Posts tagged web marketing
The Life and Times of Google, continued
Feb 25th
A day on which a person living in Australia, America, the UK or Europe doesn’t interact with Google is a rare day. Most of us depend heavily on our computers, our internet connections, and Google. Google is the giant of the SEO world, driving the overwhelming majority of search traffic, and therefore creates a livelihood for businesses worldwide. In that spirit, today we’re continuing our Google gossip-fest from yesterday, checking out the ins and outs of Google’s relationships for our own voyeuristic gain 
Google buys Remail
Remail created an email search application for the iPhone … and as soon as Google saw the word ’search’ in a product that it didn’t own, that credit card in it’s ginormous wallet really started to itch! It has now bought Remail, and seems close to closing a deal with on2.
Real time search now to include MySpace
Previously only Bing included MySpace status updates, and there was some balance to the world. Now Google’s real time search includes MySpace status updates, Facebook updates, tweets and news results.
Google and Yahoo raise doubts over Conroy’s filter
Stephen Conroy’s controversial internet filter, which would attempt to remove content that has been ‘Refused classification’ by the Classification Board, has taken a hit from Google and Yahoo. Both search engines have said that the filters ‘would not effectively protect children’, and noted that it is the chat rooms and message boards that usually feature material relating to child porn … and these are not usually indexed by search engines anyway.
Google looks to bring 1G per second broadband speeds
It’s the way of the future – Google is now working on bringing internet connection speeds of up to 1G per second to thousands of households. Unfortunately, they are currently located only in America.
eBay Exec is new Google VP of Commerce
The hiring of Stephanie Tilenius of eBay as Google’s VP of commerce has raised talk that Google might be upgrading their checkout process or other ecommerce initiatives.
Facebook more important than Google?
People are more often getting product recommendations and referrals from Facebook than Google, according to the San Francisco Chronic. Of course, this will not outstrip demand for general search information on Google, Bing or Yahoo anytime soon.
MS Uses Google’s own platform to take a swipe
Microsoft has recently uploaded a series of videos to Youtube – hosted by Google – attacking Google Docs and Google Apps. The videos suggest that the applications don’t have the security or on-premises flexibility that most businesses need.
4 Things You Should Know About Facebook PAGES for Web Marketing
Feb 18th
From the user perspective, there is little difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group. Both allow you to connect with like-minded people or ‘brand’ yourself … whether those like minded people are fans of breastfeeding in public, the 5th gen iPod classic, or saying “Bond … James Bond“. From a company perspective and for internet marketing purposes, though, there are a few differences which could make a big difference to the ease and effectiveness of your Facebook marketing.
What are the features of a Facebook Page?
Facebook pages can have inbuilt applications, HTML and Flash in them – they’re a lot purdier than Groups are. It’s not only form, though, Facebook pages have much better functions than Groups – the applications make the most difference.
Pages are displayed a lot more prominently on people’s profiles than Groups are. If you click on a Friend’s ‘Info’ tab for their profile, the Groups are listed in order of joining, as a mess of blue hyperlinked text. Pages are much more spaced out, and they have their own individual little icon … however, the viewer does have to click a link to see any more than the most recent five or six pages joined.
What is the cost of setting up a Page?
Zero, zip, zilch, nothing, nada – there is no cost to set up a Facebook page, at least in terms of putting it on Facebook. However, if you want your page to have the additional functionality of applications or rich content like Flash (and you aren’t a web developer yourself), there is a cost involved in having that set up and troubleshooting done when they inevitably break. Of course, there is also an internal cost in administering the Page – replying to questions in wall posts, posting blogs, notes and reviews, and generally creating enough content to make your Page worthwhile for fans. In this respect, the cost is much like setting up a website – you can get a template for free, but if you want to personalize or add value, you’ll need to factor in some dollars.
Page Title considerations
Can you think of a way to engage your readers at the level of friends, or people with a common interest, rather than as a business? For example, if you manufacture underwear that stays where it is put, your Page could be titled ‘I would rather walk around with a wedgie than fiddle with my underwear in public’, or something similar. If you have an effective unique selling point, you can have a page that engages your potential customers like this!
4 Things You Should Know About Facebook GROUPS for Web Marketing
Feb 15th
While figures do vary according to the particular survey and geographic region, there is no doubt that Facebook is one of the most popular websites of the noughties. It took a while for businesses to find their feet with Facebook web marketing – for quite a while, all you could do on the site was play Vampire Wars, after all. Nowadays, though, Facebook Groups are well-recognized as one of the primary methods of social media marketing. We explore what you need to know about Facebook groups for web marketing success.
What are the features of a Facebook Group?
