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## Copyright

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ISBN: 978-1-4477-9595-7

Email: info@creativedevelopment.com.au

Website: www.creativedevelopment.com.au

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Contents

Copyright 2

Contents 3

Sign up to get unlimited free updates. 6

Introduction 7

Road Map for this book 9

Important Reading Materials 10

A quick glossary 11

Eleven steps to ecommerce success 13

How the web works (a very quick overview) 14

Some common misconceptions about the web 15

How modern websites work 17

Some free tools before you start 20

The eCommerce Model 22

So you have an idea – what now? 23

Core aims of any online business 24

Will your idea suck? 25

Testing your business idea 28

Open Source ways to become an internet mogul 30

Are you Competition Resistant? 34

Planning your website 35

Keyword Set up 36

Attention Interest Desire Action in Keyword Choices 37

The Long tail 38

Choosing the right web host 41

How To Choose A Domain Name 41

Choosing a domain 43

Blogging – Start Early 44

Lessons from Obama on Web Design 45

Ecommerce 47

How eCommerce Works 47

Considerations for selling online 49

Shopping carts/ecommerce systems 49

Payment Gateways 52

Security 55

Ecommerce Success 57

An Whirlwind Introduction to SEO 58

There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book! 58

The value of SEO – why it pays to be number 1 58

Top 11 SEO methods for Plumbers 60

Top 9 Real Estate SEO Tips 62

New SEO Strategy – Keep your customers happy! 65

Google and the 10 Commandments of SEO 66

How Google Places works – Improve your position 68

There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book! 68

Why Local Search Marketing? 69

Week Website Launch Formula 70

There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book! 70

What is better than SEO? 71

There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book! 71

How to get people to buy 72

Pictures worth a thousand words – Online Marketing Rule#1 72

What makes a good call to action? 73

Landing Pages 73

Product pages that encourage conversions 75

How to get people coming back 78

There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book! 78

10 Tips for the best email marketing campaigns; 78

Advertising Online 80

ppc vs seo – when to use Google Adwords 80

Improve your Google Adwords performance 83

There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book! 83

Evaluating Content Sharing Methods 84

A Comparison of Social Advertising – Digg, Facebook, Reddit 86

Mobile Marketing in a nutshell- Android, iPhone, Blackberry 88

20x click through, 1c per click advertising 90

Using Seduction in B2B Marketing 91

Advertising Offline 96

Branding 96

Direct mail flyers 98

Case Studies 100

Tough Mudder – A Marketing Case Study 100

Hidden Pizza Restaurant – A Wasted Opportunity 102

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# Introduction

My company is Creative Development, a marketing and web design agency based in Sydney. Every year we build ecommerce websites for clients across a wide range of industries, from recruitment to Baby products. We have made many attempts to launch new businesses online, with mixed levels of success.

Over the course of the last ten years, I have had the pleasure of working with some global brands and have built some great websites that have more than served their purpose. However, I have also had some catastrophic failures. Most of the failures can be traced back to one or two key issues or moments in time where we made the wrong decision.

I have found it difficult to get good impartial advice on how to build a business online. Web designers have their personal preferences for the types of websites they build, and often the so-called "mentors" have very little experience in the field in which they are advising.

We have tried to take as much of the knowledge we have on marketing, web design and ecommerce, and distilled it down to an easy to understand language. We hope that this book will cover enough information to keep those new to the internet as entertained as seasoned veterans.

The internet has become a massively open market where anyone who has an idea can find someone to develop it and make it a reality. You do not have to be a first mover (Google came along 5 years after the launch of the first search engine) and you do not have to create something completely unique.

Almost all of the chapters in this book have come from question and answer sessions we have run with our clients or with people starting out with ecommerce. Our main aim is to provide as much actionable knowledge for you.

This is not a get rich quick book. This is not a book about Multi-Level Marketing or Affiliate marketing (although we do cover affiliates as a sales channel). This book is not necessarily only about eCommerce.

This book is about creating something new, that wasn't there before.

I am available for consulting and speaking

All you have to do is go to our website, http://www.creativedevelopment.com.au and contact us for more information.

# Road Map for this book

Like all good works, this is in progress. Below are some of the things planned for this book. If you want to see other chapters here, go to our website and suggest some.

1. Think of a better title

2. Growth Industries Online - Micro Trends, Micro Niching ( verticals etc), Freelancing

3. How to find great business ideas - Make notes, read business magazines, read blogs,

4. Do I need a designer?

5. Taking an existing idea and changing it

6. Some Things To Look Out For -Hosting scams, domain name scams, website submission scams.

7. Proper Planning for Online Business - Ecommerce or not, content, selling, sign up, subscriptions, Communities advertising.

8. Planning your website - Hosting web pages The Cloud Online vs host.

9. Surveying customers

10. Use amazon mechanical turk

11. Crowdsource

12. Shipping, Handling, Privacy oh my!

13. Building store fronts that sell

14. Free advertising Methods:eBay, communities, classifieds, directories, advertising contra, squidoo

15. Subscriptions, Shopping carts

16. Affiliate marketing systems

17. Only mothers share pictures online. - How information is shared online, Facebook etc.

18. Using Freelancers – oDesk etc.

19. The legalities of domains

20.

# Important Reading Materials

Someone once said "Leaders are Readers". If you want to find some of the books that inspired me, here is a list.

37 Signals – Getting Real: Its a free ebook. Some of the key things you learn there, are Underdo your competition, Outside money is plan B, Launch on time and on budget.

The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki

Purple Cow - Seth Godin

Blue Ocean Strategy -

The Innovators Solution - Clayton M. Christensen

8 hour work week – Tim Ferris

Internet Business Mastery – An online course that has a podcast each week.

# A quick glossary

Broadly speaking, we are using terms like he/she interchangeably. We are also using terms like products and services interchangeably. Unless we state otherwise, products and services have the same mechanisms for buying and selling as each other.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.

I am going to use this as a catch-all term to mean "anything that promotes your site to number one". Eventually we will differentiate between things that improve your website (on-page SEO) and things that promote your site with links etc (off page SEO).

eCommerce

Again some people break down eCommerce and eBusiness. However I am going to use the word eCommerce to define anything within "business marketing and transacting online".

Keywords

For keywords, think; "words people will use in search engines to find my website." When a person is browsing, reading, researching what are they putting into search engines to stumble across your product.

Open Source

When something is described as Open Source it means that the developers have allowed access to the end product's source materials. It does not mean free/gratis, and it does not mean the system is not offered without conditions. Broadly speaking, Open Source systems are good because they are, usually, developed in a way that anyone with an understanding of the development language can make changes to it. They can be tricky, though, for people without a grasp of the system because they are offered usually only with the support of a community. There are a variety of open source systems available for different uses, from Auction websites to Content Management to Operating Systems.

Content Management System (CMS)

In the early days of the web CMSs were restricted to Newspapers and Academic organisations. Now anyone can install Wordpress and make it work to their specifications. The main idea behind a CMS is that a user can add content and make small changes to the layout, while the look, feel and structure does not change.

Landing Page

This is a term for a page on a website that will receive hits from your advertising and marketing. It could be your front page, or it could be a product specific page. Usually the landing page is meant to convert browsers into customers as efficiently as possible. Some websites are ONLY landing pages, designed to target specific customers and have high conversions rates.

# Eleven steps to ecommerce success

For those that don't have the time to go through this whole book, here is the distilled version.

1. Sell as many unique products as you can

2. Do your research. Use Google Keyword tool to find the most likely combinations of keywords your potential customers will use

3. Pick a system that will help you sell. We use Wordpress with WP eCommerce (for small stores) or Magento (for more than 20 products) to sell, they are both free and open source.

4. When naming your products, and writing on your pages, be consistent with your use of words to describe your products (using the keywords from point 2)

5. Try to write a blog about your products and industry, it will help you stay on top of trends and it will help with your Google ranking

6. Try to limit the time a user has to spend finding the products they want, and buying them. A one-click checkout will help.

7. Use lots of small images. They need to be small to help with load time of a website, and you need to vary them to keep people interested

8. Encourage feedback and participation, through Facebook, your packaging, how you send to people etc.

9. Payment gateways connected directly to your bank save double handling, and increase trust. If you can't afford the monthly fee, pick a gateway like Payment Express that has flexible payment options and can still connect directly to your account.

10. The key to selling more than the next guy is in your terms and conditions. Ship faster, for less money, give a 30 day money back guarantee, offer 24 hour phone support etc.

11. Build as many links back to your product pages as possible. Use Public Relations and SEO strategies to make your product pages the most prominent part of your site.

# How the web works (a very quick overview)

Websites are documents sitting on a computer somewhere in the world, connected to the global network of computers, called the world wide web. Computers are identified by an IP address, something like 209.192.268.2. Website addresses, www.apple.com are translations of those IP addresses into something memorable.

There are globally recognised standards and protocols that everyone tries to adhere to how people interact with these documents and how they relate to each other. The system is freely open to anyone to interact with, change and modify within those protocals. The major benefit of this is that innovation is a core principal of the internet.

Anyone with a computer can change the way everyone in the world does business. Websites like YouTube and Amazon, both of which started at someone's home, forever altered how people will use video and buy books. Programs like the Fire Fox browser or Open Office are created by a collection of people who have often never even met each other.

The downside to an open, collective, system is that there are no hard and fast rules on how the web should work. For governments this means a hacker can disrupt national security in a heartbeat. For poor web designers it means that a website never looks the same from one web browser to another.

Do not worry you can't break it.

The point is, get stuck in. Jump online to some forums and interact with people. Download some software and start your own wiki. Download Firefox and view the web with different set of eyes. Buy something from Amazon. Get someone to do something for you for a fiver at www.fiverr.com.

## Some common misconceptions about the web

In the early days of the web, it was only used by a few universities, connected by telephone lines and using simple text to exchange messages. Now almost anyone can browse the web with internet connections that can stream live video or download movies in minutes. The depth and breadth of any market on the internet is astonishing.

Everyone who buys speaks English.

We have a website that is almost exclusively geared to selling products and services in Australia, yet around 1/3rd of our traffic comes from India and China because we write about issues that affect businesses globally. When doing business online, you have to keep in mind that your next customer may be from the other side of the world, browsing using a translator. If you have automatic payment gateways, what will you do if someone buys from overseas, how will you ship to them?

The web always looks the same.

There are hundreds of different ways you can interact with the web. Traditionally using Internet Explorer on a PC was by far the dominant way people interacted with the web, because no one changed the default option that came with their computer. Now people are starting to use other browsers like Opera and Google Chrome, and using their phones. Each browser and system works differently and has different features.

Google is Search Engines

In Australia, Google makes up around 94% of all searches. Whereas in China Baidu makes up 65% and Google makes up 33%. Globally there are thousands of different search engines for different areas of the web. There are some, like Froogle (Google's product search) that just focus on the price of products sold online

People make decisions exclusively on their own

97 percent of consumers now use online media when researching products or services in their local area. Consumers use 7.9 different media sources when shopping for products or services in their local area, up from 6.5 sources in 2009 and 5.8 in 2008. Consumers soak up a massive range of information before they make a final decision.

The internet is increasingly becoming a place of constant feedback. Between Twitter and Google showing user reviews, businesses and customers can see how a business is performing in real time. Word of Mouth is now THE most important consideration in operating a business online.

People who spend time online, only spend about 30 seconds per website.

There are communities for everything, from ecommerce to babies. The level of interaction in those communities is staggering. A user on a website like Reddit.com spends an average of 15 minutes per session, and Facbook, 11.5 minutes per session. These people are loyal and interactive. Visiting and spending time in the forums of your industry is a must.

Only Kids use Facebook

Amount of information shared online. Products shared online. WOM. Time spend on Facebook

Only Geeks use their phone for the web.

Times spent browsing, types of browsers, Mobile users currently make up around 5% of all web browsing, and we already know that those browsers are tech-savvy, heavily connected, early adopters. By the end of 2011, we expect, mobile browsing to make up as much as 15% of all web browsing. We also know that mobile browsers spend more time on websites than normal browsers do. Mobile browsers have different requirements (screen size, media use etc) to desktop browsers, they do not have all the same functions as normal desktop browser.

## How modern websites work

When websites first became mainstream, they were mostly made in such a way that a person needed special tools to edit them. Now websites are made using a wide range of languages and tools, most of them very accessible to everyone. Most websites are not made with hand written code, they are created using a system that allows you to just change the text, and then the website does the rest. Just to get you familiar with how these things work, there are usually 7 key parts that make up a modern website.

 Domain – this is the www.yourwebsite.com bit.

 Host – this is where your website documents site, and it controls your email.

 PHP is language used to create dynamic websites.

 CSS makes it look pretty and controls the colours, images and layout of some parts of the website

 HTML is what browsers read. Usually links and images are pulled together using this language.

 Javascript makes things active, like drop down menus and some animations.

 A database that stores all the information such as page content and administration preferences. The most common one in most modern websites is MySQL, but there are plenty of others out there.

Most websites have two distinct areas.

Header

The Website (Front End), which has the following notable areas;Body

Widgets

Footer

The Administration Section (Back End)

Most modern website architecture works like this;

Your Website

Pages

Menus

Widgets

A database that holds your preferences and your website content

A System that controls how the website is generated

A Design Theme – Generates the look of the website

## Some free tools before you start

Take some time to play around with these online tools; what you learn from this will become a huge part of your online business later.

Gmail – Free email

Use Gmail to set up a free email account. One you have this, you can also use the full suite of Google tools to improve your business.

Wordpress.com - Create a free website here.

Wordpress.com is a hosted version of the popular blogging platform. This website allows you to set up a very basic website, with a few pages and some functions of a full

You will not have access to your own email address, but you will have a lot of the main functions of a website that you need to get started. I thoroughly recommend starting a blog about the product you are selling. Just write about what you are looking for, and what you are going to achieve. You don't have to be too specific, but just start gathering feedback.

