Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

The Importance Of Experimentation

As children we love to try new things. I know, I have a five year old at home and he has without a doubt the best ideas for things to do around the house. Unfortunately our education system is setup in such a way that overtime discourages us to try new things. Instead we’re taught to conform an follow direction.

In this new era of information technology and the creative economy, a business cannot afford to have a group of employees who don’t know how to think, develop ideas and test them out. How else can a company grow and expand if it cannot be creative and experiment with things to see what works and does not?

These same principles are applicable to Internet marketing. The pace at which the Internet and services running on the Internet demands that we be creative and experiment with ideas at much more rapid pace. For example, Facebook is now offering paid advertising on it’s site. If you’re target market matches the demographic profile of Facebook users this may just be a tremendous source of leads for you. Unless you test it out, how will you know? The options available to a business change every week and you need to be out there find and testing these them out. By doing so, you’ll be guaranteed to find sources of good traffic and leads for your business.

In addition you’ll develope awareness of your site, increase your back links count, and untimately improve your natural search engine rankings which will lead to increased “free traffic”. So why delay? There is virtually nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Instructables.com - Good for Traffic and Links!

I came across this site today and was impressed by the concept. As usual, I investigated further and wanted to see if instructables.com held some SEO value and traffic value. Low and behold, it does!

The site and concept is really cool - somewhat of a hybrid between Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Flicker and others. It is a social site for learning and teaching others “how to” do things like replace LED lights in your keychain, make knitted octopus pets, or even make burlesque tassels - if your into that sort of thing!

It looks like you can register and account and post instructional videos, slide shows and written explanations about whatever it is you want to share with the community. Within the post, you can also post what looks to be a followed link back to a website. The individual page rank on a particular instruction site isn’t very high but if you do have a valuable video that gets promoted to the first page, you will probably get some great traffic out of it!

So there you go… happy late Valentines Day… no go make some burlesque tassels!

PAD Submission Services

In doing some recent research for a client we compiled this nice list of PAD Submission Services.

As a software developer you need to make people aware of your products. Afterall, just by posting your software to your website does not mean people will find it. The fastest way to expose your product in shareware, or freeware form is to produce a Portable Application Description (PAD) file (which is an xml document) and submit it to all of the shareware and freeware sites online.

What’s the problem?

There are thousands of these sites so unless you have a lot of free time on your hands doing this yourself for each of your products is not a likely solution. As a result PAD submission services have cropped and we’ve brought to you a list of them.

Here is the list of services we’ve identified. We have not used any of these so we cannot vouch for their quality but we felt compelled to share this information with you since it will save you some of your precious time looking for each of them on your own.

If you use any of these please feel free to come back here and comment on the results you’ve seen. We’d love to find out! Also, if you have others to suggest, please do so and we’ll add them to the list.

PAD Submission Services

• http://software.ivertech.com/submissionService/submissionServiceInfo.aspx
• http://www.avangate.com/seo-services/software-submission.php
• http://www.submitmysoft.com/
• http://www.elwinsoft.com/submit.html
• http://submit-everywhere.com/details.html
• http://www.softwaresubmit.com

Yahoo! Turns Down Microsoft’s Buyout Proposal

Yahoo! has turned down Microsoft’s buyout proposal!

Not much more to say about it - the Yahoo! board turned it down citing that it was not in the best interest of shareholders. Not sure how more money is not in their best interested, but we’ll see what happens over the next few weeks.

So what do you think of the buyout - should Microsoft buy Yahoo!?

Simple Bookmarking Widget - AddThis.com

One of our clients put me onto this tool from AddThis.com which places a bookmarking widget on your site giving visitors the ability to add your page to a multitude of different sites.

Promoting your content is the next important step after writing it. There are various ways you can promote your content and this tool from AddThis.com is just one more way to make it convenient for your visitors to promote for you.

The tool is free and easily installs wherever you want via convenient html script. In second you’ll have a component on your page that will allow a user to submit the page to a multitude of different places.

We hope this tool comes in useful for you!

Secrets for Success in Google’s AdWords Site Placement Campaigns

As a manger of PPC campaigns, it is my responsibility to find the best ROI for our clients paid advertising dollar. For a while now I have been experimenting with the content network and how to best manage and optimize a campaign there. If you have created a content network campaign, you will most likely know that it can either be a great source of cheap traffic, or a huge money pit! Here is my approach for creating a successful content network campaign.

1. Separate your Search and Content Campaigns.
A rule I stick to and discovered long ago was to separate my search and content campaign. It can be quite tempting to simply “flick the switch” and turn on the content network. Resist the temptation. Even though Google doesn’t include content numbers in your quality score calculation, separating the two will allow you to see your data more clearly.

2. Bid Less
A good rule of thumb is to bid between 50% - 75% of your search bit for the content network. Try this to start and increase if necessary. Monitor your placement position and try to aim to have your ad placed anywhere between 1st and 4th positions.

