Internet Marketing Blog

As you write content for a landing page, a micro site, a blog, a press release or a sales letter, always keep in mind that your main goal is to appeal to your customers and sell your product or service. To fully maximize selling sales copy, use these tips and techniques to get your customers to take action.

1. Your headline says it all – If your audience is not awestruck by your headline, then most likely they will not read anything else you have to say. Use descriptive words and phrases to make your headline compelling and creative.
2. Speak directly to your audience – Customers like to feel as if your writing is speaking directly to them. Use words like “you” and “your” as often as you can. Try to avoid this kind of wording: “One could assume that if one did the work necessary…” This not only sounds incredibly superior, but it disassociates the customer from your copy.
3. Don’t assume that your audience knows what you’re talking about - Always make it crystal clear about what you’re selling and all the benefits associated with your product or service. Make all action steps extremely obvious to get your customers to do what you want them to do.
4. Don’t use superfluous, incommodious words - Simply put: try not to use too many difficult words throughout your copy that most people are not familiar with. Again, this creates distance between your customer and your copy. If your customer has to look up every other word while reading your content, then your content does not flow well. Simplify it a little.
5. Write shorter paragraphs - Research has shown that longer paragraphs lose people’s interest. Keep things clear and concise. Short paragraphs, bullet points and lists can easily break up long paragraphs.
6. Create a good conclusion – Remember to effectively sum up your content in a well-written conclusion. Don’t end your content on a whim or it may leave your audience wondering what happened. Reiterate your main points about your product or service and explain to them again why it superior and why they should buy it.

Consumers have mixed results when judging the credibility of a website. What influences their opinions of why they trust one site opposed to another? And why will they buy the same product from one site, but not another one that is very similar? Ongoing consumer studies, such as the Stanford Web Credibility Research http://credibility.stanford.edu are striving to answer such questions. Although consumer opinions on web credibility will always differ, implementing these few simple tips and techniques into your sales copy may influence your reader to take the action you want them to.

Branding is extremely important to a business, yet it is so often left in the dust. When you hear the term “branding” you think of logos and slogans. While these are part of a company’s “brand” they do not define the brand. Think of every major brand and then think of what they would be like if they were a real person. Nike “Just do it”, what do you think of? Speed, youth and confidence? That’s exactly what it’s designed to make you think of. The logo is designed to make you more confident in yourself when you purchase that brand. That’s what branding is all about; it’s the embodiment of who and what a company is and most importantly, why it matters.

A good brand:
-Motivates customers
-Creates customer loyalty
-Envokes an emotional response from your customers
-Makes your credible
-Is clear and concise

How do I accomplish this?

1. Having a perspective
Like a person companies have perspectives and views on certain issues. A fast food company isn’t all about healthy food, they are all about convenience, cost and taste. This vastly differs from a company like Wild Oats that charges premiums for its organic products. To them health is worth a little extra time and money and usually their customers agree.

2. Who are you, what do you do (why does it matter!?!)
Many companies fail to define themselves and fly by the seat of their pants. Creating focus for a company will not only help your brand but it will help your employees identify with the company and understand why their work is important.

More importantly than who you are and what you do is why does it matter. This is also known as a USP or a unique selling proposition. Why should customers buy from you and not your competitors, what is that’s different or special about you? If there is nothing that differentiates you from your competitors than you are unlikely to have huge success,

3. Presentation
So much of branding is about perception and appearance. If you are a high end services company you need expensive offices and professional sounding receptionists. If you are a skateboard company it’s more about style and acting casual, a big office doesn’t suit you in this case. Keep presentation in your mind at all times, this is how your customers will perceive you.

4. Be consistent
The thing that makes a brand work is that it’s consistent; it doesn’t change. When you go to McDonalds’ you know that you’re going to get the same Big Mac no matter where you are or when you buy. A coke is always going to taste like you expect and theres no surprises. Sure in reality there are failures and burgers aren’t always delicious. But this is why consistency is so important. You must make every attempt to deliver on your promises every single time. Failing to do what you claim will damage your brand very quickly. If your company focuses on service and you have an unhelpful customer service department say goodbye to your business.