There are other websites that offer similar options like Blogspot.com, TypePad, Moveable Type etc, but we find Wordpress.com the best experience for what you will need later.

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool is a part of their website analytics. It can tell you how often particular keywords are searched for online. This is particularly useful when looking for the market size for your product.

Use the Google Keyword tool to see how many people are searching for the products you are selling. Some caveats; This will show all local and global searches that include you keyword. So if you search for "books" this will include buyers, sellers, researchers, everyone. The figures here are also known to have some variations from reality, especially if the keyword you are using has low search volumes.

Facebook

There are a plenty of things you can do with Facebook that will help you investigate your market. It is not just a place to post pictures of your cousin's Bar Mitzvah. It is free to set up a page for your product or service, which you can use to gather a following. You can use the Facebook market place to find buyers of your product. You can use their advertising platform to a) research your market size and b) gather leads. Finally you can use Facebook to see if there are any groups that you would be able to use to gather feedback.

Keyword Spy

www.KeywordSpy.com allows you to look at what other competitors there are in your market place and how much they are spending on marketing with Google Adwords.

eBay

eBay is a great place to start out looking at the market for your product. You can see historical and current sales, and you can see how your competitors pitch themselves. In the medium term I don't think eBay is a good way to actually sell your product, for reasons I will go through later. For now I will just say that you want to own the means of processing the sale and the means of transaction.

Online Forums

There are so many online forums worth getting involved it. There are plenty of people out there that will give you feedback on everything from the product you are selling to the website your are building. All you have to do is search on Google for your industry forums.

## The eCommerce Model

Search Engines

Branding/Marketing/Advertising

Returning Customer

Good Website Structure

Links to your site

Your Position in SEs

www.yourwebsite.com.au (domain)

Your Host

Your Website

Catalogue

Shopping Cart

Friends

Customer

Payment Gateway

Bank

Reviews

# So you have an idea – what now?

Answer the following questions;

1. Our customers are....

2. We are offering them....

3. Which is we create by taking..... and adding.....

4. Which will help improve customers lives by.......

5. They will pay us $xxx because.......

6. Which we will take from them by......

7. They will find out how good we are by......

8. We will keep making money from them because.....

If you have a basic idea of what it is you are offering, then you can do some early market testing.

## Core aims of any online business

This is really what this book is all about, and what should drive any online business decisions. These core aims

 Build income as autonomously as possible. There is very little point in working 24/7 just to maintain a small website. You also want marketing methods that will keep driving customers to you, even when you are not maintaining them.

 Own Intellectual property and a brand that is worth something. This allows you grow the brand, and the website, beyond something that is just a website. It also means that the business has something of value that can either be sold off or kept as an asset.

 Have a website that is easy to maintain. You don't want something that has thousands of dollars in licensing fees. You also don't want a website that costs $200 an hour to fix when there is a problem, or you want to make a change.

 Own the customers that buy from you. This differentiates an eBay store from a website that works. You want to be able to gather as much information on your customers as possible. You also want to turn them into fans of the store, not just the products they buy.

## Will your idea suck?

We get asked all the time what we think of this idea, or that business concept. Most-times it is as plain as "start a skip hire company" but occasionally the idea is one that really blows the doors off. So we thought we would write 6 ways to tell if your idea sucks. Obviously this won't apply to all situations, and in most cases you won't be able to truly know if the idea sucks until you are knee deep in it paddling like crazy. However, if you tick one or more of these boxes, maybe it is time to go back to the drawing board.

You must be able to talk about your idea.

How often have you heard this;

"I have this great idea for a business, but I can't tell you about it"

Unless you work in the intelligence community, this is the NUMBER ONE way to tell that your idea sucks. Aside from this being an unhealthy level of paranoia, it also pretty much dooms your idea to the scrapheap. If you think your idea is unique, but it relies on complete secrecy, then your idea is almost certainly a) not that unique and b) destined never to get off the ground. You can tell if you fall into this category because you punctuate any mention of your idea with the phrase "but tell anyone and I will kill you".

If your idea is a good one, you MUST be able to bounce it off people. Also your idea should unique enough that no one except your closest competitors would be able to implement it, and even then they may not be able to do anything about a truly exceptional idea.

You need to get in-the-field experience, or find someone who has

The road to culinary glory is littered with people who "just love food" but have never worked in restaurant before, or haven't since they were 16. People love "ideas" because they are low maintenance, low risk and don't harm anyone. When that idea is put into practice, that is when the damage is done.

The best ideas come from people who work in a field for years, and then have an ah-ha moment. Archimedes had some experience in math before his Eureka moment.

However, do not feel that if you have never worked in your target industry you will never get your ideas off the ground. Taking influences from multiple industries is what makes some ideas completely unique. Just be careful to enlist the right help from within your target industry first. Also make sure that you can find someone you trust within the industry to support the creation of your idea.

You should make money from the start

In order for an idea to actually float, you should be able to pre-sell the product first. This gives you two motivating factors, one an idea that you can actually make money from your business and two that you actually have to ship the damn thing. Pre-selling your product also helps you crystallise your marketing and sales information. If you are looking at 12 months of development before anyone can even look at your idea, or you are going to give the product away without any other financial support, your idea is probably doomed to the trash can.

You can give away a product to gather feedback, as long as you have a deadline when you are going to ship and start charging people.

Before anyone says " but Google!" and other fabled rags-to-riches stories from silicon valley, there is one small addition to this point. Pre-selling includes gaining VC funding, which is what Google and other tech companies eventually did. Even hoping for VC funding is a bad sign as we see when;

You must be able to map the business process in detail from beginning to end

If your business plan looks something like;

1. Collect Underpants

2. ? insert magic here ?

3. Profit

then there is a good chance your idea sucks. If you rely on VC funding, or something coming together at the last minute, then there is a good chance your business is doomed to fail. For one thing, VCs really will only fund businesses that are making money already, (see the above point). For another, VCs only fund a very small portion of the programs that get presented to them.

If you build it, they almost certainly won't come. If you can't answer the questions at the start of this chapter, or you can't map the process of building the business, you may be in trouble. Another reason to map out the whole process is it will give you an idea of how long it will take you to build the thing.

Ask your customers for feedback, not your family.

Unless your family are the Rothschilds or the Trumps, asking your family for feedback is generally a pointless exercise. Your family are pre-programmed to give a particular type of feedback, whether that is good or bad. Sometimes they will tell you they love it, when they don't. Other times they just won't be able to give any specific feedback, because they know how you will react. You need to find potential customers and get feedback from them.

It is fine to give away the product when you are testing, because that can be a good way to iron out bugs, as long as you are getting good feedback.

You must be able to put a deadline on availability.

Not putting a deadline on availability is usually a kiss of death for a business. If you have mapped out your business process, then you should be able to put a timeline on availability, and billing. Saying "sometime next year" is also a bad idea, because next year is always just around the corner, just ask the creators of Duke Nukem Forever. Deadlines also need to be adhered to, so if you get to your deadline without the end in sight, then it may be a good idea just to pull the plug and move on to more profitable exercises.

## Testing your business idea

Whether you are a large corporation with cash to burn, or a bootstrapping start-up, testing your idea can be cheap and can yield some great feedback. The main goal of testing your idea is to help you refine your idea. Most ideas or programs you want to develop will never make it out of the testing phase, but they might lead you onto something else. The three key things about business testing are;

1. You generate real, quantifiable results that you can use later

2. You use real market conditions, ie your family doesn't count

3. You keep the cost to a minimum.

How big is the market for your niche?

You can use tools, such as the Google Keyword Tool, to see how many people are searching for the product you are looking to sell. The ideal number of searches changes depending on the market. If you are selling "Shipbuilding services in Jakarta", there is a good chance anyone searching for those services is a genuine buyer. However if you are selling "shoes" globally, the market breaks down into buyers, sellers, writers, researchers etc.

Who else is operating in your niche?

Even if you are building something that world has never seen before, there is still a very good chance people were already using something else before your product existed. Before freezers existed people used to buy Ice from companies that would ship it in from colder countries, (obviously from not far away). You should be looking for a niche where people are already advertising, because if there is money to be made, others will be advertising. You can simply enter your search term into Google to see whether there are a decent number (say 4 to 5 at a minimum) of sponsored links associated with the search term.

Are the First Page Websites Selling Similar Products or Services?

You should look at the websites that appear on your first page of results for your selected keywords. You want to make sure that there are at least 2 or 3 of these websites selling similar products or services. This is a further validation of the market viability. It also helps you understand the competition, in order to determine how you can add value in this space

Can You Achieve a position in Google that Gets You On the First Page of Search Results?

Getting listed on page one of Google can be a lot easier than people realize. However, it requires you to select keywords that are less competitive. Specifically, you want a search term that has less than about 30,000 other competing web pages. There are some excellent tools available online, as mentioned at the bottom of this article, to help you find out how many competing web pages exist for any given search term.

You also want to look at the strength of those competing websites, and specifically, the strength of the top 10 results for your search term. This involves analyzing the Pank Rank, number of backlinks and metadata of those sites. Again, excellent tools to do this research quickly and accurately are referenced at the end of this page. In essence, you are looking for at least one or two weak websites on the first page of results that you could potentially displace.

The One-Page Website Test.

This is the ultimate, low cost, test to see if your product has a market. This is adapted from Tim Ferris' The Four Hour Work Week, which has a good outline of other methods for testing the market. After reading through this book, you should have a better idea of how these items fit together, but for now, this is the recipe.

Basically what you do is you build a small website using a cheap domain and hosting. You can use something like Wordpress.com or your own host to promote just one product or service. Just make the front page the product focus page. In the top right hand corner place a button that says "fill in your email to buy now for $xx". Ensure you have adequate privacy policy on display. Use the form to then display a page that says you are out of stock, and the customer will be notified when stock is available.

You then use $50 of Google adwords to drive some traffic to your one page site and see if anyone is buying. The more traffic you can send the better, because it will give you a chance to tweak the wording of your marketing.

## Open Source ways to become an internet mogul

Here are some free/cheap combinations of ideas that you can use to get started with your business online.

10 Years ago if you had an idea for a new business, especially online, you had to go out into the dirt and plant the seeds yourself. Now, however, there are a thousand programs that you can buy, re-purpose, develop and change to create almost anything you might care to build. Facebook was crafted from PHP and Javascript, now there are open source programs you can use to create your own social network that won't cost you anything. Here are just some of the inernet properties you can without spending thousands on development.

Your Own Facebook/MySpace

Creating a social network around your brand is probably the direction most businesses will try to take over the next 5 years. Whether that is on Facebook or on their own website, it is the best way to connect their brands with the users.

Wordpress mu has now been folded into just straight Wordpress. However the features are still the same. Using this free flexible blogging platform you can create a network of blogs, homepages etc with very little technical expertise. You could build your own network of cat lovers with everyone having their own subdomain like johnny.catlovers.com.au. Wordpress is an open source program that is probably the largest blogging platform in use today. Out of the box it comes with all the things you would need for a website, including SEO facilities, templates and some eCommerce features etc.

Ning isn't free, but it is a pretty good, low cost, social networking platform. Groups like The Plain White Ts use it to connect with their fans. Out of the box you can choose from one of 50 distinct and unique themes. Ning allows you to define your own network profile questions. Like Facebook, every Ning Network comes with a rich invitation engine, with full web address book and .csv file importing to enable you and members to invite new members.

Joomla and Com Builder are probably a little more advanced than the previous two, and really only for those that have some development knowledge and skill. However they are free, and very powerful. In order to keep up with other CMS systems, Joomla is slowly shedding some of the problems it has faced in the past, so issues over novices using the program have started to recede.

Your Own eBay

There are thousands of things you could use auction scripts for. You could auction off your time, your user's time. You could auction off your soccer players for the off season.

There are a plethora of open source auction scripts out there. However the one with the most promise is probably WeBid. It comes standard with all the things you would need to get started, templates, pricing structures and an easy to use admin section.

Your own Digg.

The basic premise of a Digg clone would be to allow users to vote on links posted. This could be an in-house voting system on the next project you work on. It could be a voting system at school for the next class president. Either way there are a few options for open, online voting and networking.

Reddit code is open source, but not really for the faint of heart. It does have a great community of developers working around it, but you need more than a basic idea of what you are doing.

Your Own Mashable

Mashable has some incredible viewing figures, with something lik 30 million plus pageviews. In part this is because it has a large network of bloggers and writers working to create new content all the time.

If you wanted to create something like that, again you would turn to Wordpress. It already has all the different author levels built in, with plugins that can help with quality control, spam protection etc. There are already a thousand "article" sites that take advantage of this, but you could use it for something more worthwhile. You could get your developers to write about their experiences working on the latest project. You could get your friends to write about their experiences around town. Wordpress comes with a range of free plugins that can help you turn your website into a hub, with aggregated feeds from other websites etc.

Online Forums

Again, open online communication is going to be key for brands over the next 10 years. Scripts like SMF offer you the chance to have an online forum for your business. You could use it to build a forum on the latest in car building trends. The possibilities are actually endless.

Your own Google

Creating your own search engine is, unsurprisingly, not nearly as easy as the other options listed. Most open source search platforms require a server to which you have complete unrestricted access, and a good knowledge of the language they are built in. The other thing is that if you want a search engine that covers a lot of ground, you need massive processing power and storage space, which is usually more than you would get leasing a server on its own.

You could use Google's custom search but this is restricted to a search of only 3000 websites, which is still big enough for most people, but not big enough to create a complete search engine. Also, of course, you are restricted to Google's own engine.

Your own Twitter

There are a few reasons why you would want to build your own Twitter clone. Maybe you have an event where you want to keep the microblogging on your domain, within your own website. Maybe you want secure internal microblogging at your next function.

---

Probably the most complete is Status.net, with a good range of themes and plugins for you to choose from.

Your own Craigslist/Gumtree

Having a classifieds site is not a bad way of making money. It is also a good way for you to sell things specific to your industry. Being an industry leader is important, and owning a way for users and suppliers to communicate is a big part of that leadership.

