Create an Awesome Home Business » Internet Marketing

How Not to Do Business Online

Martin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:15:41 +0000

Renewing an existing subscription should be the simplest possible of online transactions, so it’s amazing how consistently AVG manage to screw this up.

I have two PC’s, both currently running AVG Internet Security. I moved to AVG from McAfee because it doesn’t slow down the PC performance as much.

But two things where McAfee was great were customer service and renewing subscriptions.

AVG, by contrast, consistently make this an extraordinarily difficult and frustrating experience.

The subscription for my desktop expired last January, but when I tried to renew it the system told me my licence key was invalid. And when I tried to log in to my account the system kept returning me to the login in screen.

No joy there. At all.

I did eventually manage to get AVG sales to respond to my emails and after a week or so my renewal went through.

At the time I took careful note of the licence keys for both my laptop and desktop and assumed that when the time came to renew my laptop licence I wouldn’t have the same problems.

Well, you know what they say about assumptions..!

Sure enough, my laptop licence comes up for renewal next month and 3 days ago I received the renewal reminder from AVG.

And, once again, the system told me my licence key was invalid.

This time I was, at least, able to log in to my account to raise a trouble ticket, but the drop down menus for specifying my problem didn’t have any options for renewal problems.

So I picked the one that said ‘licence key not working’ and got an automated email that came nowhere near solving my problem.

So far I’ve emailed sales at AVG, renewal at AVG and followed up on the automated response to my trouble ticket and I’m no nearer renewing my subscription than I was this time last week.

Not even the courtesy of a reply from either of the two email addresses.

How can companies make it so difficult for me to give them money..!!??

As I said at the outset: renewing a subscription has to be the simplest of all online transactions and they’ve managed to turn it into the most frustrating experience imaginable.

So I’ve researched other Internet Security Suites and will be canning AVG for something with better service. (If you have any recommendations let me know – leave a comment).

And the moral of the story?

When you’re transacting online make sure you understand very clearly the journey you’re expecting your customers to go through.

I always do a flow chart when I’m setting up new sites to sell stuff online.

Being able to see the customer journey on a flow chart highlights points that will cause frustration to your customers, so you can correct them.

I also always test out my customer journey thoroughly by going through it myself and seeing what happens – including if a fault or error occurs.

For example, I’ll click submit before filling in all the required fields, or I’ll put a date in an address field, and see what happens.

Finally, I also describe clearly to my visitors on each screen what they have to do, what will happen after they click the ‘Next’ or ‘Submit’ buttons, and what to do if the expected result doesn’t happen.

It may seem like the screamingly obvious to you, but it’s the first time your customers have seen your sequence of screens and, possibly, the first time they’ve bought anything online.

So you need to give them as much confidence as possible because, if they lose confidence, you’ll likely lose a customer: they’ll simply abandon their shopping cart.

Keep things simple, make sure you know what you’re putting your customers through and make sure you explain, at every step of the way, what they should do and what they can expect as a result.

If you have a favourite Internet Security Suite let me know in a comment.

I’m currently considering Norton Internet Security 2010, Webroot Internet Security Essentials 2010, Security Shield 2010, Kaspersky Internet Security and Trend Micro Internet Security 2010. (And if you’re an affiliate for whatever you suggest, please let me know – thanks!)

Cheers,

3 Timeless Tips for Internet Marketing Newbies

Martin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:52:13 +0000

I’ve been lucky enough to pick up a nice new contract, setting up and maintaining websites for a group of 6 restaurant/bars here in Hong Kong.

As a result I’ve had a frantic week and I haven’t had time to research and produce my normal second article.

So, instead, I’ve spent some time looking back over articles I’ve written before, finding ones that I think are timeless and relevant to people starting out with Internet Marketing today.

Here they are (3 of them) with a short intro to each:

How to Succeed

My first (and short-lived) entry into Internet Marketing was trying to sell Clickbank products through Adwords. That was tough and didn’t last long, but I learnt a lot!

After licking my wounds, my next entry was a Direct Sales/MLM business.

