Using Product Comparisons for Fun and Profit
April 28, 2009
One of the best ways to create new content is to do a product comparison. You can go about this from a few different angles:
1) You Vs. Competitors – Use a comparison page to show why your Unique Selling Point (you have one, right?) is powerful enough for your customer to purchase your product or service over your competitor’s.
2) Product Option A vs. Product Option B – Use a comparison page to show different features of your products or services. A good example would be if a landscape company created a page showing the differences between, say, organic and inorganic fertilizers…and the pros/cons of each.
3) Affiliate product comparisons – It’s possible that you’re running an ad supported site, and are selling competing products, create a comparison of them to increase your sales of both!
So, what are the benefits of comparisons? For one, you can clearly and concisely illustrate why your website visitor needs to purchase from you vs. your competitor. On a deeper level though, it is an opportunity to create content that will rank well for a number of longer keyphrases.
For example, my site receives a good bit of traffic because I did a comparison of SEO and PPC – so now I get Google searches for “SEO vs. PPC”.
This is just one more step you should be taking to enhance your web prescence. Keep up the good work, and be sure to check back for more!
Content Strategy for Your Website
April 21, 2009
I was in a client meeting yesterday, discussing content strategy and how it relates to their need for SEO and better conversions. We’ve made some really good progress in a super-competitive area the last three months, but were having trouble converting visitors and wanted to expand our SEO footprint.
The CEO asked me, “Is it better to have several pages that are always changing, or to have a site that is constantly growing with new content?”
The VP of Sales laughed out loud when I answered that question, “Yes!”
We all know that fresh content is vital to SEO success. It’s also important for visitor conversion. And, it’s important to not only have your most prominent pages (home page, etc…) “freshen up” every now and then, it’s also important to push out new content on a regular basis.
From a search engine standpoint – it gets spiders coming back more frequently, which gets you indexed more thoroughly, more often, and often better. From a visitor standpoint, it gives you the opportunity to excite and engage the visitor more.
More and more, we are seeing that visitors need more than a catchy landing page, a great offer, or a slick form to turn in to leads or customers. Search is becoming less and less a direct conversion tool, and more of a sales process that you need to nurture in order to get the customer.
Of course, this rings true a little more for larger ticket item purchases than for, say, a book or pair of shoes.
What does this mean for your business? For one, you need to craft all your content with an eye for the ultimate goal – conversion. You need to come up with a schedule and stick to it (this is much harder than it sounds). You will need to create content that is interesting and useful for someone, even if they aren’t your customer. You need to give options to share your content (social bookmarking buttons, email this buttons, etc…) – and encourage people to use them.
In short – your website needs to start to become a combination of promotion and enhanced conversion strategies, and real substance.
Improve Your Business Website
April 14, 2009
In – JUST ONE EASY STEP!
Sorry, I work up early this morning and ended up cooking breakfast while an infomercial was on.
Anyway – here’s a quick idea to drastically improve your business’s website: Improve the image quality!
So many great businesses have websites that look awful – a big reason for this is fuzzy, poorly sized, poorly managed images and product photos.
Here are some things to look for in choosing an image:
1) High Quality/Resolution
2) Color matching with the rest of your site
3) Does it “Pop”
4) Is it “selling”
What this means: Use only High-res images that have been sized appropriately in an image editing program. Make sure it matches somewhat with your website’s colors – and is sharp enough to draw attention on the page and guide custmers to do what you wan them to.
Old Marketing Pro Tip – visitors love pictures of people – and they will look at the spot on the page the people in the photo are looking at! This means, if you want someone to read a certain section of your website, a picture whose eyes are looking in that direction will help.
For product photos, there are a few things you can do to make sure your site:
- Crop in to show the most interesting detail of the product.
- Remove backgrounds, replace with a white or gray background
- Use a drop shadow to make the image pop
- Auto-Adjust Color levels and use a sharpening filter in your favorite editing software
- if you don’t have editing software, get some!
Where can I find the time?
April 9, 2009
One common question I field from business owners is – “Where do I find the time to do all this stuff?”
That’s a fair question, because, as a business owner, you have a lot of things going on. First and foremost, you’re likely having to service your customers – you may be cleaning their air ducts, returning a package, or tailoring their suit. There’s not a lot of time to agonize over search engine rankings while you’re doing this.
Unfortunately, you also don’t have time to ignore online marketing – and especially search engine marketing. Why? Because your competitors sure aren’t ignorning it.
You have a couple options when it comes to managing your own online marketing – there are some tools out there that can make it a lot easier:
- PPC Management Software – There are several good options out here, all running in the $300-$500/month category. You may need a little help getting started, but you’ll be able to quickly manage your PPC campaign after a few months of getting used to it.
- SEO “Systems” – I may be being unfair here, but as a resident expert on SEO, I’m telling you there isn’t a system out there worth anything. Save your money.
- Off-shore outsourcing – This can be cost effective, as some companies will work with you for less than $300/month. However, every time I’ve done it, the results have been less than optimal (at best), to ridiculously bad (at worst).