Some cPanel/Fantastico systems come with a free classifieds program called Noahs Classifieds. They claim that NOAH is the fastest growing Classifieds Platform on the Web. It comes with sub.categories, custom fields and e-commerce to charge to post. OSClass is another fairly complete classifieds program, with the added bonus that it is open source.

Your own Realestate.com.au/Domain.com.au

If you are a real estate agent, the reasons for having your own website with listings is clear. Wordpress has templatesthat allow you to blog and upload your listings. However there are some programs that are more geared towards multi-user, feed aggregation.

Again, cPanel comes with Open Realty, which has, integrated blogging and lead capture. Combine this with commercial add-ons such as IDX data importer, RETS data importer, and advanced Google map integration and you have all tools needed to have a top real estate website in your market.

Your own Wikipedia

 Building a wiki around your brand/business is another trend that is moving quickly. Universities use the technology to share information across departments, business can use it to allow all stakeholders to contribute in a project. There a hundreds of different open source wiki platforms to choose from, including the popular one that runs Wikipedia itself.

Choosing the right wiki platform for you comes down to what you want, and how capable you are of building the templates yourself.

If you have any great open source programs you know about, let us know in the comments below!

## Are you Competition Resistant?

Strong businesses are resistant to competition. If you want a business to last, you need to aim for a few of these aspects.

Be difficult to copy. Things that are difficult to copy; A brand name, a trademark, a recipe, a personality.

Intellectual Capital, copyright, trademark, patent, systems, process, innovation etc, are the most powerful ways to avoid copycats.

Exclusivity. A distribution monopoly or licence agreements.

Large asset based production, where the barriers to entry are high.

Promote the value of your product not the price. Pricing is transient, value can be sustained. This also means not a monetary value, but a value in the mind of he customer. It could be "more functions than X brand, works better than Y brand, but uses more resources than Z brand."

Maintain a Brand. If you continually reinforce a space in your customers mind, it is difficult for you to be removed. A perfect example is Ansett in Australia or Jaguar in the UK. Ansett has not existed in Aus for sometime, but people still remember the company. Jaguar has not been a British company for longer, but it is still considered so.

Allow for flexibility. Systems, processes, methods and even revenue streams need to be flexible to allow for adjustments in the market. It also stems from a business plans that are "sustainable".

Know how to change. It sounds funny, but it is something that is inherently lacking in some large corporations. Sometimes it stems from a CEO wanting to "see out" his tenure. At other times it just comes from engendered work practices that cause a "this is all we know," mentality.

# Planning your website

Properly planning your website will save money and headaches later. Before you spend any money, make sure you have but as you go, make sure you have looked in to and lined up the following items. All of these items are explained in more detail later;

 A Domain Name – this controls what your www.XXXXX.XXX will be for your website and your emails

 A Website Host that meets these requirements

 PHP 4.3 or greater

 MySQL 4.0 or greater

 The mod_rewrite Apache module

 You have decided a website Username and Password

 You have text Editor Software (this is for making small changes to your website on your computer)

 We recommend Edit Pad Lite

 You have FTP Client Software (This is for taking files from your computer and putting them on the web)

 We recommend Filezilla

 Your Web Browser of Choice

 We recommend Firefox

 A single compelling offer or proposition

 A single goal for users of the website (buy, subscribe, download etc).

 The 3 and 4 Keyword Phrases for your website

 A Google Adwords account (which is free)

## Keyword Set up

Search engines look for keywords that best describe the webpage they are looking at. In building your website you need to know what people are searching for and what words they are using. This gives you an idea of what to call your business, and what words to focus on when writing your marketing information.

When you are planning your website you need to set in stone a two-word phrase, three-word phrase and a four-word phrase that you will use consistently to describe your service on your website.

1. Go to the Google Keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

2. Use the search function to find all the keywords related to your industry.

3. For this we will use a case study: Bondi Pilates.

4. We would search for words related to; Pilates, Bondi Pilates, Pilates exercise, where to find Pilates, how to do Pilates, Australia Pilates.

5. Export the results to a spreadsheet, so the data is easy to manipulate.

6. You then need to sift through the results and remove the keywords that don't relate to Pilates or the content you are producing.

7. You then select the top 10 groups of words.

8. Based on the results we want to build content around the following keywords;

Keyword | Monthly Searches

---|---

pilates yoga | 90500

pilates reformer | 90500

pilates exercises | 74000

pilates classes | 60500

pilates studio | 60500

pilates workout | 60500

Common keyword groups to include in your research;

 How to, guide, help with,

 Locations, make sure you include country, state, region and town

 All words that are used to describe your industry specifically, it might be accounting, finance, tax.

 Any activities associated with your industry such as excersizes, classes etc.

## Attention Interest Desire Action in Keyword Choices

AIDA is an acronym used in marketing that describes the stages a buyer goes through when purchasing a product.

A \- Attention (Awareness): They have become aware of a need for a product or service

I \- Interest: They have become interested in a group of products or services.

D \- Desire: They want to buy that specific product.

A \- Action: They actually take action in buying it.

As an online marketer it is your job to motivate people through this process. Also you can use this model to predict the types of keywords people will use at different stages. The best keywords for a website will use a variety of these.

A \- Attention (Awareness): The customer will use research words like "MP3 players" and "best stereo systems"

I \- Interest: They will use comparison words like "iphone vs android"

D \- Desire: They will start shopping around for the best product and price eg "Asus NJ61 Laptop"

A \- Action: Usually at this stage they have already bought the product, but they may also still be looking for their local retailer with words like "Sydney ps3 bundle deals"

## The Long tail

Our Search Terms

The Long Tail is a term given to situations where a larger share of a market rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a 'normal' or Gaussian distribution. The term "The Long Tail" was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy.

What Chris Anderson found, with Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, is that with Amazon.com titles outside of the top 100,000 in sales made up 36% of Amazon's book sales.

To put this into practical terms, Amazon has a massive inventory, with only small portion making up more than a few thousand sales each month. All other products might only sell once a month, but because this is such a massive amount of products, it accounts for a significant amount of revenue.

Another example is online travel company Expedia and their affiliate booking system. The top 20 travel destinations account for only 10% of the total number of bookings. Thousands of bookings are made to out of the way places, off the beaten track, from Mooloolaba in Australia to Deadwood in the USA. It's the diversity of destinations and the amount of available inventory that has driven the growth of Expedia TAAP in Australia and New Zealand. The inventory, they claim, is simply not available through other sources.

This theory works for both search terms, and products. When building a website you should try to cater to as many people as possible with your marketing, because you

Long Tail keywords are search terms used by only one or two users. The graph above shows the number of visitors to our site per keyword over the course of the month. As you can see our top 20 keywords supply just 10% of our traffic. The other 90% comes from the long tail. Here are some of our popular keywords;

 creative development

 best e-commerce lightbox gallery

 product developers sydney

 web design sydney

 seo Sydney agency

And here is a list of long tail keywords

 web development recruitment agencies sydney

 web development agency

 web developers sydney

 web developer agency sydney careers

 web develop marketing

 web develop cafe

You can see that long tail keywords are typically groups of words you would not normally use in conversation. They might include keywords that are misspelled, or in a strange order. Most of our long tail keyword phrases are 5 words or longer.

Who uses long tail keywords, why are they good?

People type in strange and long combinations of keywords when they know what they are looking for. These are customers that are doing research for something they know they need. As opposed to people searching for "marketing" or "web design" who could be anyone, long tail keyword users will be people who really need "magento ecommerce web design sydney". This makes them very valuable, because you know the people using them are ready to buy.

What to do about long tail keywords

Here are three tips to increase your chances of snagging long tail keywords;

Write original, quality, content. This goes without saying, however the more you write, the more likely you are to snag some of these keywords. Don't keyword stuff, because there is a) the chance you might only optimise for one keyword, and miss out on all the long tail and b) you just get hit with a spam tag anyway.

Use your meta tags well. Don't keyword stuff them, because this will guarantee you will miss out on natural keyword usage. Make sure your title and description tags have natural language in them.

Build links naturally. Having links anchored with a variety of keywords will improve your chances of being optimised for a range of subjects. Only anchoring with one keyword might make you number one for a popular word, but as you can see from the stats above, that would mean you miss out on a large portion of valuable users.

## Choosing the right web host

When you are looking to build a website, you should spend some time searching for the right web host, at the right price. You may find somewhere where you can host your website and get your domain for a reasonable price. When you are purchasing hosting, most companies will throw in a free domain. Most of the time your web host will also control your email.

Find a webhost that has its servers in the country you will do the most business in. This is because users will find your website faster to use.

Make sure the package they offer meets your minimum requirements.You should find web hosts that offer the following AS A MINIMUM:

Ones that offer cPanel or Plesk, Fantastico and have WordPress built in.

Fantastico allows users to install wordpress with one click.

Cpanel and Plesk allow you to make change to the hosting system without having to request extra features or go through tech support. This is why hosts like Melbourne IT are NOT very easy to deal with. Also they are VERY expensive for what they offer.

Disk Space measures the amount of space your website will take up on the web. Most websites will be at least 50MB but we recommend getting at least 100MB. Most web hosts now go up to GIGs of space, which is fine, but if you are trying to save money you probably won't need that much space. We developed a website that has 50 pages and nearly 40 videos online and the total space used is about 120MB.

Bandwidth measures the amount of disk space accessed by someone using your website. We recommend getting at least 500MB per month.If your website is used by 5 people per day, and they access 3MB of data, (say a 1MB Pdf, a 1MB video and some images), that means you are using 465MB of bandwidth a month.

## How To Choose A Domain Name

Here are a number of steps to take and things to consider when choosing a domain name. Selecting the right domain name can really mean the beginning and the end for your business. Even the brightest business ideas can be overtaken by competitors that have better domain names.

Determine your niche blog strategy. Think about the main thing you will be selling. This is important, because you dont want to have a domain name that describes just what you will be discussing in your blog. If you are discussing marketing but intend to sell marketing training, then it would be a better idea to try to secure the domain name marketing-training.com

Make a list of keywords. There is a good chance that your first or second choices for a domain will be gone. Start thinking about alternatives early then you won't be disappointed.

Use Urban Directory. Find out if there are other alternatives for the words/names you are using. Find out if people are using slang terms instead.

Don't worry about length, just make it memorable.

Make the Domain Unique.

Avoid Hyphens and Numbers.

Make it easy to type and easy to remember

Check for Domain availability. Use our domain name checker to see which domains are available.

Use our domain name registration service for cheap domain names.

Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains

Avoid Copyright Infringement

Secure Multiple Domains

Other tools to use;

Domain Tools

Google Keyword Checker

## Choosing a domain

Choosing the right domain has an impact on your search rankings and how people perceive your website. Make sure you get it right first time. Use the following list to narrow down your own shortlist of domains.

Choose .com or your local TLD(Top level domains like .com.au or .co.uk) over other options like .NET

If you can, buy the domain name that is closest to the keywords you have selected for your website.

Choose a domain name that includes a word for what you are selling and the location, for instance www.kentinsulation.co.uk or www.brooklynbicycles.com

If you can, do not break up the words using hyphens or underscores.

The length of the URLis not a huge concern. For most businesses it is FAR better to have something like www.sydneyaccounting.com.au rather than www.sydacc.com.au

Make sure you shop around. Some domain retailers will charge you a fortune to renew your domains, or just to redirect your domains to your website.

Below are some examples of what you can expect to pay for TLDs for one year.

Website | .com | .co.uk | .com.au | .co.nz

---|---|---|---|---

linkdaddy.com | $10.69 | $9.99 |   
 | $59.49

cheapdomains.com.au | $24 | $19 | $9 | $24

webbase.co.nz | $29.95 | N/A | N/A | $29.95

cheapdomainnames.co.uk | £7.99 | £5.48 | N/A | N/A

## Blogging – Start Early

Sometimes it can be hard to find enough content to write about, especially when attempting to blog weekly. However, once you have some techniques on finding content, you will find there is more than enough out there to last a few years. Blogging for a law firm can be perilous, because you don't want to overstep the mark with providing advice. However we have come up with a list of blogging ideas that any business, particularly law firms, can use.

What you can do once you have a lot of ideas, is write the title of the post and then file it as a draft, or save it as a word document. That way you can save them for the days when you don't have any ideas. The main thing is to focus your blog posts on the niche, in this case law firms, you are writing for.

We thought we would share some of the things we do, and the places we go, to find great blogging content.

Spend some time reading forums. Here are a three forums that are high traffic and have lots of good threads on marketing, business and web design. All of them have a "legal issues" forum, which is a nightmare in itself. You can sort each topic by "number of views" to see which ones attract the most attention.

1. http://www.v7n.com/forums/

2. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44

3. http://www.warriorforum.com/

4. http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/forums/

5. Read Seth Godin's post on blogging for traffic .

6. Read anything off The Big List of marketing blogs.

7. Read through social networking websites to see which content has been tagged and commented on. Here are three quick websites that are great for finding content.

8. http://www.reddit.com/r/law

9. http://www.digg.com

10. http://www.stumbleupon.com/discover/law/

11. HubPages

12. Squidoo

13. Delicious

14. Read through trend spotting websites to see what is an up and coming topic. Here are some great websites for spotting trends;

15. http://www.tweetmeme.com

16. http://trendistic.com/

17.  http://www.google.com/insights/search/#geo=AU&date=today%207-d&cmpt=geo

18. http://www.trendhunter.com/cool-hunting/category/Business-Trends

19. Read the Gok Dot Com post on newsletter content

20. Use the content suggestion tool from WordPress

21. Write short, quick, posts on something in the news. You can use Google News or your local newspaper, anything will do.