I did recover my investment on that one, which was good, but the business owners turned out to be flakey and I pulled out of that one too, when it was obvious the business was dying on its feet.

But that business prompted me to start this blog (my first one), in order to provide a resource for people in my downline.

And one of the articles I wrote at the time, that still carries importance today, is this one:

How to Succeed with G.A.P. (But please make sure you read the update at the bottom!)

What are You Selling?

This next article carries a very simple message that’s missed by many of the MLM/Direct Sales businesses like G.A.P. (that I referred to in the previous article).

The emphasis in G.A.P. was on signing up new members – it was called a ‘system’ sale.

Basically, new members paid a healthy chunk of money for the right to persuade others to invest a healthy chunk of money.

But real products that brought real value to someone? A lot of talk (in that business) but never any real products – which was the reason I left.

This article talks about products and how to get hold of one to sell. Because if you don’t have a product you don’t have a business:

If you want to make money online sell something.

Blogging

One of the things you hear when you start Blogging is that you must post regularly. Every day, if possible, or even more frequently.

And the reason you need to do this is that the search engines ‘love new content’.

I don’t agree.

They love good quality content that lots of people link to. They don’t love trash just because it’s served up twice a day.

I touched on this back in the dark days of December 2008, when everyone was still in shock at the Global Financial Crisis.

I wrote an article setting out some principles I was going to follow with my blogging in 2009.

Now, 18 months later, I can say that I’m following those principles. But it wasn’t always like that.

To paraphrase: there’s enough junk on the Internet already – it certainly doesn’t need any more.

Here’s the full monty:

What am I going to do in 2009.

I hope you like those articles – I think the messages in each form solid principles for people new to working online.

Cheers,

I’m Switching From Twitter to Facebook

Martin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:58:09 +0000

If you dropped into this site around a year ago you’ll have read that I was a big fan of Twitter for attracting readers.

But over the past year my love for Twitter has withered.

Why?

Firstly: The search function no is longer as effective as it was.

I used to search for people asking questions about WordPress, but these days the results often don’t even contain the word ‘WordPress’!

Secondly: The efficiency with which I’m able to use Twitter is therefore a lot less than it was.

There’s a lot of information flying around on Twitter and if you can’t filter it effectively it becomes a pretty inefficient way of finding the stuff you need.

For sometime I’ve known that I should be exploring Facebook as an alternative. But, frankly, I find Facebook to be one of the least intuitive systems I know!

None-the-less, a recent article by Darren Rowse on how to set up a Facebook page, which followed one on how he’s now driving traffic with Facebook have shamed me into action.

And I now have a Facebook page for this site.

It’s a brand new page – set up yesterday – and I’ve got about 2 Likes so far. So if you happen to hop over there feel absolutely free to ‘Like’ it too!

And if you have a Facebook page leave us its URL in a comment so we can reciprocate.

Cheers,

Are You Making the Most of Description Tags?

Martin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:30:05 +0000

There’ve been quite a few discussions recently about the use of META tags as part of on-page SEO.

Keywords, it seems, are out (at least for Google, and at least for now), but Titles and Descriptions are in.

Just to be clear, this is what I mean by Titles and Descriptions:

Let me say upfront that, despite everything Matt Cutts said in that video, I still create keyword tags on my pages and articles.

Why? Because I don’t know that all search engines have stopped using them.

However, I also don’t spend hours agonizing over which keywords to use and I only use two or three at most.

That’s not to say keywords are irrelevant.

To get the best search engine results for an article you still need to know what question you’re answering when you write it, and to optimize it around a relevant keyword (or search term).

And the best way to find a relevant search term is to use a keyword tool to see what people are typing in to find what you’re writing about.

Then use that term in the Title and Description tags, as well as your H tags and content.

But one tag that’s rarely used to its full potential is the Description tag.

You can type almost any search term into any search engine and in 95% of the results you’ll find that the description beneath the title link is simply an excerpt from the article.

It’s whatever the search engine thinks is appropriate.

