the U.S. can buy your book even if it is only available in U.S. stores.
Social media enables you to join groups of people with the same interests and goals. On LinkedIn and Facebook you can join groups as varied as Children’s Book Writers to eMarketing. If you choose groups to join based on your brand, you’ll be putting yourself in front of the exact groups of people you want to reach as potential clients/customers. This can pay off in increased sales for you.
Once you are active on social media platforms and have people who are your followers (Twitter), your friends (Facebook) and/or your connections (LinkedIn), you can start your own groups of highly targeted interests. You can create a niche market in your brand, book or business and share your knowledge with others who join your community.
These people can become your loyal followers, friends and connections – and they can help spread your marketing message to their followers, friends and connections.
People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. By sharing your knowledge for free online with the people in the social media groups you belong to, you can establish yourself as an expert. This can pay off in increasing potential clients/customers’ trust in you.
And you can also receive invitations for blog “interviews” or BlogTalkRadio show interviews or podcasts. And these interviews lead to more free exposure for your brand and more free promotion for your expertise.
Amazingly in the world of social media, people who would be considered competitors in the off-line world are teaming up to provide products and services to their combined clients/customers.
And these clients/customers are very responsive to these cross-promotions (often called joint ventures) – especially when introduced to a second expert by a first expert they already know, like and trust.
You and your cross-promotion partner can each get access to the other person’s “list” (the names of interested clients/customers collected at a website) and thus you’ve greatly expanded your potential client/customer pool.
Your updates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn take seconds - and you’ve announced to your followers, friends and connections what you’re doing or what you’re offering or what you’re speaking on. And there are even online applications that allow you to update your status across several of your social media accounts at one time. So it is as easy as 1-2-3 to keep in front of your potential clients/customers.
In conclusion, once you become active yourself on social media platforms, you’ll find many more reasons to promote your brand, book or business on social media in order to attract targeted potential clients/customers. And you’ll look back at your pre-social media days and wonder how you ever did marketing without using online social media.
Click here to learn how Chi-Sky can help you with this.
Article Written by: Phyllis Zimbler Miller (c) 2009
Direct mail marketing is one of the oldest forms of modern promotion, but don’t let its age deceive. Mailing coupons or even catalogs to potential customers can significantly improve site traffic and sales conversions. While the exact origins of direct mail marketing are in question, there are examples of savvy business folk using the tactic more than 200 years ago.
For ecommerce businesses, traffic is king. The more visitors that an ecommerce site receives, the more that ecommerce site is likely to sell. In the effort to generate traffic, store owners will certainly use several marketing channels and campaigns, and by no means will I disparage search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, banner advertising, or even print advertising. But too many ecommerce marketers may be overlooking direct mail, which can provide very good conversion rates. It is far more measurable than other promotions and it allows a marketer to provide a full and rich presentation of a business’ value proposition.
As with any marketing tactic, direct mail’s conversion rates are as much a function of the quality of the messaging as they are a result of the media (direct mail). A poorly conceived direct mail campaign won’t offer much of a benefit, but because direct mail is not as limited as, say, PPC, it is possible to be far more creative and communicative in direct mail than in almost any other media.
As an example, consider a 2006 American Express direct mail campaign designed to increase renewals for the very exclusive Centurion Card in Australia. AmEx had just boosted the annual membership fee to almost $2,000 and had concerns that many of the cardholders would think that the fee was too expensive. But AmEx developed an impressive titanium card sample, etched a metal letter explaining the cards benefits, and sent the metal direct mailer to its target audience. The campaign generated a reported 85-percent conversion rate, and earned American Express millions of dollars, according to Royal Mail.
Similarly, a research report from the New York Department of Health Behavior found that sending a direct mailer to smokers explaining the health benefits of quitting and offering a free nicotine patch increased call traffic 36 percent and drove conversions up nearly 11 percent.
In general, a good direct mail campaign should convert about 1-to-5 percent of its recipients. So an ecommerce site that mailed out 10,000 postcards with coupon codes, should expect between 100 and 500 of the postcard recipients to convert, visiting the site and making a purchase. That sort of a response rate offers a lot of opportunity for ecommerce merchants.
Ecommerce retailers, like all businessmen, want to earn the best possible return on their marketing investment, and direct mail makes tracking that return very easy. The simplest method for tracking direct mail campaigns is to use a custom URL or subdomain. For example, if your store’s URL is somestore.com, try purchasing the domain somestoreonline.com and using only this second domain in your direct mail campaign. Then monitor traffic through the new domain. Or if you are offering a 10-percent discount in your direct mail campaign, try using the subdomain discount.somestore.com, and track the web traffic to that subdomain and landing page.