22. Write long, tutorials

23. Write posts that are take the opposite view of one you have recently read.

24. Use websites like Yahoo Answers, Ask.com to find questions people are asking, and then answer them in your blog.

25. Read other blogs. Search for blogs. Post comments on as many blogs as you can.

26. Review products.

27. Highlight one of your customers.

28. Read through Google's Hot Trends.

29. Write a list. Some of the things you could list;

30. Your top posts

31. Your favourite blogs

32. Your favourite people

33. Your least favourite people

34. Save some of your proposals to other companies, and use them

35. Write about how hard it is to write about your industry.

36. Write a follow up to a post you have recently written

There are plenty of great ideas out there for writing blog posts. You just need to dig around for them.

## Lessons from Obama on Web Design

A great post over at Optimizely on how they used analytics to improve the Obama campaign. They ran all sorts of combinations on a splash page asking people to sign up for their newsletter. The difference between the top combination and the bottom combination was 3% conversion, from 8% to 11% . According to them, they learned;

Every visitor to your website is an opportunity. Take advantage of that opportunity through website optimization and A/B testing.

Question assumptions.

Everyone on the campaign loved the videos. All the videos ended up doing worse than all the images. We would have never known had we not questioned our assumptions.

Experiment early and often.

We ran this experiment in December of 2007 and reaped the benefits for the rest of the campaign. Because this first experiment proved to be so effective we continued to run dozens of experiments across the entire website throughout the campaign.

However if you look at the post, and the results, the lessons learned about optimisation should be;

Use People, the more people you have in the image the better. The more people can connect with the people in the image the better.

Use non threatening action words. They went from "Sign Up", a commitment, to "Learn More" a non threatening request for information.

Use emotive words. The top combination had their slogan "Change you can believe in" which obviously has a stronger brand and emotive connection than "Get involved".

# Ecommerce

## How eCommerce Works

The players:

A website: In order to sell on the web, as far as your website goes, the minimum you need is your own domain, a web host, and a website. You can even get away with just having one page on your website, (which is what some people do).

A Shopping Cart: (or some way to capture customer information): Most eCommerce systems are shopping carts, but in a minimalistic model you can get away with not having one. Basically you MUST have some way of capturing your customer's details.

A Payment Gateway: You can just use the standard PayPal as your payment gateway, however this will not deposit funds direct into your account. A payment gateway will take the customer's details over a secure connection and pass them to the bank. If you are a large store, you can host payments yourself without a gateway, however you must meet certain conditions of security.

Your Bank Account: Obviously you need somewhere to store all your revenue.

PayPal/WorldPay/Money Bookers etc: In the absence of a bank or payment gateway, you can use PayPal or another system that will host payments for you. This is a cheaper short term option as they often have no overheads, but can have a higher cost per transaction.

You could build your website with just a few pages on the products, and a "buy now" button that takes people straight to PayPal. This works for digital products where the customer can download from a link in the invoice email (from PayPal). The downside to doing it this way is that you will have no way to update a customer's information for when a product is shipped etc.

This is probably the most secure, stable and common form of eCommerce.

Which one to choose?

1 to 10 CMS + Payment Processor

Wordpress

More than 20 = Ecommerce system

Magento

10 to 20 = CMS + Shopping cart

Wordpress/Joomla + WP/eCommerce or

Website – host – CMS/ shopping cart – Payment gateway

## Considerations for selling online

Walk through this checklist and makes notes on what you need/want in your online store. Keep these in mind when selecting an online system:

1. How web savvy are you? Do you just use Facebook, or at the other extreme, do you have a good grasp of CSS and Javascript?

2. Are you selling more than 100 products?

3. Will your products have multiple options, like colour, size or shape.

4. Are you delivering overseas

5. Are you connecting the site directly to your bank account.

## Shopping carts/ecommerce systems

There are many open source ecommerce systems available to web developers and designers. Some have great support, whilst others are meant to stand alone. As part of our launch of the new Baby and Home store, we decided to take a look at a group of ecommerce systems from the perspective of a small to medium sized store, with 20 products. Our store is looking to do some newsletters, small amounts of marketing and will need some SEO facilities. This case study store will have to stand on its own, without the need for tinkering, however the administrator will be capable of making small changes to the product catalogue.

osCommerce / Zen Cart

osCommerce and Zen Cart were one and the same thing. However recently Zen Cart split off and now does its own thing. Although the code is similar there are a few very important differences, namely that Zen Cart has its own template system built it, a feature frustatingly lacking from osCommerce. osCommerce is one of the older ecommerce systems available, and it is starting to show. The system is easy enough to install, and if you want to have just a very basic shop that processes payment via email or paypal, then this is probably ok. For the hardcore systems admin, this system will probably cover most bases, however it is seriously lacking in any niceties, which will put off all but those with the strongest stomach.

The nasty bits;

 The manual Credit Card payment is not PCI Compliant and should be used for testing only.

 Image thumbnails are in fact full size images reduced for display which impacts bandwidth.

 The main cause of stress, however, is that almost all of the add-ons and additions, which you will almost certainly need, have to be coded in manually.

 Be prepared to back up your website frequently because a large number of contributions come with little or no support and some are very old and no longer work.

 The back end is very clunky

 Although there is a simple template system, the front end is still hardwired to the system, so you are unable to easily move to a better looking design.

 Nested tables... virtually all the content exists in some form of a nested table... GAH!

 Almost all of the templates are outdated.

The good bits;

 There are MASSES of options to tweak, improve and add to your site

 The community support is good, if a little high level. Its fine if you understand php.

 There is support for MIGS, which is used by almost all of the banks here in Australia

 The basic additions are relatively easy to add on, if time consuming. Most of the seriously offputting issues are taken care of by contributions from the community

 Its very lightweight and fast. A full installation, with images, can compact down into less than 10MB

 If you are a tinkerer, then you can get in and work under the hood. There is no gloss to the code, so you can get your hands dirty if you want.

 It supports multiple languages and multiple currencies/prices and shipping options from the beginning.

Magento

If osCommerce is an old sea dog, then Magento is speed boat racer. It is slick, good looking and improving every day. It is very easy to install, but has only been around for a few years. The good side to that is it looks modern and has a lot of the functions we expect as standard. It claims to be the fastest growing eCommerce system available. The downside is that it is still working through some issues. When we looked into it again 6 months ago, there was a MIGs gateway, but it needed tweaking.

The pretty bits;

 Very slick inside and out

 Module installation is as automatic as you would want

 Comes with SEO optimisation and analytics out of the box

 iPhone support from the beginning

 A good range of addons and plugins

 The code is well put together

The grungier bits

 MIGS is unsupported at this stage, which can be a big drawback for Australian retailers

 The community is not as strong as other open source software, and being young there is not as many help files available

 The way it handles variations in size and colour is fiddly and time consuming

 The interface is easy to understand, but clearly designed by a programmer.

 The code is complicated for first time developers

WordPress and WP-eCommerce

WordPress has started to become all things to all people, which is a good thing and a bad thing. The once humble blogging systems has been tweaking and hacked apart and now can pretty much be used as anything. The problems start when people try to turn it into something that it probably isnt.

As far as basic eCommerce goes, using the WP-eCommerce system is easy. Using WordPress' native coding and templating makes it by far the easiest option for someone to set up a small store. If you have a few products and are happy to sell through PayPal or through another payment gateway like that, then you are fine. However the system does not naturally support a lot of gateways and does not have support for multiple currencies. Also, as far as we know, it does not support membership and sign up, so you can't tell if people are abandoning carts etc.

The sexy bits;

 WordPress is pretty much magic. Modern, sleek, sexy

 SEO comes easily

 You can have a blog with a shop attatched, which is content gold!

 So easy to set up

 Support is generally good, from a lot of capable developers

The gruesome bits

 Its not really meant to be an all singing eCommerce system

 Some parts are actually open source and some aren't

 Most of the "best" add ons you have to pay for

 CSS coding for the shopping cart is completely seperate from the blog itself.

 There is little or no support for multiple currencies, languages etc

There are more opensource shopping carts out there, and over time we will probably assess them too. For now, however, the three/four above are probably the best for most situations, and are well worth taking a look at.

Of course if you have your own experiences with eCommerce, you are welcome to share them here

## Payment Gateways

eCommerce is still risky business these days and many people are still skeptical of giving out their credit card or banking information online. Considering that Creative Development would never send you out to the sea to be eaten by sharks. All payment gateways compared have strict security measures and they all use the latest and state-of-the-art datacenters. All of the gateways are compliant with the security programs for the major credit card providers such as Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. You can also double check that the payment gateway is NOT on The Match File which is a list of payment gateways that are not compliant for online payment processing.

The criteria that will be compared in this review will be available features, cost and reliability. Payment gateways have additional features that will help managing your e-commerce website. The most common features are: virtual terminal, fraud protection, recurring billing and eCheck processing. There are fees associated with using payment gateways and the most significant of those fees are setup fees, monthly fees and transaction fees. Reliability can be the most frustrating issue out of any situation. When a customer is online making a payment the payment processing needs to be instantaneous or the sale may be diverted to your competitor. The payment gateway needs to be able to service your transactions at all times.

Depending on your business you may or may not want to enroll in some of the additional services that can be provided by your payment gateway. A virtual terminal may be key if your customer has contacted you by phone. This will allow your agent to process payments over the phone instead of having the customer go back to your website. Again, you need to be able to process those payments as quick as possible so there is no time to think about the money they are spending and create buyer's remorse. The virtual terminal would also be key in handling customer service issues after the product/service has been purchased. It can allow an agent to process a return and void transaction taken place prior. Fraud detection is a services that well, detects fraud. The service is proactive and can help prevent transactions that seem out of place or unusual. The service will complete an address verification (AVS) and allow the customer to input the security code that is on the card (CVV2). Recurring billing is a tool that could be used when your product/service bills the customer every single month. A few examples for this would be internet service bill, gym memberships, and subscriptions. Let's face it everyone does not own a credit card or debit card. You still need to make it accessible for the customer to purchase your product/service. That is where eCheck Processing is handy. This process allows the customer to input the checking account information as a payment method.

The cost of running a payment gateway has to be based on a number of situations for your business. Will you be processing a small amount of transactions per day or will you be processing hundreds or thousands per day? The cost of setting up your payment gateway can range from nothing to several hundred dollars. In most cases, the setup fees are non-refundable. A monthly fee is usually assessed and that fee will range from the volume of your transactions. In addition to the monthly fee, the payment gateways may charge you for each transaction that is initiated. I say initiated because the fee would be assessed whether the transaction is approved or declined.

Authorize.Net

Authorize.net has been in business since 1996 and is very well known in the ecommerce business for payment gateways.

Features: Their fraud detection is programmed to ensure that the transaction is legitimate prior to the product being shipped. They filter their transaction to compare with a low and high value of the transaction to ensure that this is the usual behavior of the consumer. They also have suspicious activity monitory that can determine if the product or type of service is usual for that consumer. They tract how many transactions are being received in any given hour for each consumer. They compare the billing address to the shipping address (which does not mean you cannot ship to a different address but rather watches out for suspicious activity). The detection service can filter individual IP addresses that have been known for suspicious activity. In fact, depending on the severity of the suspicious activity authorize.net can block individual IP addresses. Authorize.net offers both recurring billing and eCheck Processing.

Cost: Authorize.net does not sell directly to the merchant. If you visit their website you can find a reseller of their service. This means that the cost of authorize.net can vary from reseller to reseller. The pricing here are only estimates and you would need to contact one of the resellers to get more accurate pricing.

Setup Fee: $25-$300 (average is $100)

Monthly Fee: $10-$30 (average is $15)

Transaction Fee: $0.05-$0.15 (average is $0.10)

Recurring Billing: setup fee $40-$100 (average is $50), monthly fee $20-$40 (average is $30)

Fraud Detection Suite: setup fee $25-$50 (average is $40), monthly fee depends on the capacity of usage. 1-100 transactions $8-$20 (average is $13), 101-1000 transactions $15-$50 (average is $30), 1001+ transactions $50-$150 (average is $100)

eCheck: application fee $49, setup fee $100, transaction fee is $0.30 and 1.75% of the face value of the check.

Verisign Payflow Pro

Verisign holds the highest honors for security and trust.

Features: Verisign has additional services with their recurring billing service. It will allow the for recurring billing to be initiated at the time that the customer registers which can be a huge time-saver. The recurring billing service will also create an emailing service; the customer will receive a monthly receipt in their inbox and notifications of declined payments. There is also a reporting capability built in where the merchant can review billing transactions and individual profiles for their customers. Verisign has two fraud detection packages. The merchant can select the basic package that will include the following filters: AVS failure, shipping/billing mismatch, high risk zip code, freight forwarder, CSC failure, high dollar value and high item value. The advanced package would include all of these filters and an additional 15 filters.

Cost:

Setup: $249

Monthly Fee: $59.95

Transaction Fee: First 1,000 transactions are free and every transaction thereafter is $0.10

Recurring Billing Fee: setup fee $39.95, monthly fee $29.95

Fraud Protection Basic Plan: setup fee $29.95, monthly fee $19.95, transaction fee $0.05

Fraud Protection Advanced Plan: setup fee $89.95, monthly fee $49.95, transaction fee $0.10

Account Monitoring (additional to fraud detection) fee: setup fee $29.95, monthly $19.95

Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode (additional to fraud detection) fee: setup fee $150, monthly $9.95, transaction fee $0.10

Total Fraud Protection package (summary of above): setup fee $260.90, monthly fee $79.85, transaction fee at minimum $0.20

## Security

The required security for an Ecommerce Store should be at its finest. You want to ensure that the customer's data is safe in your hands and you, yourself are also protected from fraudulent activities. There are a number of things you can do to ensure security is your number one priority on your website. Start with developing a privacy policy, it is not necessarily a measure to protect you or the customer but what it does do is instill trust and integrity that is required to run a successful business. Define your promise to the customer and what it is that you have done to create that security and what will you do if it were to be broken. The privacy policy is an oath that you will, by all means necessary; keep their information secure from any 3rd party. There are three major security measures that you should take into consideration when operating an ecommerce store.