And while the description they pick is probably relevant to the search term, it almost certainly does not have any call to action in it.

If you’ve done any PPC advertising you’ll know the importance of relevance and calls to action to achieving a high click through rate.

The same principles apply to natural search results and the way to do it is through the Title and Description tags.

In PPC it’s important to have your keyword (the search term you’re optimizing for) in the title. Same in the natural search results.

In PPC it’s important to get your visitor to click through to your site through the use of benefits and a call to action. Same in the natural search results.

In both PPC and the natural search results I use the AIDA formula as much as I can:

A = Attention

I = Interest

D = Desire

A = Action

So rather than thinking of the Title and Description tags as two separate tags, think of them as two components of a single advertisement for your site or article, and apply the AIDA formula across them both.

Typically your title tag should catch the Attention, and the Description tag should create the Interest, Desire and Action.

Like this:

The term I’ve optimized this site for is Internet Marketing Tips – the first phrase in the title.

The first part of the description creates some interest (Effective Internet Marketing Tips for your small business), the second part triggers some desire (… products that get results) and the last part encourages them to visit (Hundreds of articles here).

Creating a descriptive, AIDA-based description tag will give you the edge over the site next to yours in the search results that simply uses a search-engine-defined snippet from its page.

Cheers,

Schmoozing Yahoo

Martin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:30:05 +0000

I have an interesting problem that I’ve wrestled with for a while:

99% of my search engine traffic on this site comes from Google.

While I’m delighted that Google sends me a lot of traffic, there are two problems:

I’m missing out on the 40% or so of web search traffic that Yahoo accounts for
I hate being so dependent on a single source.

So I’ve been taking some steps to up my Yahoo traffic. I’ve focused on this for a while and, although I’ve seen a small uptick, it’s still very small.

I’ve made the mistake over the past couple of years of focusing on Google search traffic and, while I’ve been doing things that I believed were good, generic SEO practices, I may have inadvertently optimized my site for Google.

So a while ago I took a couple of steps to rectify this:

I registered and verified my site in Yahoo Site Explorer (Yahoo’s equivalent of Google Webmaster Tools)
I got myself a validation key for my XML sitemap generator plugin so that Yahoo is notified of new posts and pages (as well as Google, Ask and Bing)

However, I didn’t notice any perceptible change and after a couple of months (about 1 month ago now) I took a third:

I set up a low key Yahoo Search Marketing campaign

I thought long and hard about the YSM campaign. It’s the first time I’ve done anything that amounted to paying for traffic to this site, but here’s why I did it:

I have another WordPress site which is configured in exactly the same way as this one. Same XML sitemap plugin, registered in Google Webmaster Tools but not Yahoo Site Explorer, same SEO practices that I’ve followed with this one.

Yet on that site 49% of my traffic comes from Yahoo.

Why the difference?

That site has a sister site and they sit on the same domain name, but with two different TLDs – one is .net, the other .com

I’d run a Yahoo Search Marketing campaign for a while to drive traffic to the .net site, which was the first one I set up.

When I set up the .com site I deliberately did not set up a YSM campaign and yet Yahoo started sending search traffic to that site before Google did.

In fact, initially some of the traffic they sent to the .com site should have gone to the .net site. They got that sorted out after a while, and they now send natural search traffic to the correct sites.

I was surprised that Yahoo started sending search traffic so quickly to the .com site, and it’s still sending a smidgeon under half of all search traffic to it today.

The only thing I could find that was different was that I’d been running that YSM campaign driving traffic to the .net version of the domain name.

So part of my experiment is to set up a low-key YSM campaign to drive traffic to this site.

The purpose of the campaign is not about driving paid traffic for its own sake. It’s to find out whether using a YSM campaign helps to increase the natural (unpaid) search traffic over the longer term.

I’ve had this campaign going for a month or so and there’s been a miniscule upturn in natural search traffic from Yahoo (2% better than it was a month ago), but a noticeable number of visits from new traffic sources.

This is mostly from minor search engines that didn’t figure at all previously.

So I’m going to continue this campaign for a while and see what happens.