Many of us are familiar with the features of an ordinary profile page on Facebook. A Group page is simply a page where people of similar interests and values can come to discuss things and post related content. When you set up a Facebook Group, you can use the platform for:
- General discussions via the wall (although conversations can get a little messy)
- Post photos related to your topic
- Post videos related to your topic
- Post links to related content across the web (although these are not followed by Google and therefore don’t count toward link popularity)
- Sending news and updates to your Group members
What is the cost of setting up a Group?
As far as Facebook is concerned, there is no cost to set up a Group. However, you will certainly want someone either within your organization, or outsourced, to administer the group. When somebody posts a question about your product or service, the polite thing to do in social media situations is to answer it 
.
Group Title considerations
People on Facebook often use Groups as a ‘bumper sticker’ for their profile. If you create a group name that is bumper sticker-ish, you instantly increase appeal for these people. Use a bit of humour, and make sure you go into detail about the group’s purpose in its title. Here are a couple of good examples:
- People Who Always Have To Spell Their Names For Other People
- I Flip My Pillow Over to Get To The Cold Side
- Unlike 99.99% of the Facebook population, I was born in the 70s.
- When I was your age, Pluto was a planet
Do you have a running joke in your company or industry that other people relate to? You can see that the groups that have no direct link to companies or monetization of any sort often do well.
If you get popular…
You’ll have to think about all sorts of different things, like assigning someone to administer the group on a more permanent basis, weeding out spam links in the comments and wall posts, and developing a strategy for marketing with the blast messages.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #4
Feb 12th
There are so many studies that rely on our understanding of neuroscience – marketing is perhaps the most prominent of these (outside of brain surgery!). Today we are looking at how you can improve your connections with customers, your web marketing in general, and of course your SEO performance, by paying attention to how your customers minds work and tailoring your website to make them take action.
Redback spider's mating ritual effectively combines all three important elements ... sex, food and danger!
Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I ‘mate’ with it?
The neuroscience: Whenever our brain encounters something new in the world, it tries to determine three things of it. These three things are closely linked to both personal survivial and the survival of our species, which is an innate drive:
- Can I eat it?
- Will it eat me?
- Can I mate with it? (alternatively known as ‘Will it mate with me?’)
The web marketing tactic: Where you can, try to incorporate elements of each of the three ‘items’ these questions represent into your web content and marketing for it. If you can relate your product to food, sex or danger, your visitors’ brains are wired to instantly pay attention. They will be more likely to read more content, more likely to explore the site further, and more likely to engage with your message than if you have a dry, corporate site. To incorporate food, sex and danger into your website, you can do things like:
-
- Use photos of attractive women or men in your marketing – or even ordinary women or men with suggestive expressions or poses
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of food or people eating with your products or services. Happy people are usually a good illustration for a wide variety of products – juts pop a little food in their mouths!
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of dangerous things with your content
- Highlight in your web copy how your products either help you become more attractive (sex), avoid danger, or remain able to feed yourself (usually related to earning or saving money).
Of note: As with all of these neuroscience tips, don’t overdo it. People can see straight through it when you stretch logic to fit one of these characteristics in, and it usually garners more derision than genuine interest.
5 Internet Marketing Strategies You Can Do in Ten Minutes
Feb 11th
Unlike hospitality or retail, internet marketing is not an industry for those who need instant gratification. Everybody is vying for top Google results, and that means that it is going to take a lot of time to get those valuable top 10 positions. However, as turtle-like as internet marketing can sometimes seem, there are plenty of things you can do in ten minutes or less, that will help your search engine rankings. Today we go through 7 of them.
Now that's fast SEO!
- Answering Twitter questions
Set up an alert through any one of the Twitter companion programs for questions with keywords related to your industry. When you see someone ask a question about either your industry, or your brand specifically, answer them! This really makes your customers feel cared for, encourages them to visit, pushes up your Google ranking… - Write a case study
Information from experts is in short supply on the web. Knock out a case study for recent clients of yours, and note how you solved problems for them. Provide real, useful information and people will not only visit and link to you, they might even hire you. - Create a narrow ‘How-to’ article
The big, long and in-depth ‘how-to’ articles are more than a ten minute job. However, people want the answers to all sorts of small questions – they don’t always want to have to read through ‘The Ultimate Guide’ to solve a problem. - Use Google Hot Trends to decide what to tweet and blog about
Of course, it will still have to be related to your industry – but Google Hot Trends shows what the buzz is about, right at this very second. If you can link a news item or issue to your content, the traffic possibilities are enormous. - Check your page speed with Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools lets you see how fast or slow your site is. And Google has hinted that page speed will become an ever-more important factor in ranking … so make sure you know where you stand.