SSL Secure Socket Layer encryption: You will need to purchase an SSL Certificate if you are going to accept transactions online, offer a login screen, process sensitive data (social security numbers, birthdates, addresses, etc.), and comply with privacy and security laws. Even if none of the above is on your agenda it is still considered a statement that you value your customers' privacy. An SSL Certificate allows encryption and data being transferred from the user to the server and is sent in a manner that cannot be read by anyone or anything else.

Choose a Payment Gateway: A payment gateway makes it possible for you to complete credit card and electronic check transactions. It is highly recommended that you research the various payment gateways to ensure that you get the features you need and stay within your budget. The reason why a payment gateway is highly recommended is because it takes the security part of the transactions out of your hands and into theirs. The payment gateway takes care of all security concerns for you. Some of the most common payment gateways are PayPal, Authorize.net and Verisign. They also have fraud detection services to protect you, as the company, against people trying to purchase items with a stolen credit card.

Fraud Detection: As mentioned above payment gateways will also have fraud detection features when they are processing your credit card transactions. There are many different fraud detection programs to choose from within the payment gateways. One of the primary features you should choose is address verification. This will ensure that the owner of the card is receiving the product at their billing address. The fraud detection packages have many outstanding ways to prevent fraud and you can feel more secure with the transactions that are being placed through your business.

## Ecommerce Success

We see many businesses online busting a gut to build an online store, and then they waste their time worrying about how their logo looks, and not what the customer experiences. What an online store loses out on the touchy feely side of buying, they have to make up in other ways.

Can Australian small businesses compete as online-only entities if they use their lack of a physical store to price more competitively?

Of course a lack of a physical store has its benefits, as well as its problems. There are more and more businesses that are taking advantage of cheap technology to build an online presence. Competing on price is one way to build a business, however it is very short term thinking. Businesses who claim to be price competitive now, will find the tides can turn very easily. By far the best two things a business can do online is a) build a brand around unique products b)offer a customer experience that is hard to beat in the real world.

Can local online retail compete with international online retail, and how?

Yes of course, and they often do. Displaying a local address and telephone number is a big plus. As is having a .com.au domain name.

Local retailers can also take the fight overseas. The first thing a business needs to do is make sure they can transact in different currencies. Next they need to make sure they can ship their goods overseas, and they have overseas shipping pricing. Of course this does not apply to businesses that sell eBooks etc.

Next they need to make sure they have optimised their site for international search, so that means not just ranking for local searchers, but also other target markets.

Here are four things you can do that make your website successful online:

Sell a product that is hard to find at the local store. There are a lot of price competition online, try to find products that are rare. Most of Amazon's revenue comes from products in the long tail, you should sell similar hard to find products.

Make it easy to return, complain, review. Unlike a print catalog, you have the chance to give people more reasons to buy from you.

Be original.

Returning customers are more likely to buy again. Use newsletters, specials and discounts to bring people back. Make sure you have enough new products to keep things fresh.

# An Whirlwind Introduction to SEO

## There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book!

## The value of SEO – why it pays to be number 1

Top 3 spots in Google make up 62% of all traffic

How much is the top spot on Google actually worth? According to data from the Chitika network, it's worth double the traffic of the #2 spot.

In order to find out exactly how much traffic number 1 spot was worth, Chikita looked at a sample of traffic coming into their advertising network. The top spot generated 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined.

Here are the positions and their total/relative values.1 2,834,806 34.35%

2 1,399,502 16.96%

3 942,706 11.42%

4 638,106 7.73%

5 510,721 6.19%

6 416,887 5.05%

7 331,500 4.02%

8 286,118 3.47%

9 235,197 2.85%

10 223,320 2.71%

As you can see, the benefit of being in the top three is huge. This is backed up by an eye tracking study performed at Cornell University. They used a sample of undergraduate students instructed to perform search in Google for 397 queries of topics covering movies, travel, music, politics, local and trivia.

In 2006 AOL leaked millions of search records showing click rates by position. Jim Boykin's blog reveals the percent of clicks for each position for 9,038,794 searches and 4,926,623 clicks. Donna Fontenot shared the relative click volume of lower ranked results relative to the top ranked site.42.13%, 2,075,765 clicks

## Top 11 SEO methods for Plumbers

Over the last two weeks we have had dozens of plumbers ask us for SEO advice on growing their business through their website. Plumbing is a highly competitive business, particularly online. The top plumbing business, for the search "Sydney Plumbers", on Google has a PR of 6, over 4500 indexed links, and has a domain authority of 63.

What SEO methods do plumbers use increase their traffic and increase their sales leads? It is the same as any other highly competitive industry.First you need to know you should be focussing on quality traffic. That means you are looking to attract visitors that are looking to hire you right now.

SEO is about getting people to spend money with you, NOT your competitors. To that end, chasing after people looking for "Sydney Plumbers" may not be the best way to go. Your primary goal should be to drive people to search for you, find you and then spend money with you.

You need to know your tools. We use the following;

Google Keyword Tool – You will use this to find low-competition/high traffic keywords.

OpenSite Explorer – You will use this to find the highest ranked AND most relevany pages linking to your competitors

Directory Critic -This is where you will find the most relevant quality directories for articles and links.

Yahoo – This is a much better search engine for finding links, who is linking to you and your competitors. Google Webmaster tools are ok, but for some reason they don't list all of the links.

Use Google Analytics. If you outsource your SEO functions, make sure they give you a full detailed report, or at least access to your analytics data. This will allow you to see where you are getting the most traffic from, what is working for you, and what keywords most people are using. If anything it will open your eyes to the volume of traffic that can come from the most random places.

Spread your keywords/look for the long tail. Everyone is competing for "sydney plumbers". I am not saying abandon this completely, but start thinking outside the box. There are more people searching locally for "Hot Water Service" (12000+) than for "Sydney Plumbers" (~9000). Also there will be people who are more likely to buy when they are searching for "Emergency Hot Water Plumber". Also would you rather do business with people looking for a "Cheap Plumber" or "luxury home plumber" or "best quality plumber sydney"?

Build Content. This means you have to look at building up your quality content around lots of related keywords. I would suggest building a blog. You could write a few "how to" articles. Once you have written them, wait 2 weeks, and then submit them to the article directories listed in Directory Critic.

Follow these rules; Use unique interesting title tags for each page. Do the same for the meta description.

Use Video. Firstly, few plumbing businesses do use video, so you will stand out. Secondly, it is a great way to bridge the gap between those that do and don't trust your business.

Don't look for high PR links only – Use the Open Site Explorer and Yahoo to find out where the most authoritative links are coming into your competitors. Try to get links in relevant directories. You don't have to chase the top PR websites on the web, because not only is that unrealistic, but you will probably miss out on a lot of other places that could give you quality traffic.

Strive for publicity. Sponsor a local soccer team, donate to the local hospital, hold a "How to change your water heater" event for old people. Write information that can be used by the press and local media. The bottom line is, by doing all of this a) you will get a lot of people linking to your website and b) it will raise your profile in the local area.

Get links in sparingly. Only initiate link exchanges and directory submissions from website that are highly relevant and have been indexed for a long time. If you do use a reciprocal link exchange read this first. Avoid buying or selling links. Pretty much the only place you should buy a link from is the Yahoo directory. After that you might want to get a premium placement in a plumbing directory online. Everything else is a waste, until you know where your traffic is coming from.

Control the number of outbound links on your pages and on pages where you place your links, avoid link-farms, links to gambling, pills, etc. If you want a rule, never link to other plumbers in your country, only overseas. Only link to websites related to home improvement or plumbing. Only link to websites that are ranked on the firsst 3 pages of the search engines.

Spend money on other things, like Facebook/Twitter, before Yellow Pages. The yellow pages rarely rank top for any of the keywords you would want. Few people actually read the books any more, and there are better ways to spend your money. If you want a cheap alternative to PPC, look at social media, or having a Facebook page, and spending some money on PPC. Also think about using Twitter actively to find clients.

Get a Google Places listing, and focus on improving that. Firstly your location matters in Google places, and that can't be faked. Secondly it relies on a lot of data sources to see where your address is, so every time you place a link back to your website, make sure you put your telephone number and physical address down.

Want some more great reading about SEO for Plumbers? Here is some great information about the SEO Success pyramid, which has a great, in depth, breakdown of the things you should be looking for.

## Top 9 Real Estate SEO Tips

Real Estate SEO is a lot like Recruitment and Jobs SEO. Unless you are one of the major aggregators, eg: Domain/Seek, there is very little point in trying to optimise for "New Homes Sydney", because you are coming up against massive players for the front page.

If you are a small Real Estate Agent, or even a franchise owner, you are going to want to a)promote your existing properties to people looking in your area and b)promote your services to potential vendors.

With this in mind, here are our top 9 tips for optimising your real estate website for search engines. We assume you have gone through our other posts on SEO to get an idea of how to keyword research etc.

Optimise your front page first on your location, then on your name. Don't think about going for words like "new homes" or "buy homes sydney". The more you can optimise for your location, the more likely you will be able to promote homes in your area. The better your name is optimised the more likely you are to be found when people look for you. For vendors, most frequent searches are for the name of the real esate agent, and "real estate + location" comes a distant second.

Make sure you have your page structure built around the size of the house, ie 4 bedroom etc, and then separate pages for each property, with descriptive page titles based on location. If someone searches for "4 bedroom house, lane cove" you want your pages to have the best chance of being found. For buyers, the most common searches are for the number of bedrooms and then the location.

Search for link partners from your local geographic area. Local search is becoming more important, so finding other businesses who want to link to you within 20kms of your business is a must! You can do a search for "add url your location" etc.

When you have your pages for each property built, use the target term evaluator from SEO moz to see if your page is best optimised for that property. Some common things websites miss having good descriptive terms for their images, and using the H1 tag properly.

Find out where your competitors and near competitors are getting their links from. Use the opensite explorer to find out if they are using directories or link partners to improve their position. You can also use the operator "link:yoursite.com" in Google to see what has been indexed.

Sponsor local sports teams. Make sure you ask them for a link back to your site, from their front page, that is both image AND text. If you can, instead of sponsoring the one local soccer team for a few thousand dollars, sponsor the local team for a small fee, and then sponsor several other local teams too. We once looked into this for a client, and found we could sponsor the local table tennis competition, badminton competition and chess tournament, all for less than $500. The more teams you can sponsor the better. You get double points if you can get naming rights to the competition.

Allow for Q+A or comments on pages, or at least somewhere on your website. This is about increasing the amount of relevant and interesting content on your website. If you can allow people to post questions and you answer them, this is going to increase the amount of interaction and content that is relevant to people searching for you. You don't have to approve every comment, or even have a full time effort at it, but just post some of the most common questions about a property or about your service, on your website.

Another content tip is to have a blog. Talk about upcoming real estate trends, vendor's nightmares, anything that relates to buying and selling a property. You don't have to make it all about one house or another apartment, talk about the industry etc. One of our biggest sources of leads comes from this blog! If you manage to start writing some lengthy blog posts, then you can start to post those to other blogs, article websites or squidoo etc.

Talk in forums. There are forums for new immigrants, new buyers, newly weds etc. Spend 15 minutes a week on a few forums to spread your name around. You don't have to be mercenary and JUST talk about real estate, make it real and give some sage advice. Try to find forums that allow you to have a signature, which will help with links back to your site. For Australians, there is the expat forum or the Australia forum.

Remember SEO is a long process, especially in competitive markets. What you are aiming for with your Real Estate website is to allow the properties you do post to have the best chance they possibly can to be found

## New SEO Strategy – Keep your customers happy!

If you haven't seen the New York Times' article on DecorMyEyes, you are missing out. It is quality reading for anyone interested in how not to do customer service. The story breaks down like this; Clarabelle Rodriguez orders something online, does not get what she ordered, complains, and then gets what has to be the worst customer service in the history of the world. The proprietor then goes on to brag about it online.

Some of the choicest parts of the exchange include the owner of the website saying "Listen, bitch, I know your address. I'm one bridge over" which is apparently a reference to the company's office in Brooklyn. Mrs Rodriguez says he threatened to find her and commit an act of sexual violence too graphic to describe.

Now, however, Google have responded directly with the issue. In the last few days Google has developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm Google incorporated into search rankings represents, they claim, an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

In 4 days, Google just changed their core product to address a concern published in the New York Times that is otherwise minor.

So basically now, negative reviews count heavily against you.

## Google and the 10 Commandments of SEO

We thought we would throw together our own version of the 10 commandments of SEO. There are a few versions of the SEO commandments around, but we thought we could do a better job. Firstly we wanted to keep to the original script of the commandments, with easy to understand and critical laws that can be passed down through generations. If I had had my way, the main picture above would have had me coming down from an Apple store with two giant iSideTables in my hands.

These commandments also have a bias towards those guidlines created by Google, partly because they are readily available, but mainly because Google makes up about 500% of seo attention at the moment. We tried to pick the 10 that were critical for the performance of your website, not just the ones that we all do, like link building, that are nice. Our 10 commandments are;

1. Thou shalt not link to bad guys

2. Thou shalt not keyword Stuff

3. Thou shalt not cloak pages

4. Thou shalt not steal content

5. Thou shalt not use hidden links

6. Thou shalt create original content

7. Thou shalt use meta tags

8. Thou shalt use Robots.txt

9. Thou shalt link sparingly

10. Thou shalt provide a site-map

We also had a few commandments that got left over, and may just end up getting moved to our version of the sermon on the mount. Maybe that one will start with something like "Blessed are the bloggers..." Here are some of the things we could have included;

1. Thou shalt have clear page hierarchy

2. Thou shalt be accessible

3. Thou shalt check for broken links

4. Thou shalt use pretty URLs

5. Thou shalt cross browser test

6. Thou shalt optimize load times

7. Thou shalt make pages primarily for users

8. Thou shalt not spam the search engines

9. Thou shalt avoid "doorway" pages

If there are any more out there, we would love to hear them. Maybe one day we will rewrite the bible from the perspective of search engines. Perhaps it could start with

"In the beginning TBL merged TCP/IP, hypertext and DNS to create the world wide web, and he saw that it was good."