5. Don’t be afraid to change
This one sounds a little contradictory but it is ok to change certain elements of your brand to keep up with the market. If your brand focuses on being old fashioned taking on new logos and fancy designs isn’t a great idea. But in many cases brands need to be developed over time to become the Nikes and Pepsi’s of the world so don’t restrict yourself if it means improvement.

http://www.slideshare.net/perfectpixels/creating-a-brand-persona
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?type=RESOURCES&itemId=1073790776

These days its very easy for small businesses to get a site up and running. A business owner can have his son, cousin, brother, co-worker, etc. design a site in Front Page and get it up on the web.

The difficult part seems to come when their site has been online for a while and they don’t get any hits or they get hits but don’t get any sales. Website Marketing is a fine art and there are dozens of things you can do. I will outline what I feel are 5 of the most important ways to make your website more marketable.

1) Content - It’s great to have a site that looks good with flash, animation, images etc. but good content is the keyto getting the right potential customers to your site and getting them to take action.

a. Search engines like content - When a search is submitted, the search engine scours the web to find sites with content most relevant to that search. So the more relevant content you have on your site the better but you want to keep in balance so that it is also interesting and valuable to your visitors.

b. Visitors like good content - When writing your content you want to make sure you are not only using terms that search engines will be looking for but you want to make it interesting to the reader. Ask yourself the following: Why would people come to this site? What am I offering that is unique and attractive to a potential buyer? Why would they choose my product or service over a competitor?

2) Clean code - Sites that are coded well are not only faster loading but more easily ready by search engines. Ideally make sure your site is coded using CSS (cascading style sheets) and W3C compliant (World Wide Web Consortium).

Once your site is up and running, here are some tools to run to make sure your code is clean:

Markup Validator Service

http://validator.w3.org/

NetMechanic

http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml

Dr. Watson

http://watson.addy.com/

3) URL Structure - Search engines can scan through your site urls and find keywords relevant to the search. Therefore if you are selling Nike shoes, it much better to name your page nike-shoes.html rather than something like page21.htm. This also applies to folder names so you should use something like shoes/nike-shoes.html rather than /store/page21.htm.

4) Link Submissions - We’ve all seen sites that promote submitting your site to 100,000 search engines. This may have worked back in the 90’s but it can actually cause more harm than good. What you want to do is submit your site only to directories with related content. When submitting to search engines, it is best to submit to only the really important ones such as:

a. Google

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

b. Yahoo (account needed)

https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

c. Open Directory

http://www.dmoz.org/

5. Get Feedback - Marketing research can be a very simple but invaluable thing to have on your web site. Simply put up a feedback form to collect data from your visitors. Listen to what they have to say and adjust your site accordingly. When you receive glowing feedback on a product or service you have delivered, post that to a testimonials page. This will instill trust in others who are considering buying from you!

In summary, create a site that has clean code, fast loading and provides quality content that your visitors are looking for. Keep in mind the url structure to make the pages easy to find and only submit your site to the most quality directories and search engines. Quality is more important than quantity here. Finally get feedback from your visitors and heed that feedback to continually improve on your site.

GOOD LUCK IN YOUR ONLINE MARKETING EFFORTS!!

Your Personality Type can affect your purchasing decisions:
Did you know that your personality type can actually influence your buying decisions?  Effective copywriting can influence a non-believer to believe, persuade someone to do something, or it can do the exact opposite and repel a potential customer.  So why will your copywriting persuade some people to buy what you’re selling on a website and other’s to click right out of it?  Widespread knowledge within the sales and marketing world indicate that most people decide to purchase something at an emotional level.  If your copywriting does not appeal to them on a personal, emotional level, then chances are they won’t buy what it is you’re selling.  Each human is incredibly distinctive and the key is to try to cater your writing to appeal to 4 distinct personality types.