If anyone else has come across this problem I’d love to know how you dealt with it – let me know in a comment!

Cheers,

How Smooth is Your Customer’s Journey?

Martin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:35:34 +0000

Are bumps in the road you send your customers down costing you sales?

A while ago I wrote a review of the website I used to book my vacation – see it here.

My message was ‘Simple Sites Sell’, and I described the experience: A simple, stable, reliable site that led visitors, step-by-step, through the process of choosing and booking a hotel. And flawlessly executing delivery when the time came.

Here’s another example: This week I bought my first iPhone.

Having used Nokias for years I was reluctant to change, but my most recent Nokia was driving me crazy.

Every new software upgrade piled new bugs on top of old bugs and added new functionality I had no interest in.

So what about my first couple of days with the iPhone? Painless, so far.

The User Interface is a more intuitive than the Nokia, so setting it up was quick. Setting up iTunes (which includes submitting credit card details) and syncing the phone with my Outlook was also intuitive and went without a hitch.

It even included a software upgrade which didn’t appear to deliver any new bugs.

So right now I’m pretty relaxed, because it all just worked.

What’s The Lesson for Webmasters?

If you’re selling stuff online take a long, close look at your customer journey. What hoops do they have to jump through in order to buy your stuff?

The drop off rate at the shopping cart stage of a customer journey is always high, so you need to check and re-check it to make sure you’re not putting obstacles in your customers’ path.

A site I reviewed recently is a case in point. The design is not entirely consistent (the payment page includes the logo of the bank processing the transactions) and the font colours make some of the messages almost illegible.

Further, I live in Flat A on my floor of the building. But the field for specifying the Flat in the details capture page is numeric only – and it’s mandatory.

So I wouldn’t be able to buy anything from them, however hard I tried.

Little wonder, then, that the drop off rate at the shopping cart page is high.

Submitting my credit card details to iTunes when I was setting up my new phone offered a quite different experience.

The font was simple black on white – no awards for design, but 100% for usability.

No new logos were introduced and everything went through quickly.

As with the site I reviewed a while ago, the iTunes page told me what to expect, and what it said would happen did happen.

These are all small things, but they make a difference.

And if they reduce the drop-off rate at your shopping cart page that will directly lead to more money in your pocket.

Another area where the same principles apply is your email list sign-up process.

I use Aweber and they enable me to create my own opt in confirmation and re-confirmation pages.

If you’re not doing that I strongly suggest you do, because it gives you control of your customer journey.

You can explain to your visitors what’s going to happen next, what they should do and what they’ll get as a result, at each step along the way.

I have my own confirmation and double opt-in confirmation pages on all my lists and each one describes clearly what’s going to happen next and what they should do.

And whenever I make changes to those pages I always see a change in the numbers of people who double confirm the opt-in.

These things matter.

Summary

So, again: review your customer journey and make sure you’re explaining to them at every step of the way:

What they’ve got to do now
What will happen next
What they need to do when the ‘next’ happens
The benefit they’ll receive for doing it.

And make sure there’s nothing in the process that will stop them in their tracks. You don’t even want to make them pause or question.

You need your customer journey to be a smooth, uninterrupted slide down to the transaction confirmed page.

It must all just work.

Cheers,

Simple Sites Sell

Martin — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:30:58 +0000

I just returned from a week in Boracay (Philippines) which I booked entirely online.

And the entire experience was superb – a perfect example of simple but effective web design, and flawlessly executed delivery.

If you ever feel the need to visit Boracay (and I do recommend it) then you should take a look at the My Boracay Guide site to make your bookings. (That’s not an affiliate link, by the way).

The site is nicely designed but, most importantly, it’s simple and clear.

No flash, no movies, well spaced out content (making it easy to read), and clear navigation.

The result is a fast loading, easily understandable website.

For me, this minimised worries about my credit card transaction getting hung and not knowing whether I’d be charged twice – the usual worries people have when transacting online.