Maybe Moses is AOL and Jesus is Google, I don't know. Perhaps someone else has a better idea of how this tortured metaphor fits together.

## How Google Places works – Improve your position

## There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book!

## Why Local Search Marketing?

Every business person knows the importance of marketing in general, but why is the local market is so important? If you have a local business, it is imperative to reach your local customers by meeting their specific needs. Sydney marketing will look different than marketing Melbourne because, while these two cities are in the same country, there are many local differences come into play.

Still, people are looking for local businesses using the Internet to make their search easier. Here is a list of the top six reasons to be locally a part of running your business.

At the moment, search marketing is the most important part of the marketing mix. Almost all transactions are preceded by a search online for reviews, or information.

With time being short for more people, customers look online for where to shop before the head out the door. This saves time and money by ensuring that they will give their business to the local retailer who can offer the best deal.

Local headlines make a difference in what your local market should look like. When people see something interesting in a magazine or newspaper, may seek further link to see what they can find. A short PR campaign, or even just contacting your local bloggers and news outlets will help.

People do not always live where they work. Commuters are common, and when something happens at work that requires your product or service offered by your company customers will look for you online. It's invaluable that your local market will find you.

One thing has not changed in advertising. The objective of advertising is to get people to buy their product. When you couple Sydney online marketing to brick and mortar store, you are looking at being responsive to the needs of two different kinds of prospects. One kind likes to buy goods online, while another kind of love to find a physical connection box so you can visit the shop and concrete you try our product for themselves. Using local marketing, you can capture both markets.

All eyes are online. Consider that the billboards are getting hired less these days. Magazine ads flipped past as if it was not even there. Using good local Marketing you draw the attention of people looking for your product.

## Week Website Launch Formula

## There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book!

## What is better than SEO?

## There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book!

# How to get people to buy

## Pictures worth a thousand words – Online Marketing Rule#1

The is really only one rule to direct mail pieces that surprise, and that is creativity. We get hundreds of direct mail pieces every week, and they all look the same, are written in the same boring copy, and have the same SCREAMING offers on the front.

There really is only one secret to great direct mail, and that is to be creative. Here are two quick steps you can take that will help improve your direct mail response.

Surprise Broca – Brocas area is a part of the brain that deals with anticipation. It is a hard wired section of the brain that would normally block out anything that is anticipated.

If you can't get through this section of the brain, your message will get tuned out. Roy Williams coined the phrase when looking at the anatomy of a marketing campaign. The quick tips he suggested were,

Avoid words that do not contribute toward a more vivid or colourful mental image.

Frosting. Replacing common, predictable phrases with unexpected, colourful ones.

Seussing. Invent words. Read a Dr. Seuss book and you will see how a man who invented words became a best-selling author.

Ignore the details, exaggerate the colour, and remove the black.

Write in Style. Poor English, common boring sentances, they all make for a bin-ward bound Direct Mail piece.Write like you mean what you are saying. Write like you are entering a creative writing competition.

## What makes a good call to action?

On every piece of marketing you produce you should be focusing on a call to action. You must compel your readers/listeners to take action, otherwise you are missing out. I would even argue standard "Branding" marketing should include a call to action somewhere.

Timely/Time focussed. Give your readers a reason to pick up the phone/email right then and there.

If you don't have a special on, or an offer, make one up.

The focus is on the action. "Call this number" "Hit send on this button". A web address on its own usually does not function well enough as a call to action.

The call to action is easy to see, read and understand. On a website the best place for a CTA is the top right hand corner.

People know what they are asking for/to do. They are contacting you for a consultation, or they are going to get a phone call from you etc etc.

## Landing Pages

## Product pages that encourage conversions

Turning your website from a drab static website into an exciting lead producing machine can take time and money. Here we have a long list of lessons we have learned over the years to produce the best web design that converts readers into customers. First though, here are some quick tips;

Optimising your website for conversion is an ongoing long term initiative, a few quick points from this page will not make your website the best it can be.

Focus first on the offer, then the layout.

Dramatic changes can yield dramatic results. \- we once turned a 40% bounce rate website into a 5% by scrapping the theme and starting again.

Excellent Design. In the end, your website is the most important piece of marketing you can own, and it must look good. The best web design obeys the rules of aesthetics and landing page design, this means premium real estate for the logo and the offer, concise use of page layout, customisable widget areas.

First aim to build trust

Use safe shopping logos.

Customisable. You should be able to make many changes to a template without spending too much time sweating over the code. You should also be able to do most of that through a CMS system or something similar. The easiest CMS Systems are Joomla and WordPress.

SEO friendly. Your website should at least be optimised for seo, that meant no flash, good used of H1 tags, css menus, title tags, meta descriptions and a HTML and XML sitemap.

Title and description Tags. These are the main tags that Google will use for your listing. Including the main city and your telephone number will increase conversions. Also making sure that the right products and services are included in your description will make sure you are attracting clicks from the right customers.

Accessibility. The best web designs work with all modern browsers and have W3C valid code. Up to 30% of

Reduce form fields required

Remove distracting banner images

Strengthen the visibility of the headlines.

The offer should be easy to see and understand. A large dark headline with light background behind a features area will attract attention to the offer. The best web designs have all other elements balanced, so they don't overwhelm. You should use short, direct, language that speaks to the user.

A clear primary call to action. Don't just state "click here". You should have action verbs that relate to the offer, like "Buy Now" or "Find Me"

Repeat the call to action. Drive customers to interact with you.

Use contrast. The more contrast you have, the easier the website is to read.

Keep the pages short and to the point. Whilst it is "en-vogue" to have a long page jammed with SEO Keywords, the best performing web designs have less content, more focussed offers and several calls to action.

Content on the left, call to action on the right.

You need a two column layout, with the sales proposition to be the first thing that the user sees. Their eye will naturally track to the right, where you put your call to action button. When they use Google to search for your product you want them to see the offer first.

White background.

All research in readability points to having a white background as THE best way to endure copy is readable. To put this another way you should have black text on a white background. If the background is not white, it makes it difficult to use any other colours in your body.

Stretchable side areas (outside of the body)

Either you need to build your website at 1000px across with stretchable side areas, or have no side areas at all.

Reduced Javascript and CSS fed from the bottom

Cut down on javascript and CSS, have them in one file each and load them from the bottom. This will speed up the web page load time.

Test everything

# How to get people coming back

## There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book!

## 10 Tips for the best email marketing campaigns;

Target. Find out to whom you want to send the email campaign. Make sure you know what they are interested in and what market they operate in.

Produce quality content. Every day we recieve over 100 emails from various people that go straight to the bin. Make sure you are given the recipient information that is up to date (what is happening in your industry NOW), informative, (dont just give facts, give analysis), fresh/new, (don't just cut and paste from google, and don't just steal other people's conent) and above all make sure that it is well written. Poor content can also get caught in SPAM filters.

Develop a list. Make sure that your recipients have allowed you to send them emails. Make sure you have taken down as much information as possible, at least their names and company names. We use double opt in lists that people actively subscribe to. We also use a different technique to market to potential customers, however we are always moving them to the opt in lists. We are also only marketing to small numbers of potential customers so that we can keep the email campaigns from becoming SPAM.

Use engaging subject lines. Try to sound informative and not "marketing". Try to show that the email is up to date and has the latest information. Here are the top 5 subject lines, thanks to Mail Chimp

[COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter

Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 – Nov 4)

[COMPANYNAME] Staff Shirts & Photo

[COMPANYNAME] May 2005 News Bulletin!

[COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – February 2006

Personalise. By far more people will open, become engaged and click through an email that has their name in it, or their company name.

Use a good email marketing program like MailChimp. Mail chimp is a good example of an email marketing client because you can measure your performance, personlise the email. They also have bucketloads of tutorials on how to improve your email marketing campaigns.

Include several calls to action. We make sure in every campaign we give the customer good reasons to click through the email. This can be a particular special offer, a great article or just asking them to update their information. We always use immediate language and make sure that it is clear what is a link and where they should click.

Test for design/looks. For every email campaign we produce we run two different types of tests. Firstly we test the design of the email in several different browsers. We test for useability and readability. We want to make sure of the following;

Do the images show up, if they don't does the text make sense on its own?

Does the image preview well, so people can see the heading/first paragraph of the content without opening email?

Does the design render correctly in a few different browsers

Does the content make sense? It seems easy to produce content but is it short, punchy and readable in Outlook?

Do the links do what they are supposed to do?

Test for performance. We also run A/B tests to see which of two headlines create the best response. Every email marketing campaign we run a small test to up to 50 recipients with a few different layouts of content. We keep track of the changes we make and use this information to improve the performance of our email marketing.

Track Measure Repeat. All our email marketing campaigns are active. We try not to run short term once off marketing campaigns. We use our knowledge for each market in each campaign to improve the quality of the next one.

# Advertising Online

## ppc vs seo – when to use Google Adwords

It seems to be the hip choice to spend money on SEO right now. The forums are full of people claiming; don't spend money on Adwords, it is expensive and short sighted. In some instances, this is true, however it does not tell the full story.

Why does PPC advertising work?

The bottom line is Google Adwords works extremely well in some markets. First of all you have to realize that spending money on PPC advertising is a strategic choice. The strategy could be long or short term, however you do need to look at it in a targeted and outcome based way. You can't spend money on PPC advertising in an aimless manner. Second of all Google Adwords has to be one of the most ubiquitous advertising method on the planet right now. More people interact with Google on a daily basis than watch the Super Bowl. You can reach any niche, any target in a cost effective way not imaginable 10 years ago.

What is the problem with Google Adwords?

However in recent years Google Adwords has become too good for its own boots. We regularly document changes in the pricing of Google Adwords, and mostly they never go down. Over the last 6 months the cost of ALL adwords has increased, with some markets experiencing a 24% increase in the cost of advertising. Some keywords cost $50 plus per click, which is pretty much out of the reach of any small business marketing budget. This is compared to a far lower cost per click on something like Facebook. The other problem is that, because almost anyone can have a panel of Adwords on their website, and because the best markets have become wary of advertising from Google, the quality of clicks from Adwords has also slowly decreased.

When does SEO work?

Building, and raising, an online profile takes time, effort and skill. SEO isn't just about links, or just quality web content. It too can take time and money that might not see a return if done incorrectly. It is certainly more fickle than an Adwords campaign. However it is generally a far more profitable strategy for long term lead generation. In some markets, where there is little competition for certain keywords, one good link from an online directory can be enough to give a website a front page berth. In fact this would be the case with almost all local markets, and local keywords, where there are less than 10 competitors looking to make the front page.

In this scenario, the cost to the website owners might be a few hours in the beginning and then maybe one or two hours a month after that to maintain front page status. This is compared to $1 per click on Google adwords in a small market that, in a $150 campaign, will only generate a few leads for one month only, after which the owner has to start all over again. Even if you look at spending money on Facebook ppc advertising, you might get some response from 50c per click, but again it is short term and may generate some followers on your Facebook page, but that is about it.

When is a Google Adwords campaign a good idea?

Spending money on Adwords can be a very effecting marketing strategy in the following scenarios;

The strategic campaign

Got a short term offer, or event, that might last for one day or two weeks? Adwords is a great idea for this. If you are promoting an event, or something that is only going to exist for a short term, ppc in any form is one of the most cost effective online advertising methods. Adwords or even social media advertising allows you to target a diverse range of people, even in just one local area. SEO for this scenario would take a long time to build, for something that exists for only a short period of time.

Where SEO is expensive

Effective, long term SEO can be expensive in highly competitive global markets. International insurance companies are a good example. The leading Australian global insurance companies have exceptionally high PageRank and have tens of thousands of affiliates linking to them. If you were to launch a marketing campaign in this market, the $50 price tag per click would actually see cheap. If you found the right target, and could convert, almost any form of ppc would work better than attempting an SEO campaign

Where you are branching out into new markets

If you are an established player in one market, and you are looking to move into a new area, Adwords, or some other ppc campaign, might be your best and only option for an online marketing campaign. When a website builds an online profile, the search engines will give the website a ranking for a particular keyword. Once that keyword profile has been established, it is very hard to shake. So if you have rated well for "Sydney Marketing" if you suddenly want to add "Brisbane Marketing" onto your keyword profile, you are not only looking at starting again, you are also looking at having to work against the "Sydney" keyword profile you have already got.

We will go into the major Adwords markets later this year, but for now, you can see, Adwords are great in the right place.

## Improve your Google Adwords performance

## There is more information on SEO in the full edition of this book!

## Evaluating Content Sharing Methods

Your web 2.0 strategy should involve enabling content sharing. Even the most basic of websites should be built to allow users to share content they have found on the web. After Google announced its sharing option in Google Bookmarks, we decided to help you understand the pros and cons of content sharing websites and how they may help you shape your social media strategy. We only selected a few of the content sharing options, as there are currently some 271 content sharing websites available. Something also worth noting is that email makes up the largest portion of all content shared.

Google Bookmarks. The new kid on the block. At the moment users can share content with other contacts through email and public lists. It is easier to use that the older bookmarking systems and it has the benefit of being integrated into Gmail and Google Buzz. At this stage it is difficult to see how the community will act towards the bookmarking system, and if there will be any further developments, ie "Popular Bookmarks".

Stumbleupon. The biggest benefit of Stumbleupon is that users can "Stumble" through the most popular bookmarks available. Like a good box of chocolates, users never know what they are going to get. The downside is that sharing your list of contacts is actually quite hard compared to things like Reddit and Digg. Also the community is quite inactive. Even the most popular content only has about 20 to 30 comments around it, so it is very difficult to guage what people think of the content that is listed.

Delicious. Probably the least easy to share out of all the content sharing options, but also one of the oldest.. There are no obvious ways to benefit from other people's lists or content and the way that they bookmarks are created sometimes feels non-sensical. Delicious makes up about 2% of all content shared, but again it is hard to see where the community is. You have to rummage around to find comments, which are not in a nested fashion anyway.