3. Monitor the Reports
Set up a “Site Placement” report in your AdWords account to run once a week and monitor the results. Take some time to go to these sites yourself and see what kind of content they offer. Does your ad have any business being there? If not, add the site to your blocked sites list. Compile a list of sites that DO talk about your products or services and set aside. Make sure you include any site that has also driven you conversions and low bounce rates (in Google Analytics).

4. Create a Site Targeted Campaign
Take your list of positively performing sites and create a site targeted campaign with them. System won’t allow you to add a site? Proceed to Step 5.

5. Contact Your Google Rep
If your one of the few who have an agency rep, call them and ask your representative to develop a “site pack” for your client. A site pack is a list of sites that Google has in their inventory and can add to a site targeted campaign for you. Make sure to send your Google rep the list of sites you have created yourself. Once you receive the site pack from Google, go through it with a fine tooth comb and evaluate each site they have suggested. Check for relevancy to the content your website, product and service represent.

5. Repeat step 3 and optimize your bids and sites for conversions and quality traffic (low bounce rate etc).

Don’t Waste Your Search Engine Marketing Efforts - Apply These 17 Conversion Principles And Generate Leads and Sales

Over the years we’ve had a chance to systematically test and prove many different conversion principles. Today we’re sharing them all with you so that you can benefit from all of this research!

Search engine optimization is a means to an end. That being the delivery of qualified traffic to your site. All that new traffic is wasted if you can’t convert it into leads or sales. Since our clients tend to judge us on how much we help grow their business vs. how many keywords we get them ranked for we’ve spent a lot of time working out strong conversion techniques for sites. Here is the list that we use when producing or maintaining our clients sites from a search engine optimization perspective.

1. Include the phone number in the top right corner of the banner on every page. If possible, use a call tracking service such as Who Called?
2. Use a “Click To Call” feature on the phone number. Let’s face it, web visitors are motivated by convenience and nifty things, and click to call fills both of those needs.
3. In the top banner and on every page include the value proposition for the visitor
4. Create strong calls to action in key scanning points on the home page. For example, give away something for free to get their contact information. Once you have their contact info you’re much more likely to sell them something over the phone!
5. Provide a short privacy statement on each form. This should be linked to a PIPEDA compliant privacy statement for us Canadians, or the equivalent in the US, or abroad. At the very least provide a “privacy” link to your privacy statement immediately next to the submit button of any form.
6. Also, provide point of action assurances as necessary. This includes the privacy statement on forms – but could also include a re assurance as to why a visitor should call, or complete a form and that you’ll respect their privacy, and meet their objectives.
7. Use Email Marketing to re assure users after they’ve converted. Send them a confirmation email (HTML) that confirms their submission was made, and that your team will follow up accordingly. Include any “next step” information which may be required by the user. Make them feel special.
8. Provide a contact form on the contact us page which has the following properties
   • Client and server side validation (server side if possible)
   • Mentions the privacy statement
   • Asks customer comments first, then collects personal contact information
   • Limits the number of fields to only those absolutely necessary. Additional information can be collected after contact with the prospect has been made
9. Include a site map for visitors
10. Include a “home” button in the main navigation bar (make current pages in active on the nav bar)
11. Ensure that copy is just the right length to explain the products, services and value propositions for the reader, and not any longer.
12. Use inline text navigation (anchor text) to allow the reader to follow the desired path through the website while reading the copy, and then take the ultimate step of converting to a lead by submitting a contact form, or calling from whichever page they decide to convert on! Don’t make them hunt for your contact information.
13. Use pictures of people - it humanizes your business and warms people up to your services.
14. Use an H1 tag on every page and break up copy using H2 tags. This improves the “scanability” of each page allowing the user to determine if they want to bother reading the page. It’s also good SEO practice.
15. Include all certifications, accreditations, association logos, etc. on the site and repeat them on every page perhaps in the footer, or header.
16. Remove the “Reset” button from all of your forms. Why give the user one more convenient way not to convert!
17. Always construct each page with the four types of traffic in mind. Note: we did not define the visitor types but cam across them in our research. If anyone knows who did, please comment and let us know. We’ll add the credits (with a link) to this post.
    • Visitors who know exactly what they want are looking for facts.
    • Those with a need but not all of the answers and are looking for facts but also reassurance.
    • Window Shoppers – those visitors who are simply looking for information which they may or may not act on in the future
    • The lost – visitors who would up on the site by mistake. Let them know they are in the wrong place as soon as possible – this happens naturally if you’ve done the above correctly.

Don’t waste search engine marketing efforts by not maximizing your opportunity to convert all of that traffic! If you take the time to implement these conversion principles we are convinced you’ll see an increase in conversions. Good luck and we hope this information helps you grow your business!

Microsoft Is Officially Trying To Buy Yahoo!

So it’s real this time - Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!

I am thrilled by this! It’s time that this merger happens. The news confirms Microsoft’s commitment to search and paid advertising and will give Yahoo! the financial support it needs to continue forward. To find out more checkout the post on seeking alpha.

What do you think about this merger?