Over the years, there have been many behavioral scientists and psychologists that have categorized personality types.  The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI) was developed by Carl Jung to identify 16 unique personality differences.  Another physician, named Hippocrates, observed 4 distinct personality types: Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Melancholic.  In more recent years they were labeled: Driver, Expressive, Analytical and Amiable.  These distinctions in personality can determine what kind of content speaks to you the most and what influences you to buy.

Driver types:  All about Results
“My way or the highway!” These people are impatient, practical, in control, assertive and concerned with the bottom line.  Driver types do not care about all the fluff; they just want to know what the product or service can do for them, how long it will take to get to them and how much it will cost.  Everything else is irrelevant.  Not overly emotional people.

Many Driver types are:
•    CEO’s
•    Managers
•    Sales Representatives
•    Businesspeople
•    Bankers

Analytical types: Detail-Oriented
These types don’t care too much about the results.  They are mostly interested in all the details about your product or service.  They are organized, deliberate and systematic. They thrive off even the tiniest detail about your product. What is the exact size?  Where was it made? What are all the features? What guarantees are offered?  What makes it work? The more details and statistics you can include in your content, the better.  They prefer solid information opposed to emotional stories.  Provide plenty of truthful details to back it up.

Many Analytical types are:
•    Mathematicians
•    Computer Programmers
•    Developers
•    Scientists
•    Doctors

Expressive types: care about Perceptions
Expressive types care a lot about approval and status.  These are the people that buy things just for the status of ownership, or to impress others.  They are very impulsive, undisciplined and self-centered and are very concerned with how others perceive them.  Tell these types of people how your product or service will make them look good, or how it will boost their status in the world.

Many Expressive types are:
•    Musicians
•    Teachers
•    Artists
•    Graphic Designers
•    Comedians
•    Actors
•    Directors

Amiable types:  involved with Feelings
These are the people that are emotional, humanistic and care deeply about their relationships with others.  The question they want answered the most is “why?” Try to cater your writing style around why your product or service will help others or why it will strengthen your relationship with them.  These people need constant reassurance.  Use a lot of testimonials, case studies and stories to highlight your product.

Many Amiable types are:
•    Social Workers
•    Human Resource
•    Entrepreneurs

How to Structure your copywriting to appeal to these Personality Types:
Your market will primarily consist of 1 predominant category, depending on the type of industry you’re appealing to and what product or service you’re selling.  Carefully structuring your content to appeal to that 1 type can persuade them to buy.  Yet if you try to cram 4 distinct writing styles into one marketing page, you may repel everyone involved.  If you know that there will be 2 major personality groups viewing your content, then it would be best to incorporate these unique styles into 2 different pieces of content.  Creating a couple of marketing pages can easily appeal to different personalities.  For example, you can focus one marketing page to appeal to the analytical types by including lots of details and statistics, and create a separate marketing page about the same product that appeals to the expressive type by including comments on how the product would make them look better or improve their status.

Focusing your copywriting efforts to appeal to all 4 distinct personality types by creating separate marketing pages can improve your chances of selling the same product to various personality types.  Remember that not everyone who reads your content will respond to your words the same way.  Different people respond to different things.  Conversions are important to any website.  By appealing to different personalities, you can greatly improve your conversion rate and attract a wide array of customers.

Last week Google officially launched Knol. The story behind Knol is explained here:

“Knol is a free service from Google that allows you to communicate, collaborate, and share your knowledge with the world. We believe that Knol increases the availability of information, encourages freedom of expression, and makes possible new connections between authors and readers.”