Reddit only makes up about 0.9% of all content shared through the web, placing it well behind the bigger content sharing systems like Digg and Delicious. The major benefit is the subreddits system which means you can share content with users who are active and interested in your chosen subject. Also, with the way the rating system is structured, if you have genuinely interesting content, there are few barriers to getting the content in front of Reddit's very active community. The voting system ensures that, largely, only interesting or new content floats to the top. The downsides to Reddit are; their search function is broken and sometimes the community can downvote content based on the way it is submitted, (eg: wrong subreddit or poorly worded title) not on the content.

Digg is one of the most popular social media sharing communities. It regularly has guest speakers and blog posts by interesting people. The content is always fresh and changing based purely on the volume of people submitting content to the system. The major downside though is that it has become a victim of its own popularity. You pretty much have to rely on getting content in front of one of Digg's power users in order to spread the word. Also the community is tightly focussed on only a handful of topics, so if you have somethin interesting on origami, it is unlikely you will get it out to the people that might be interested.

Facebook is the largest content sharing website available. Recently they came out with statistics showing they were also the largest image storage system in the world too. The benefit to sharing through Facebook is you can quickly develop a community around whatever it is you are interested in. You can then go on to share just about anything with your close knit community of crocheters. The downside is there are a few barriers to spreading quickly beyond your own community. There are millions of Facebook groups, some with similar ideas, but it is very difficult to find out where they are and who are the members. Also there is no way of knowing what content is good or bad or what other people think.

Twitter allows users to share content with less than 140 characters. It is also easy to spread content with use of hashtags. However the downsides to sharing content through Twitter are the short messages themselves. It is very difficult to hold a long debate in less than 140 characters. Also Twitter has a major problem with spam. A large percentage of tweets are either "retweets" or the same tweet reworded. The best content has no way of reaching the top. Through services like ad.ly, people with a large following will be able to get paid to spread content, further pushing up the volume of spam.

Overall you are probably better to use a combination of social media websites to find the content you like and spread the content you enjoy.

## A Comparison of Social Advertising – Digg, Facebook, Reddit

Advertising is becoming the key way for social networks/aggregators to make money. The lure for advertisers is, they can target genuinely interested customers by placing the ads in relevant sections. As social networks and media mature, their audience size is beginning to exceed traditional media.

There are a multitude of dangers in using social media and aggregators for marketing and advertising, but these are no worse than the dangers associated with advertising on a major news website. Every advertising medium is unique and has its own benefits. Below we took all the information we could find on advertising through particular online media to provide a comparison. For each website, we took one campaign and an average of other information we found online. Digg.com

Digg.com – Most data we could find indicated that it is VERY expensive to advertise on Digg for the amount of click-through you get. It appears they are running their costing closer to the online newspapers' model of charging per impression. The major benefits and risk to advertising on social networks is you can get a community discussion about your ad or product. On Digg, this is harnessed by allowing advertising costs to come down if your ad receives a certain number of votes. Digg is the largest social aggregator on the web, so it attracts a very large and diverse audience. It may be worthwhile to advertise on Digg as an alternative to TV or online Newspaper advertising, because the audiences are similar. Conversly though, it appears, it could cost less to write decent content and submit it to this social aggregator, rather than advertise directly. IDEAL FOR: Games manufacturers NOT IDEAL FOR: Car manufacturers

Reddit.com – The information we could find about Reddit showed it was excellent value on a cost per click basis. However it appears that the audience on Reddit is significantly smaller than other media. By all accounts you are advertising to college-going, bacon loving twenty-somethings with no money. This significantly narrows the number of potential advertisers for the site. However, if you are advertising a new Star Wars convention, or you are promoting a T-Shirt of a narwhal eating the Kevin Rose, you may be in the right area. With thousands of subreddits available, you can pretty much name your target. If you want to advertise to the 2000 odd subscribers to the Doctor Who subreddit, then this may be the way to go. IDEAL FOR: Magic: The Gathering wholesalers NOT IDEAL FOR: Toothpaste producers

Facebook.com - Currently the advertising network in Facebook is somewhere between Digg and Google, both in terms of size and cost. You can target based on a wide range of criteria including location and keyword. However the click through rate is relatively low. We guess this is because the "targeting" system is not nearly as good as you would find on Google. Just because a profile says the words "football" as an interest, does not mean I am looking for anything to do with football right now, or even that I really like the game. The audience on Facebook is still expanding, however the targets are still the younger demographic. IDEAL FOR: Get Rich At Home schemes NOT IDEAL FOR: Photocopier salesmen

SMH.com.au (and other comparable newsosaurs) – The Sydney Morning Herald is one of the most visited news websites in Australia. It still has one of the most active online ad networks of any internet news media. However, as with other Newsosaurs, it still justifies its rate card by impressions/views. This may be fine for banks and car manufacturers that are looking to justify their branding spending by the number of people who see their logo. However most small and medium businesses would find the campaigns grossley under-perform compared to an online advertising campaign. Even when the ads on the website are matched with ads in their newsletters, the level of targetting and the activity associated will not satisfy most small advertisers. IDEAL FOR: Telcos and Car Manufacturers NOT IDEAL FOR: The manufacturers of Civ V

Google Adwords – The online advertising behemouth is the model on which all other online advertising is measured. The major benefits include targetting keywords and phrases, as well as reaching people when they are ready to buy. The downsides to Adwords are not so often talked about. Adwords are creeping up in cost in many competitive categories. Some advertisers expect to spend $5 to $10 per click, which puts some advertising out of the reach of those with a small budget. Also the deliberate or accidental click fraud is on the rise, as more competitors or adword spammers click on ads placed in valuable keywords. To get a reasonable return advertisers should be expected to start with spending at least $100 and spread the load into keywords that are less commonly used. Having said that, however, some markets are still untouched, and a large number of keywords have no competition at all. IDEAL FOR: The local Pilates instructor NOT IDEAL FOR: A startup webhost

If you have any experience advertising on social networking or news websites, we would love to hear from you!

## Mobile Marketing in a nutshell- Android, iPhone, Blackberry

Bank of America has more than 930,000 customers for its mobile banking services and is one of leaders in the space.

Mobile click-through rates average 8.9% up to 49%

Android has doubled market penetration and overtaken iPhone in the last 8 months.

There are basically three leading, different and incompatible operating systems on modern mobile smart phones. First there was the Blackberry, which handles email and business applications very well, and over a secure connection. Next there was the iPhone, which is Apple's offering. The iPhone broke the mould with its applications market and has lead the industry for the last few years with slick design and flexibility. However, in the last few months, Google's Android has come on the scene with its own applications market, and is now leading the pack.

So what does this mean for marketers?

Although mobile browsers only make up around 1% of total web traffic, you have to look at the demographics of mobile web browsers. For one they are almost certainly educated, tech savvy and with disposable income. Secondly, the lions share of web browsing happens during the commute. Basically you know you are talking to the early adopters when you are marketing online. Also, this segment is probably the fastest growing market segment at the moment, with mobile browser usage doubling every few months.

Who is doing it and what is working?

It seems that all the cool kids are doing it. Samuel L Jackson has his own app. Most of the big companies have started some kind of mobile marketing program, because Mobile Marketing can provide marketers with the holy trinity of

marketing, timely, personalised, actionable marketing messages. There are dozens of great mobile marketing case studies to look at that show how easy it is to get a response out of targets. The methodologies vary too, with some mobile marketing groups using SMS, and others using applications.

SMS marketing?

An example is this case study; McDonald's says, send a SMS to Santa & get your gift within seconds. Promoted using unique codes on cups for consumers to send in with 1 text message – right in the restaurant. Every code wins – for the first time even physical prizes. It resulted in a stunning 25% response rate – with more than 1.5 million participations in five weeks.

Mobile App marketing?

This is where the cutting edge cool is at. Almost all smart phones now use GPS to give users their current location. Now marketing professionals are tapping into this, providing targets with information about their brand. Reebok released a free app that allowed users to customise their trainers. This creates engagement and interaction directly with the brand. Time Out offer an app, like many other media groups, that taps into their information system and provides users with what is going on, events, gigs around them right at that moment.

So what does this mean for marketing professionals?

In almost any industry, you must be looking at mobile marketing as part of your mix. There are thousands of ways you can provide information to your customers through mobile marketing platforms.

## 20x click through, 1c per click advertising

What has 20x click through and costs less than 1c per click (and marginally decreasing?)

Twitter advertising.

Last week we promoted two of our blog posts on twitter using socialoomph and twitreply. We made sure the posts were linked to keywords that were very relevant, and we made sure the tweets were enticing. According to Twitreply, our links were clicked over 20,000 times. We were a little sceptical of this, so we had a look in Google Analytics, and we found the click through was more like 2000 times, which for 200 tweets, at a cost of $2, is the most cost effective advertising we have ever done.

You are justified in worrying about this becoming SPAM, we had a few people unsub from our tweets and compain that we were spamming the system. However we had HUNDREDS of users say they loved our articles, and more started following us. The net effect was probably greater than any other marketing campaign we have run.

The main benefit of twitreply has been that it allows us to keep posting relevant tweets when we would not normally have the time. The system is a little clunky, and it needs a few more features like scheduling the tweets, or at least spacing them out so you don't post 500 tweets in a half hour period.

SocialOomph has allowed us to reply to people that post about us and follow us. This is especially handy if you are planning a social marketing campaign like this one. At one point we had twenty or thirty people following us every minute, which was way too fast for us to respond to normally. It also allows us to track who is leaving us, and who is joining us, making it a great analytical tool too.

Overall, if you were launching a new product, or you had some great news on your blog, combining twitreply and socialoomph is a good way to go.

## Using Seduction in B2B Marketing

Good marketing is a lot like the art of seduction. Convincing a new business to purchase your product or service is a lot like trying to win over a potential suitor. All the pieces of the puzzle are the same. There are two parties, one wants to convince the other of their value. There is a goal in mind and there are powerful emotions. To put it another way, seduction follows the same process as marketing;

Make the prospect feel the need to buy the product or service

Make the offer attractive

Use emotions to engage the prospect

Make the prospect comfortable with buying the product or service, reduce fears

Escalate the prospect towards a completed transaction.

In the world of "professonal" seduction, there are set patterns and plays that have been accepted as the best ways to attract a member of the opposite sex. One of the leaders in this world is Neil Strauss, who wrote the bestseller "The Game". Using the main ideas behind his book, you can see how a business can use the rules of attraction to pursuade a new customer to buy from them.

Pre-Game

Like any good project, good preparation prevents poor performance. Understanding what you are trying to sell, and how you are going to sell it goes a long way to building a marketing program that delivers results. In this stage of the marketing process, an organisation would look at past sales, the competition, the current market, their budget and their current product or service to build an offer that will be attractive to potential clients. In the book "The Game, " the author went through a make-over process, shaving his head, having his ears pinned back, and joining a gym. Businesses could also follow this lead, but rebranding, or reinvigourating their marketing programs.

Select a Target

Targeting is the most important step in the marketing process. Finding and understanding your customer will allow you to build a thorough picture of their mindset and desires. In seduction terms this would mean a quick scan of the bar or venue to find the girl or boy you are going to target. In marketing terms this means going through your customer list, looking at lists of potential new customers and narrowing down the field. Targets can be selected by demographic, by industry, by buying location, by budget etc. The main aim is to narrow the field to an acceptable number of targets that all have something in common. You also want to be able to talk to the target customer as if it is a face to face meeting.

Approach and Open

The seduction community says you have 3 seconds to approach and start a conversation with a girl. This should be no surprise, because first impressions are the most important. In order to attract their attention, PUAs (Pick Up Artists) use "peacocking", a method of wearing outrageous or loud clothing to attract attention. In marketing, you have 3 seconds to grab and maintain the attention of the customer. A businesses "peacocking" might be using outstanding design and original marketing. This also means using a headline that will interest your customer. The best headlines are short, punchy, use simple language and convey the most important piece of value of the product or service.

Demonstrate Value

The best description of what constitutes good value, is adapted from this website

1. There is a clear distinction between, and balance of, customer benefits and the offer.

2. Value involves the psychological and physiological effects of both the benefits and the offer.

3. Good value harnesses the difference between surface attraction and deeper neurology based attraction.

4. Value includes practical applications and call to action to increase the overall odds of converting.

In order to demonstrate clear value to your prospect, you need to show what they will get, how it will improve their lives and how they will feel by purchasing from you. Demonstrating value is also showing that other people have bought from you before, that you have delivered on your promise, and you are not going to let the customer down. This might come in the form of a testimonial, a review from a magazine, or just some facts about how much of a difference your product makes to people.

Disarm the Obstacles

There are many reasons for a customer to not buy from you. In a B2B transaction this might be no previous business relationship, that you are new to the market or that they are "not looking for" your product right now. Having pre-prepared lines to counter these situations are important in telemarketing and face to face selling. In the PUA world, this would be equivilant to being "not really looking for a boyfriend". To translate this into a business context might be the prospect being "happy with their current provider". To counter this situation you don't want to bash their current provider, you don't want to claim to be better either. You want to put the seed of doubt in their mind, and show you have value in your product. Something like "Does your current provider give you XYZ? Because if when we work with our other clients, not only do we offer ABC but also XYZ", where you fill in the blanks with your core values.

Isolate the Target

Meeting face to face is an important part of the buying process. We more easily buy from people than we do an automated machine or a website. In the seduction community, moving the target into a position where you are one on one reduces the opportunities for the bond to be broken. In a sales environment, this would mean trying to get a one on one with the prospect, without the distraction of being in the office and around other people. This also means isolating

Create an Emotional Connection

Again, here is paraphrasing from a pick up routine, applied to a B2B transaction.

Find out if the prospect has any business problem or desire in business they feel "passionate" about. Most likely, these may be their sales team, not spending enough time with their customers, cash flow, gaining new customers, anything they would do even if they did it for free.

Ask them "what's important to you in doing (activity)?" "What do you feel about(activity/business)?" At this point, you are looking to recreate the feeling of doing that activity, and moving them into the states they feel while doing the activity.