3 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Web Marketing Success
Feb 10th
Ecommerce sites have created some of the greatest success stories in the world wide web. Just think Amazon and eBay, and you’ll start to get an idea of how many dollars are generated through ecommerce and the associated web marketing. It’s actually likely that the cheapness, availability and choice that buying on the internet provides, actually boosts the number of dollars spent worldwide and shores up the world’s biggest economies.
How healthy is your website's shopping cart?
So how do you get a slice of the pie?! If you have an ecommerce site, today we are looking at 3 big tips to make life easy for your customers, and therefore sell more online.
1. Look at what happens after the click
There aren’t many actions that you should take without first investigating them. When it comes to ecommerce, it is vitally important to see what visitors do after they land on your site. What is your bounce rate like? What pages do they go to most? What pages do most people exit from? This information forms the building blocks of a successful ecommerce site.
Smart ecommerce sites (and those with a reasonable marketing budget) can also gain plenty of benefit from customized usability testing, eyetracking studies and heat mapping.
2. Add ratings and recommendations … and personalize them
The easiest way to understand this tip is to think of how Amazon interacts with you. If you have an ecommerce site of your own, but no experience with Amazon, go check it out now! While there are some complaints about their site, they generally represent the embodiment of best practices in ecommerce.
Amazon provides personalized recommendations for new products based on what a user has viewed before, and what they have bought before. eBay now does the same.
You can also provide ratings from other users based on a person’s behavior on your site – don’t wait for them to click through to a product page to find out that other people love a product.
3. Add a Live Help function
Most of the problems that people encounter with ecommerce sites can be overcome, or at least mitigated, by offering a Live Help service. When something happens that a consumer isn’t expecting, they don’t have to go searching for their product all over again at a different site. That is actually a lot of work – though it is possible. Live Help keeps customers on-site, even if:
- There isn’t enough product information on a description page
- An error occurs during checkouot
- Return policy is not clearlt stated
- People need to enquire about shipping
- The product is expensive
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #3
Feb 9th
We all have a brain … well, most of us do . One of the interesting things about your brain, is that it follows quite a few rules that can be used to predict your behaviour in many situations. Just ask Hunch! Your brain and its rules can also be used in an SEO context, to get visitors to your site, boost its value in their minds, and climb up the Google ladder. Today we explore another tip for using neuroscience in a web marketing context.
The grossest, but certainly the best, web marketing tool
Use scarcity as a selling point
The neuroscience: Humans are a social creature, and we tend to look for both acceptance and status among our peers. If we believe that a lot of other people have (or want) a particular product or service, we will also want it. Having the same thing as everyone else helps build our acceptance; having something everyone else wants confers status.
The web marketing tactic: So, if you truly only have a limited number of items, or can honestly only provide a service for a limited time, let people know that. You might do this by:
- Modifying your ecommerce software to show the number of items left in stock of a particular product
- Modifying your ecommerce software to show how many of a particular item have been sold in the recent past
- Puttingup a widget on your site that shows people the most popular items, and how many there are left
- Creating a special promotion or sale, but only holding it for a limited time. DON’T extend it past the indicated date. This is like telling your two-year old that they will get a time-out for touching the television … and when they touch the television a minute later, simply telling them that they’ll get a time-out again. You are teaching people not to believe what you say.
- Holding a special limited time event, such as an exclusive customer party, a product celebration, a promotion to hold inconjunction with a trade show, etc.
Of note: This usually only works when there really is a limited amount of something! For example, we’ve all seen those email marketing letters and landing pages that urge us to ‘Sign Up Now – This Offer Expires in Thirty Days’ … without mentioning what thirty day time period the offer covers. We know that people say this just to get our attention, and when this occurs, it breeds distrust.
The trick is to let your customers know when there REALLY is a limited time offer … not to invent time limits to try and increase signups.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #2
Feb 5th
One of the best-selling books of all time is Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. Everybody wants to know how to get inside other people’s brains and make them do what we want them to … even when we get past adolescence! Today, we are giving you another tip for that very purpose. We’re looking at web marketing with neuroscience; how you can use the quirks and peculiarities of the human brain to get people to take specific actions on your site.
Brain cells - the only real marketing tools!
Put the most important thing to your business first
The neuroscience: In our minds, what comes first is unconsciously regarded as the best. This may be driven by our largely hierarchical society, which has retained that basic structure since the time of our furry ancestors. Or it may not. However this quirk came to be, it is a very real phenomenon in our minds. The number one result in Google gets a whopping 56% of the clicks, according to one study – not the 10% you would expect if all the results on the page have roughly equally valuable content. In many cases content is equal – but our perception of value is different.