I’ve written some Knols in the past few days and found a strong online reputation benefit inherent in this service. Think about how social networks have changed how we do business online. Social media and social networks have had an undeniable impact on online business. These social networks have changed the way almost everyone communicates online, and this can have a serious bottom line impact on your business. It’s not overly pessimistic to say that negative online reputation spread through social media networks can destroy your business. The ownership of social communications channels and the entire balance of power have shifted. Suddenly, your company is not in complete control of your online message anymore.
Read the rest of this entry »

In a word, Yes. Steve Rubel pointed out that “Blogging creates communities around complaints”. That’s a sobering thought for all companies now - whether they are doing business online or not. Customers have a voice and are using it in many instances simply to hurt people or businesses they’ve had a bad experience with. Search engine reputation management can no longer be an afterthought. Exploring this issue further, Ann Smarty over at SEOSmarty.com posted a list of major services that encourage spreading negative reputation online. It’s a complex problem on many levels that you will likely face sooner than later.

The danger for businesses is great. These sites allow anyone to post complaints of any type. If this happens to your company, it can destroy your business. A good way to diffuse the complaints is to join in these discussions and give your side of the story, explaining how you are addressing the situation. But with the proliferation of blogs, it’s become more and more difficult for a company to monitor every mention of their web site online.

Clearly, it’s best to be proactive about your negative online reputation potential. Check out the above list, consider the impact sites like these can have on your business, and give us a call. We can help.

These days its very easy for small business organizations to get an internet site up and running.  A business owner can let his son, cousin, brother, co-worker, etc. design a site in Front Page and get it up on the web.

The difficult part comes when their web site has been online for a while and they don’t get any traffic or they get traffic but no sales.

Internet  Marketing is a fine art and there are dozens of things you can do.  I will outline what I feel are 5 of the most important ways to make your website more marketable.

1) Content - It’s great to have a site that looks good with flash, animation, images etc. but good content is the key to getting the right potential customers to your site and getting them to take action.

2) Clean code - Sites that are coded well are not only faster loading but more easily ready by search engines. Ideally make sure your site is coded using CSS (cascading style sheets) and W3C compliant (World Wide Web Consortium).

Once your site is up and running, here are some tools to run to make sure your code is clean:

Markup Validator Service
http://validator.w3.org/

NetMechanic
http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml

Dr. Watson
http://watson.addy.com/

3) URL Structure - Search engines can scan through your site urls and find keywords relevant to the search. Therefore if you are selling Nike shoes, it much better to name your page nike-shoes.html rather than something like page21.htm.  This also applies to folder names, so you should use something like shoes/nike-shoes.html rather than /store/page21.htm.

4) Relevant Links - We’ve all seen sites that promote submitting your site to 100,000 search engines. This may have worked back in the 90’s but it can actually cause more harm than good.  What you want to do is submit your site only to directories with related content.  Sites that rank on the first page of search results have links that come from trusted industry sites. When submitting to search engines, it is best to submit to only the really important ones such as:

5) Get Feedback - Marketing research can be a very simple but invaluable thing to have on your web site.  Simply put up a feedback form to collect data from your visitors.  Listen to what they have to say and adjust your site accordingly.  When you receive glowing feedback on a product or service you have delivered, post that to a testimonials page.  This will instill trust in others who are considering buying from you!

In summary, create a site that has clean code, fast loading and provides quality content that your visitors are looking for. Keep in mind the url structure to make the pages easy to find and only submit your site to the most quality directories and search engines.  Quality is more important than quantity here.  Finally get feedback from your visitors and heed that feedback to continually improve on your site.

GOOD LUCK IN YOUR ONLINE MARKETING EFFORTS!!

Shaun Roos
B.A. Marketing, Utah State University
Web Development Director
Utah Web Services

If you are a small-to-medium sized website owner, have you put off performing multi-variate testing on your website? A/B testing? Think it only matters for multi-million dollar e-commerce websites?

Conversion rate optimization has finally started to get the attention it has deserved all along. But how many of you small-to-medium website owners are actually implementing a solid conversion improvement strategy on your website?