Then, feedback these nominalized "feelings" and link these to your product. "What would it be like if we could get you feeling different? " "How would you feel if we could remove that frustration?"

Emotional connections in business are rare, and hard to achieve. However the goal of all marketing is to get the prospect to recreate the feeling they would have when using your product or service. If they can see themselves using your product, and they can feel themselves in that position, you are most of the way to completing the sale.

Blast Last-Minute Resistance

Most rational people know when they are being sold to. Sometimes it is obvious when someone is trying to sell us something, eg telemarketing, and other times it is less obvious, word of mouth etc. Instinctively people will throw up conscious and subconscious reasons to NOT buy from you. In the case of the really desirable TV or car, the nagging feeling that you can't afford the purchase is the subconscious urge to not buy that product. It is the job of the marketing professional to smooth the way through those rough waters. In the seduction community, disarming the obstacles might be dealing with a girl who wants to leave with her friends, or getting the guy to move to a quieter location. In the marketing process this would be focussing on the value of the product to the customer, offering payment plans and guarantees to reduce anxiety or giving them a money back guarantee.

In the pick up world, targets almost always go for the person who isn't completely available to her. In the business world, we always want to deal with partners who are busy with other clients too, because it shows they are valuable. We all want something we can't have. We want what there is a limited supply of, because by the sheer fact there's limited supply of it means it must be good. Many pick-up artists know this so here are a few things they do that can be applied to marketing;

* Always be the first one to end the conversation, if on the phone

* Set a time constraint on any offer, or for the conversation

* Say the product will only be available after a certain date

As you can see there are many ways good marketing is like seduction. Going through the websites on seduction unearths a great range of methods for breaking down a prospect and turning them into a client.

# Advertising Offline

## Branding

Good branding is the key to good marketing. Think of it like this; it is the SOUL or ESSENCE of the company. It is how ALL stakeholders perceive you. I will keep this as brief as possible for your enjoyment, but no doubt there will be more on branding to come.

The key to any branding is anchoring the name in an emotion, or emotions. A brand stretches beyond a logo, a name and some pretty pictures. The full concept of a brand includes how the customer feels about the company, and their experience.

Small businesses should have their brand closely associated with the personality of the business owner. This is because as the owner will be working in almost all aspects of the business, his/her own likes, dislikes, characteristics etc should shine through in the brand.

This means that when starting to launch a new brand, the brand owners should think about what personality they want to convey and what character the new brand will have. Is it going to be fun, playful, serious, cutting edge. How will they want the customer to feel, happy, satisfied, safe, trusting? All of these emotions should go into the brief they would outline for the designers/marketers that are developing their brand. Another way to look at it would be, if the brand were a character in a movie, who would it be?

A good logo is a start to a business, but it is not the be all and end all of a business. People don't interact with a logo. Once the personality of a brand is worked out, the next step is building the narrative that accompanies any of the marketing programs a company builds. Is the business taking on established players, or are they breaking new ground in the industry? Is the value of the product/service cheap and cheerful, good value for money or a premium? Is the product something for everyone, or just a select few in the market? Is the organisation a one man consultancy, or are there many people working together?

The personality and narrative will then influence the fonts and colours used on the logo, (sans-serif tends to show modernity and cleanliness, serif tends to be more flamboyant and classical).

A slogan should describe the personality, the brand and the product offering in less than 10 words. In internet terms, it is what the title of the business' home page would be.

One the personality and narrative are worked out, then the company can start thinking about launching a brand.

It should come from within. What is your special Story? This is where the company begins, and all processes, procedures, arms, legs and head should come from this. It covers a broad range of the marketing process. From the three word slogan you use on business cards, to the mission statement (if you can be bothered, they are rather over rated), to the vision statement.

It needs to be defined, definate, deliberate and a variety of other d-words. You should be able to define it in 20 words or less. Use it as your log line.

Uniformity

Through everything, anything. This is the processes part. When people talk about your company, they need to know what you are about straight away. Coke's slogan is "enjoy". Which sums up the drink's brand, because it is lifestyle, fun, refreshing and relatively light. Everyone knows this because they spend bucketloads on branding.

Regular

Day after day after day...... letterhead, website, sales schpiel, packaging, quotes, receipts, invoices, your forehead, clothing........ "THIS IS WHO YOU ARE".

Cement

The one thing that a lot of businesses miss about branding. You need to cement your brand in actions, feelings and emotions. When you think of QANTAS you think of Australia, which is meant to incite nationalistic sentement at home and make foreigners think it is the only way to get to Australia (maybe.) This is quite difficult in the scheme of thinks, but you need to make the brand equate to a function within the customer.

## Direct mail flyers

Every week we receive up to 5 different flyers from local plumbing companies offering their services. Every week different companies advertise and send out the same looking flyers expecting someone to give them a call back. Advertising to us is a bad idea for two reasons;

We don't own our office and the building is full of other renters. So even if we wanted to engage their services we couldn't

We are a marketing agency, we don't really have any need to talk about or talk to a plumbing firm.

Direct mail can give returns of up to 5%, making it one of the most effective methods of advertising. However not every business can do it well. So how can some of these plumbing companies and tradesman improve their direct marketing?

TARGET TARGET TARGET. We are renting. We work in an area mostly full of renters. The direct marketing would be far better executed if they targetted those areas that had higher levels of homeowners. You could also go one better than that still. Why not actually send a letter directly addressed to the homeowners. There are lists available that list homeowners, renovaters and small dwelling developers. One way to stand out from the rest of the crowd is to address the direct mail piece to the homeowner directly.

Engage a designer. Do not rely on the graphic designers the printing firm have. Actually engage a design house to create your direct marketing. Not only will they use clever design to make your marketing stand out, but they will also know how to use the right stock and colours to make your direct mail look different. The danger with just using a printing firm's designers is they will make your flyer look and feel the same as all the other flyers out there.

Use non-standard stock. Don't print onto a 180GSM DL sized flyer. It will look and feel the same as all the other flyers that end up in the rubbish. Ask the printer for other stock options. Look at other pieces of print material you recieve and see which sizes and shapes you like. The plumbing marketing that sticks, are the ones with magnets on one side and calendars on the other. Or why not try a make a noteblock that people can keep by the phone/in the kitchen.

Use client testimonials. Asking your current clients for testimonials has two effects. One it will allow you to use, in natural language, phrases that increase trust. Two it gives you a good idea of why your current customers use you in the first place.

Test Test Test. Send out small batches of flyers, and measure the response on each batch. If you cant afford to print and post batches of 500, then try to send different batches to different areas. You should be aiming for groups of 1000 or less, because this is manageable from a targeting point of view and it is

Use a guarantee. Some plumbers do offer guarantees such as "on time or get $50" but we think those promises are empty. Being on time should be a given. You could offer "We will beat all quotes" but then you might find your margins shrinking to unmanageable levels. Stronger guarantees might be "All work is covered by a 30 day guarantee" or "we will fix the problem on site, or your money back". Either way look at what other plumbers are offering, and offer something different.

Include standard pricing. Dripping tap? $50, Knocking pipes, $50 etc. Make it so the prospect knows what they are getting themselves in for before they call you.

Claim to improve safety, time or money. The first key motivator for people to engage a service is safety. Are they going to be safe using the service and will it improve their safety. Next target time, either promise to save time, not to waste time or to give people more time than they already have. Lastly target money, either show you can save them money, you will give them cash as an incentive or show them how you are the best value for money. Looking at each of these, alter your heading and offer so that you are targetting one of these key motivators.

Include many ways for them to contact you. Make the contact easy. Give email, phone, web and a physical address. Make sure your company name is clear, because they will probably search for you online as well.

Make sure your website matches your direct mail. If people are interested in talking to you, they will probably search for you online. If you don't have a website or your website does not match what is on the flyer, that will turn off your prospects.

# Case Studies

## Tough Mudder – A Marketing Case Study

Tough Mudder is every action man's fantasy. It is a grueling seven mile race through muddy hills, cold water and burning bales of Hay. What started out as part of the Harvard Business School's Business Plan contest is swiftly becoming a rising star of endurance races in America. During the Business Plan contest, judges felt that getting 500 people to put themselves through hell was a little optimistic. Will Dean, the founder of the contest, will be expecting 20,000 contestants at four races thoughout next year.

So why has this won so many fans? Why is it a great example of good marketing?

The Purple Cow

The race is about as unique as they get, a combination of triathlon, mad maldon racing and cross fit. The race was modeled on similar European races like the Grim Challenge and in Germany the Strongman Run. It offers something that competitors can't get anywhere else.

Fitness Craze

The race taps into the growing outdoor fitness craze. With people looking for the next fun fitness fix after personal training and "boot camps", Tough Mudder offers something unique to those that are sick of pounding pavement in Triathlons or Marathons. Everyone wants to prove they are capable of achieving something, especially those that have a little bit of a "weekend warrior" in them. This race offers something new to the fitness crowd.

Clever Social Marketing

Potential contestants have been submitting to Facebook etc. videos of themselves running up stairs in high heels. The event is encouraging people to a) be creative b) think about the contest in the lead up c) promote one of the core values of the competition, extreme endurance. Contestants are encouraged to spread the word and tell shaggy dog stories of the monkey bars covered in butter, or the freezing cold lakes they have to cross.

Outstanding Branding

The race has some very slick branding, compared to other races around the world, such as the mad maldon race in England. The marketing is as good as the major marathons and as good as any corporate event. This has a two fold effect. One it makes it easy for corporate sponsors to get involved, because they can see the marketing capabilities. Two it makes it easy for contestants to buy into the competition, because they can see it is not a flash in the pan and they can easily attach themselves to the brand.

## Hidden Pizza Restaurant – A Wasted Opportunity

For those that have not followed the social media buzz, here is a brief outline on what "Hidden Pizza Restaurant" was all about. At the start of April, an alleged Tony Fazio started a marketing campaign saying if you found his Hidden Pizza Restaurant, you could get free pizza.

Who doesn't like FREE PIZZA?

Melbourne local news/bloggers started buzzing about how great the place was and what a clever idea the "free pizza" was. However, it turns out the "Hidden Pizza Restaurant" campaign was a clever construct of Clemenger Proximity + Sensis + OMD. It appears some marketing directors got together with a big budget and too much time on their hands and created this campaign to promote Yellow Pages online.

Did it work? Well that is hard to say, because it is nearly impossible to tell whom the campaign targetted, what the message was, and what the goal of the exercise was. We can say, though, if our clients allowed us to give away free pizza, we would certainly do a better marketing job than this program did.

What was the aim of the campaign?

If it was purely a branding exersize for YellowPages.com.au, then you could probably argue that it was a moderate success. The campaign has certainly given the brand eyeballs in the marketing community, as people are talking about the Hidden Pizza Restaurant program, and there are marketing magazines that are discussing the merits of the exersize. However I would say that more has been done for the "Hidden Pizza" brand than Yellow Pages, as most people are talking about how great the restaurant was and not how they found out about it.

Social marketing is also a double edged sword. Most social marketing commentators are actually saying the exercise showed how yellowpages.com.au is a poor way to spend your marketing dollars if you are looking for a high position in search. Even now, after the campaign has ended, the front page of the website and other bloggers are optimised better for the front page of Google. To further embarrassment, the Yellow Pages entry for the Hidden Pizza Restaurant is now returning a dead link, so there is no way to see how well optimised the page is.

Maybe it was all about the promotion and buzz? 3756 fans on Facebook is hardly a groundswell, especially when you consider other restaurants with less marketing dollars have a greater following. I also wonder how many of the "fans" are employees of the three companies involved? Again there are people talking about the program, and no doubt "hidden pizza" was probably a trending search for a while. However, how much of that will generate interest in advertising on Yellow Pages?

To be crass, the campaign goal might have been to prove that, in order to find a restaurant, you have to use the Yellow Pages, in which case it missed the mark by a country mile. The campaign probably did more for Facebook, Google/SEO, Free Pizza campaigns and the Hidden Pizza Restaurant than it did for Yellow Pages. Which brings me to a separate point. For all we can tell, it looks like restaurant was temporary; what a complete waste of ongoing marketing.

Who were they targeting?

Anyone with any idea about social media marketing would view this campaign with scepticism, so the message is going to be filtered out. Anyone with money to spend on things like Yellow Pages are going to use multiple ways of growing their presence, such as social media, SEO, customer feedback etc. They are not going to rely on spending thousands of dollars on a single page online. Which demographic is going to say "YES! This has shown me the power of advertising in The Yellow Pages."?

A better idea!

We have a far better idea for growing yellowpages.com.au as well as the clients they serve. Why not partner with independent local pizza restaurants and run a "buy 1 get 1 free Wednesdays" if customers download a coupon for the restaurant from the yellowpages.com.au. Make a "Free Pizza" campaign page on Facebook where people can find their local participating restaurants. If customers take a photo of themselves with the free pizza and post it on the Facebook page, they go in to win more free pizza, or something.

Surely it would be more of a brag for Sensis if they could prove their media, yellowpages.com.au was worth something to their clients, either in terms of clicks or visibility. At the moment all this campaign says is, if you have lots of time and money to spend on PR and promotion, then yellowpages.com.au is one of the ways your clients can get in touch with you.

Maybe someone out there can tell us if Yellow Pages got value for money out of this program?

UPDATE:

Both Clemenger Proximity and Yellow Pages have released their statements on the program. Unsurprisingly both are claiming success with over 8000 people finding the restaurant, 70% through Yellow Pages. We would say it is more of a success for Clemenger, who showed they could take a brief and create something amazing in a very short space of time. For Yellow Pages, however, we still think it is marketing dollars poorly spent. The program mostly proved that Yellow Pages don't understand social and online media, and that there are better ways to find a business than through their website. There would have been around 13550 searches on Google during that period for Pizza in Melbourne, and even with the power of Clemenger and Sensis, Yellow Pages managed to capture just 5600.