The web marketing tactic: Whenever you have several items on a page, and one is more important to you than the others, put it first. For example:
- If you have a list of products, and one is either more likely to build customer loyalty, more likely to get click throughs, or nets you a higher margin, put it first
- If you have one product on site that converts better than all the others, put it first in the list
- If you have one category of products on site that is better fleshed out and converts better than the others, put it first in your menu navigation.
- If you have one piece of evidence for your system that is particularly compelling, put it first in your writeup
- If you have a blog post that consistently gets positive feedback or that contains comprehensive and well-research info, put it first in your list of ‘Popular Posts’. Put the ‘Popular Posts’ widget or list near the top of the page for extra effect.
Of note: If you have a not-so-good product or blog post in ‘first’ position on your site, and visitors go to it expecting to get an optimal example of what your business is like, you are doing your business a major disservice. Your visitors may leave and never come back, believing that the lower quality item is the best you have to offer.
Pagerank … Wah, Good God Y’all – What is it Good For?
Feb 4th
If you are just starting out on your SEO journey, you are probably wondering what all the fuss about PageRank is. Who cares what one website thinks about another, after all? Isn’t it your customers that truly matter?
Links=PageRank
Well, when the website is Google and you are trying to rank highly in it, it certainly does matter. Today we run through the basics of Pagerank – who the heck it is, and what it’s good for .
What is Pagerank?
PageRank can actually be explained quite simply – it is a measure of all of the inbound links coming to your website or blog. Google figures that the greater the number of other sites that are linking to yours, the more people must feel that your website has something worthy on it.
Every link is sort of like a ‘vote’ for your site – saying that you have something worthwhile related to your topic. This judgement of worth is something that Google’s computers simply cannot do … as powerful as they are. So they use links to create PageRank, and PageRank is part of what goes into your search engine ranking results.
How is PageRank Calculated?
Here is the formula for calculating PageRank that was published when the concept was first launched … not that too many people bother with using it! It is likely that the formula has now changed, and is as top secret as the 11 famous herbs and spices.
Nevertheless, this is a good approximation:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
Notes: t1 … tn are pages linking to your site. C is your site. D is a damping factor, usually 0.85, which is why is is so hard to get to PR10!
Increasing your PageRank
The way to increase your PageRank is to keep up with your link building activities to get plejnty of inbound links, and to ensure that you don’t link out to sites that have a PageRank of less than 1. It is possible that Google has penalized them, and may also penalize you for promoting them.
A word of warning…
If you are looking for serous advice on increasing your PageRank, go to a web marketing expert … not a site called www.pr10.com (link deliberately omitted!). All of the techniques listed are black hat, though there is no indication that it is as such. There is also no indication that the text is sarcastic. We hope it hasn’t caught out too many people!
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #1
Feb 3rd
You can do a lot of things with your brain. In fact, without, you can’t do anything at all . You can also do things with other people’s brains, if you have a basic understanding of how to engage certain neural circuits in ways that favour your own ends. This is all sounding a bit mad scientist-ish for internet marketing, I know! It will all become clear very soon. Today we are thoroughly exploring one tip for using the quirks of our human brains (neuroscience) to help get people to take action on your website.
Brain cells - great web marketing tools
Tip of the day: User ratings and reviews
The neuroscience: People are social creatures. It is how we have evolved, and one of the most prominent reasons that we have come to dominate the planet – our ability and drive to cooperate. That drive to fit in, to cooperate rather than confront other humans, can be stimulated by showing your visitors that there is a community that has been built around your product. If you can show other users that there are people that trust your product and believe in its benefits, you are much more likely to convince them.
The web marketing tactic: There are several ways to implement this strategy on your website.
- Enable ratings on your products
- Enable reviews on your products
- Make sure that people visiting the site, as well as people actually leaving reviews, know that reviews aren’t changed by you, no matter what they say. Writing something like “You can instantly publish your review – we do not moderate comments on our products”.
- Add demographic information to ratings and reviews (as an optional extra). People might relate more strongly to a review if they see that the reviewer has similar demographics – age, sex, loaciotn, family status, etc – to themselves.
- Enable comments on your blog and respond to commenters
- Add an ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’ button for comments on your site
- Build a forum that can be an additional resource for site visitors
Ratings and reviews can help new buyers, as well as contributing to their sense of community and social validation. They can also help them rationalize purchasing something they haven’t seen in person – “It worked fine for them, it will probably work fine for me”.
Of note: Testimonials don’t really work for this purpose! Every savvy web user knows that they are selected, edited and wouldn’t be on the site if they weren’t positive. Don’t remove bad reviews, simply post a public response to them offering to clear up the problem.