The number of small-to-medium website owners implementing conversion optimization is slowly increasing, but guaging the impact of marketing campaigns is not only for large online retailers. ROI matters even more for small-to-medium businesses with fewer resources to play with. So Here are 5 free- to low-cost ways that small to medium websites can increase their optimization rates and boost ROI.

1. Establish conversion benchmarks. Where does your website stand right now in terms of sales? Are there areas of your website that you would like to see improve? Note this and establish your current website standing as a benchmark.

2. Choose your definition of success: Is it traffic? Sales for a certain product? Leads? Whatever it is, articulate these business goals and have your marketing person log your website activity up to this point as the benchmark for future improvements. This is critical since many firms lack an effective system for measuring the success of their website against business goals and objectives.

3. Set up website analytics: If you have not done so already have an analytics product installed to help you collect valuable information about how visitors are using your web site. This data is gold to a web site owner, as well organized data helps you to make timely decisions, such as the best products to feature, how effective your advertising efforts have been at bringing converting visitors to your web site, etc. An analytics program I’ve used with good results is Omniture’s Site Catalyst.

So, now that you’ve got this web site visitor data, what do you do with it? Next week we’ll talk about how to use visitor data to raise your web site conversion rates.

Its official. WIworks, Inc has finally launched our Internet Marketing blog. It’s affectionately termed the WIblog.

We’ve given a lot of thought into how to present the most useful information for CEOs, directors, managers and other executives involved in any aspect of your company’s internet marketing strategy. The goal of this blog is to provide a wealth of internet survival tips for CEOs.

So, here’s some tips on how to get the most from this blog:

• Choose the subject matter that’s most relevant for your business organization by looking under the Categories section to the top right. There you’ll find pertinent subjects such as Reputation Management, Social Media, SEO, PPC, Web Design, Programming, Training, etc. Feel free to add your own comments to any post. We want to hear how you, as executives in your company, handle internet marketing challenges and find out what help you need to survive and thrive in this ever-changing online world.
• Check in each week for our WIcast a podcast featuring a variety of C-level executives, like yourself, who are managing the challenges of staying ahead of the pack in the internet marketing space.
• Subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest in Internet marketing strategies that we discuss on the WIblog
• Follow WIworksInc on Twitter and find out just what goes on in the day-to-day routine of this Internet Marketing Firm. We’re sure you’ll find some gems that you can use to ramp up your own internet marketing efforts. We post articles that we find helpful and tear apart those we think are giving misleading information. You don’t want to miss that.
• Check out some of our web design projects on our Flickr feed. You might find just the inspiration you need to move ahead with that Internet Marketing strategy you’ve put on the back burner until just the right time.

This is an internet marketing strategies blog, but there will be no shortage of passion here. This blog was created for you. Your online business is your livelihood, and surely you have much passion for that. We want to hear about it. We can’t wait to hear from you. We only ask that, as professionals, you treat others in this space with respect, even if they have a differing view.

So jump into the conversations. Ask questions or make suggestions. Feel free to talk to us. We’re listening.

Search Engine reputation management is a core need of many businesses today - likely including yours.

Technology has fundamentally changed the way companies like yours interact with customers. Like it or not, your company will be Googled by potential customers. Any negative reports that are easily found can destroy your business. The threat is real. Check out this article entitled It only takes a click to damage your company’s reputation.

The wealth of information and resources your web site visitors now have doesn’t necessarily lead to better customer satisfaction online. The schadenfreude of [social network users] drawing satisfaction from another’s misfortune is part of the popular culture that enjoys the downfall of companies or celebrities, according to Jim Carroll, a Canadian-based trends and innovation expert.

Your best cure is prevention, since the speed of new social network technologies can quickly proliferate negative websites before you ever realized that an irrate customer had an ax to grind with your company and was taking great delight in tearing your company down. Companies have been destroyed by these vicious attacks on their online reputation. Get started monitoring your search engine reputation now.