- 7xo Media – Hey, I wouldn’t be fair to myself or your business if I didn’t plug 7xo here. You can get affordable, expert, top-quality service and results – all put into a no contract, no obligation system that makes sense for your business. From $150/month to $15,000/month – we’ve done it all!
Email me if you’d like more info on what we can do. We’ll start with a free analysis of your business, and talk about a plan that is custom built for your business.
Online Marketing Cost
April 9, 2009
Especially in tough economic times, the cost of online marketing can be quite a concern for business owners. If you’re a small business owner, this can be especially troubling. How can you justify a $5000 pay per click budget, when you’re having trouble making payroll?
The short answer to that is, if your online marketing isn’t showing a direct contribution to your bottom line, you can’t. However, the ABSOLUTE BEST THING about online marketing, especially pay per click marketing, is that you can track it down to the dollar.
Let’s take my favorite example, a local family owned plumbing service – we’ll call them “John Smith and Sons Plumbing.” Well, ole John doesn’t know much about PPC, and blew through $1000 in a couple months, and decided to get stop advertising.
Instead, he is spending $500 on Yellow Page ads, and another $2000 a month on some remnant radio time. He’s doing ok, but he’s not really sure how many of the calls he’s getting come from his website, much less how many come in as a result of his Yellow Page or radio ads.
He’s throwing $2,500 into a void.
The neat thing about John’s business is, he doesn’t need leads, email opt-ins, or someone to purchase online – John needs PHONE CALLS.
Did you know there are CHEAP services out there that let pay per click managers like me track phone calls, down to the keyword? Instead of throwing money into ads you can’t track – why wouldn’t you want to put an ad in front of people searching for “local plumbers?”
I can tell you right now – I can deliver phone calls to your service business for less than $20/call (that includes my profit margins) – do you think your business could turn a profit on those kind of numbers? (email me if you want more info)
Let’s make some assumptions in John’s case….he’ll turn 35% of those callers into customers, at an average revenue of $300/customer, at a $175 profit margin/job. So, if he gets 125 calls from his $2500 ($20/call), he’s going to get 44 new customers (35%). At $175/customer, that’s $7700 in profits. Remove the marketing spend ($2,500), and you’re left with $5,200 in pure profit.
Let’s go one step further and say John retains about 30% of his business for future jobs. Those people hire him back at the same profit margin, approximately once per year. Since I talked him in to setting up a monthly email newsletter, there is no cost associated in closing these guys again. So, for every 44 customers, he gets about 14 repeat customers the next year. For 12 months, that turns in to 168 repeat customers.
So, in year one, John spent $30,000 online, and netted $62,400 in profits after it’s all said and done. (that’s not revenue, that’s profit). Because of his repeat business, in the next year, he netted another $29,400.
You can imagine what happens year after year, right? There may be ups and downs, but since we have a controlled, trackable source of business for John, he’s not struggling right now. In fact, he’s doing better than ever, all because of the things we’ve shown him.
Improve your PPC ROI in an Hour
April 8, 2009
Here’s a quick tip to improve the conversion rates for some of your pay per click keywords:
If you’re using broad match – stop. I don’t mean completely stop – that would be silly. I mean stop and think for a second. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and spend an hour with your analytics and see what you can learn.
Here are two things you should be able to find:
- Longer Keyphrases that aren’t converting. Your keyword bid on “widgets” might be sending lots of folks looking for “free widgets” even though you charge for yours. This means you should add “free” as a negative keyword in that campaign. That will save you money.
- Longer Keyphrases that are converting. Your keyword bid on “widgets” also sends a lot of clicks for “red widgets”, and those people convert like crazy. So, break “red widgets” out into a different ad group, phrase or exact match it, and save money on click costs and watch your conversions jump even higher.
Those are the two primary tenents of keyword optimization – but you have to have the analytics in place to tell. If you’re broad matching hundreds or thousands of words, and not doing this on a regular basis (meaning daily if you can) you’re wasting money.
10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking Today
April 7, 2009
Since we’re just getting this site off the ground, and sent out our first newsletter only yesterday (to over 600 people!) – I wanted to post some of the info I shared. This one is really – simple, 10 things you can do today to improve your search engine rankings:
1) Do your Keyword Research. Try to target search phrases, i.e. “Affordable Widgets in
Kansas City” vs. “Widgets.”
We have some free keyword research tools linked here.
2) Write Unique Title tags for each page.
3) Be sure to have unique, interesting, and well-written content that covers your keywords.
4) Make sure you regularly update your content, as well as adding new content
(”Freshness” is key).
5) Be sure the every page on your site has an internal link. Create a sitemap to help this out.
6) Be sure your site’s main navigation structure is accesible to search engines.
7) Use your keyword phrases in your internal links.
8) Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes,
domain name, and file structure.
9) Focus on accumulating quality inbound links.
10) Remember that SEO is an ongoing process!
Welcome to 7xo Media’s Online Marketing Blog
April 6, 2009
We are excited to get this blog up and running on our new site, 7xomedia.com.
We just started a new online marketing newsletter, that goes out the first Monday of every month. You can sign up for that here.