If it’s your first time to visit Boracay there’s enough information (without overloading you) to enable you to get oriented and choose a hotel that locates you close to your interests (beaching, night-life, water-sports or whatever).

When I actually processed my booking the experience was equally smooth.

Importantly, when I got to the end of a screen the site told me what would happen next – whether I needed to wait for a process to complete, what I’d need to do on the following screen and so on.

Sounds simple, but it creates confidence in your visitors and greatly improves their experience – which leads to positive write-ups (like this one) and return visits.

And the execution was superb as well.

Boracay is a small island without an airport so you have to fly to one of two airports on a neighbouring island.

As a result, the transfer to your hotel involves getting from the airport to a ferry terminal, and then from the ferry terminal on Boracay itself to your hotel.

So they offer an exclusive transfer service, only available to people who book through the site, that takes care of everything.

We were met at the airport, our cases were magically extracted from the baggage claim area and, before we knew it, we were in a van going to the ferry. Ferry tickets were produced and we were on our way.

At the Boracay ferry terminal the process was the same – we were in another van and on our way almost before we knew it.

And same story again with the check-in process at our hotel – no fuss, no waiting, just smooth and efficient.

So for me, the entire experience was excellent – a perfect example of building a business around a simple, but effective website and flawlessly executed delivery.

Flash and exquisite designs are nice and don’t detract (well, Flash might because the search engines can’t read it), but simplicity and clarity sells.

And now it’s back to work again

Cheers,

4 Ways to Drive Free Traffic to Your Website

Martin — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:36:44 +0000

A friend of mine talked to me the other day about getting more traffic to his site: how to do it quickly and for free.

Unfortunately, quick traffic doesn’t generally come free – you need to pay for that, usually via PPC.

But here are 4 ways you can build up a healthy level of free traffic over a period of 3 – 6 months:

1. Install a WordPress self-hosted blog on (or linked to) your site and write regular articles.

You don’t need to write gazillions of articles a day – I’ve only ever written 2, maximum 3 a week.

But adopt a frequency that’s appropriate for the subject of your blog and one that you can sustain. Which usually means start low.

2. Use your blog’s RSS feed to syndicate your articles as widely as possible.

Here’s the pattern I use:

I have an account with TwitterFeed. I insert my RSS URL, and it then picks up all my blog articles automatically.

In TwitterFeed I set up feeds to my Twitter account and my Facebook account, so that my blog articles are then automatically posted to those two, along with links.

I then paste my Twitter URL into my profile on LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friend Feed, Blog Catalog, My Blog Log and every other relevant site that allows me to do so.

That ensures my articles (with links) are posted on all those sites.

Be careful to avoid duplicating your content.

Draw up a diagram showing the flow of your feeds so you can see how they’re mapped out.

Here’s a simple rule: don’t add your RSS URL to a site that already has your Twitter URL – if you do it will get your content from both sources.

3. Find forums that cover the subject you’re writing about.

Make sure they’re active forums and they have either a search function or (as in the case of LinkedIn) an Answers section

If you’re using a search function set up a search for posts asking questions about your subject.

This works really well in Twitter, where you can set up a search for your subject followed by a space and then a ‘?’. Search terms like this: ‘wordpress ?’ will return tweets asking questions about WordPress.

Answer all the questions that you can, but don’t waste time in the forums.

I have 4 forums that are relevant to the subject of my blog. I access them twice a day and do a search for my subject or, in the case of LinkedIn, I go through the most recent questions looking for ones I can answer.

Make sure that your profile on all these sites is 100% complete and make sure that, as soon as you’re able to, you place a link to your site in your signature.

Some sites require that you go through a qualifying period – usually a fixed number of forum posts – before they’ll allow you to add a signature with a link.

Most importantly in these forums: don’t spam.

I just answer questions, nothing more.

As you work these sites you’ll see questions that are asked more frequently than others. When you identify these you can write a blog article about them.

When your article is published you then can refer future questioners to your blog article for the full answer.