Many marketers have taken to using personalized URLs. In this case, you might use a subdomain that included your prospect’s name. So if you sent a mailer to Jane Doe, the URL in the mailer might be jane_doe.somestore.com. You would be wise to include Jane’s name and a mention of the mail offer on the landing page.
Direct mail also makes it easy to test two versions of your marketing message. I once worked on a direct mail campaign for a large Fortune 500 company. The company was trying to generate web traffic. And the product was a tool that saved power. The company wanted to know if customers would be interested in a message about cutting so-called greenhouse gases or if they would be more motivated by a cost savings message. Turned out that talking about saving money generated eight times as many responses as promoting the product’s environmental benefits. In the next mail, we tested two cost savings methods, to determine if it was it better to talk about cost savings in terms of an annual total or a monthly total. In this way, we refined the campaign until it had a very high conversion rate.
Finally, direct mail allows ecommerce marketers to be very creative. Mailers can be a postcard with great graphics, a catalog (which will generate a lot of extra traffic), or virtually anything that you can imagine. Direct mail campaigns are not bound to web safe colors or short text strings. American Express sent metal credit cards. Microsoft has sent IT managers Russian stacking dolls, and many companies (i.e. L.L. Bean, Sears, J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret) have built huge followings for their catalogs.
Because of this breadth of creative opportunity, marketers can better communicate a store’s value proposition and, frankly, do more to persuade customers.
Article Written by: Armando Roggio
Some years ago, it was enough to get many inbound links to get high rankings on Google. It didn’t matter from where these links came as long as there were many links that pointed to your website.
As Google and other search engines continually improve the way they rank web pages, getting the right links is crucial if you want to be listed on the first search result page.
Unnatural links can be bad for your Google rankings
Google is able to detect unnatural linking patterns. That is why the following type of links don’t work:
Link farms and automated linking systems
Some online services promise hundreds of links in a short time with no work involved. All you have to do is to put some code on your website or to join a system that will help you to get links from other sites quickly and easily.
These automated linking systems don’t work and Google can detect them. Actually, Google thinks that you’re spamming if you participate in such a system and they might penalize your website by lowering its position in the search results.
Paid links
Google’s anti-spam guru Matt Cutts has made clear that Google considers paid links spam. If you don’t want to lose your rankings on Google, you should be very careful when buying links.
Natural links have a positive effect on your Google rankings
Natural links are links that make sense to your website visitors. For example, if you have a website about Linux, a totally unrelated link to a car parts website would look strange.
100% Natural
The links that point to your website should be from related websites and from sources that would “naturally” link to you, i.e. Internet directories, social bookmarking services, blogs, etc. The more related websites link to your site, the higher your website will rank on Google’s result pages.
How to get the best links to your website
There are a few things that you can do to get as many good links as possible to your website.
1. Create a linkworthy website
If your website is only a collection of affiliate links then you cannot expect that other webmasters will link to your site. Create a website with good content. You might also consider creating web pages whose sole purpose is to get inbound links. This could be “How to” articles, top 10 lists or even a controversial statement.
The more interesting your web pages are, the easier it is to get links from other websites.
2. Contact related websites and blogs
Contact related websites and point them to the interesting content on your site. Do you have an article on your website that solves a specific problem?
Contact websites that also deal with that topic or bloggers who have written about that topic and tell them about your article. Chances are that these websites will link to your site.
3. Submit your website to related Internet directories
Internet directories are an easy way to get inbound links. However, only submit your website to Internet directories that are relevant to your website and only submit your website to the right category.
A link from the right directory and the right category to your website can have a positive impact on your Google rankings.
4. Make it easy to add your website to social bookmark services
Add a bookmark link to your website so that it is easy for your website visitors to bookmark your site.
5. Get links to different pages of your website and vary your link texts
Most links go to the home page of a website. It usually helps to get direct links to the web page that you want to promote on search engines. The websites that link to your website should use different but related texts to link to your site. If all web pages use exactly the same text to link to your site, this will look unnatural.
Getting the right kind of back links is very important if you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines. First of all, create interesting and linkworthy web pages and optimize the content of these pages for search engines.
Make sure that your web pages are user-friendly and interesting. If you then get the right kind of links to your website your rankings will increase.
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