4. Set up an auto-responder sequence, build up an email list and send them links to your articles each week.

You’ll need to develop a suitable enticement to get people to opt in to your list – and make sure it’s a good one. You’ll also need to develop a sequence of messages to be sent out by your auto-responder

Then, each week, send a broadcast message to your subscribers with links back to the blog articles you published the previous week.

I send out a short message each week which starts with a brief sentence or two about what I’ve been up to the previous week.

It’s no more than 2 or 3 lines, but it helps to establish a more personal connection.

I then briefly introduce the articles I’ve written and provide links.

And that’s it. Short, sweet and non-intrusive. But it does get people back to the site.

Apart from driving visitors back to your site, it also gives you an easy, non-intrusive way to stay in touch with your list members, even after your auto message sequence has finished.

And that means that they’ll be more receptive when you send out promotions in the future.

OK – that’s it

Tell Your Visitors Where to Go

Martin — Tue, 04 May 2010 04:44:14 +0000

When you walk into a department store for the first time I’m willing to bet you immediately look for signs telling you where everything is.

If you see them you’ll go deeper into the store to find what you’re looking for. If you don’t, you’ll either ask someone or turn round and leave.

It’s no different online.

You know your website like the back of your hand, but your visitors don’t. For them it’s their first time there.

And if you don’t make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for they’ll be off in a click.

I reviewed an eCommerce site recently because they were getting a very high bounce rate on the home page.

They had put a lot of thought into the customer journey (how the selling process would take place), so they knew the process intimately. And it was a good process.

But they’d missed the fact that site visitors did not know it. They needed to be told.

It’s not complicated – it just requires that you look at your site through your visitors’ eyes.

Welcome them to the site, tell them what the site’s about, give them a benefit of doing business with you and tell them what to do next.

None of that existed on the site I reviewed, so it wasn’t surprising visitors were clicking away without going any deeper into the site.

Your visitors are in a hurry. They don’t have time to work out how they should use your site. Tell them, and they’re much more likely to stick around and buy from you.

Cheers,

Why We Trashed a Workshop Agenda

Martin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 05:51:04 +0000

I just spent 3 days workshopping with one of my clients and the eCommerce consulting director of a major eCommerce platform supplier.

And it was probably the most valuable 3 days I’ve spent this year.

About 2 months ago my client launched an eCommerce site. And to say the results to date have been underwhelming would be understating it in the extreme. They suck.

The original reason for setting up the workshop was not, however, to address the performance of the current site. It was to plan for the site that’s to be developed for my client’s other brand.

None the less, as all good consultants do, they soon got into asking the innocent sounding questions, and it wasn’t long before World War 3 broke out.

The questions were not about the performance of the current site. They were about the company’s overall business strategy and how the eCommerce strategy fitted into that.

Not only did it expose the fact that different members of the Executive team had different views as to the reason for going online in the first place, but decisions taken both before and after the launch of the first site had taken it in yet another direction.

The result of that one meeting was to trash the planned agenda and take the entire 3-day workshop down a totally different track.

Which ultimately resulted in agreement at the Executive level on the business strategy, the eCommerce strategy and its positioning against the company’s other channels.

It’s now up to the project team to implement that strategy. And, although the workshop only finished yesterday, so the actual implementation hasn’t started yet, we’re all fired up and focused on the same thing.

So I’d say the chances of the eCommerce strategy being turned around are pretty high.

But what was my main take away from this (admittedly exciting and sometimes pretty heated) 3 days?

The importance of standing back from your business, clearly articulating what you want from it and defining how your online presence is going to contribute to achieving that.

It’s not glamorous. And many people (including me) have often written or talked about the need to take action – stop analysing and get something out there.

But you do need to do the analysis. You do need to know what you’re trying to achieve and how your online presence is going to contribute to achieving it.

Here’s what the eCommerce team at my client can now do, that they couldn’t do before:

… in less than 30 seconds they can articulate the company’s primary business objectives, how the eCommerce channel fits into that and how it interacts with the company’s other channels.

Being able to do that tells people what we’re up to – with startling clarity.

Can you describe that for your business – in less than 30 seconds?

Cheers,