June « 2009 « MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

June 30, 2009

Watch Your Step!

Filed under: Internet Marketing Home — admin @ 8:00 am

Watch Your Step.
Checkout http://www.mklink.com/training/ for more internet marketing tips

I re-read a book the other day called “Permission Marketing” by a chap called Seth Godin.
The copy I read was a little dated as it was written about 10 years and was making references to AltaVista for example rather than Google but even so it was great to read it again.

Seth’s whole point is about the use of permission with your marketing. It is about offering the potential customer or client something for free (or at least at a peppercorn price) to start a relationship and then gradually win people’s trust over time and develop a mutually profitable relationship with them.

Now this is a concept I’ve heard again and again from people like Chris Cardell, Dan Kennedy, Cory Rudl and loads of people who’s names I can’t remember. And I know it works because I use it myself.

The average website asks people to either “pay up” or “go away” basically. Blunt but true.

The website that starts a relationship and then follows up with multiple emails and contacts generally does much better. Even for e-commerce sites, capturing contact details by offering the right “bait” usually gives you the edge over people that expect their sites to work simply by selling and nothing else.

Most people’s websites are expecting to sell straight away. Well ok that’s fine for the 1% or 2% that are in that part of their buying cycle, but it leaves 98% of the money on the table.

It’s a bit like a man going into a bar and seeing an attractive woman and asking her to marry him there and then. It may work in a small percentage of the time, but it’s not very effective! There’s no RELATIONSHIP.

Look at my site. I give away tons of great stuff to encourage people to return on a regular basis and tryout our training services.

For example, one simple way of using permission marketing is with a multiple step signup form.

We’ve all seen enquiry forms that have loads of pointless questions. Daunting at the least and usually very poor at conversion.

Far better to offer someone a free guide/whitepaper/e-book etc in exchange for the very basics i.e. a name and an email. Then, on the “thank-you” page, you can ask more questions and this way it doesn’t look too onerous.

In fact I have tried and tested having many questions over several pages and the more pages people go through(as long as they’re suitably motivated by the right “bait”) the more qualified the leads are coming out the other end. You can actually “see” people going though the sales “funnel”.

It’s a bit like a breadcrumb trail. Nice ‘n easy steps.

My question is, what can you do with your sales process to make it very easy to sign up to something and then gain progressively more information (permission) about your visitors?

Once armed with this information, you can run personalised, targeted campaigns for maximum conversion and loyalty. Again and again and again.

Why not let us show you how easy it is plus give you some great, specific advice about your website in loads of different areas? Register at http://www.mklink.com/getstarted now and don’t look back!

’till Next Time,
Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

Comments (0)

June 16, 2009

Beware Google Impersonators

Filed under: PPC Pay Per Click — admin @ 9:22 am

Beware
Google Impersonators
Checkout http://www.mklink.com/getstarted/
for more internet marketing tips

From time
to time I get calls from companies that tell me that they work for Google.

They do their best to give the impression that they are a division of
Google and that they can run my pay per click campaign for me at a fraction
of the cost that I run it myself.

Of course,
I don’t tell them at this point who I am or how many hundreds of thousands
of pounds I have spent with Google, both for MKLINK and the handful of
clients I still work with in this regard.

The last
chap rang me up and told me that he has 5 computers in front of him(!!??)
and that he guaranteed he could save me an instant 30% by optimising my
campaign.

Again, I
didn’t tell him how many hours I had already spent optimising my campaigns
to get both my click through rate and my landing page conversion rate.

Unless you
have a lot of spare money my suggestion is that you run your Pay per Click
campaigns yourself. Or at the very least learn how it should be done so
that if you do outsource it, you can always stay on top of it. Do not
be confused by this.

I preach this message exactly the same way that I preach that business
people should be in charge of all their search engine marketing themselves
because it will save you a lot of hassle, complaints and ultimately money.
No-one cares about your search engine placements more than you do!

Remember,
you do not have to do it all yourself, you can train someone to take ownership
of it. Why pay agency rates for something that you or someone you can
hire from the local college can learn for next to nothing?

If you are
confused by it all then Ring Them Up!! Google wants to help you!

It is in Google’s interest that you are happy with your campaign
and that it is working well for you. Many people try it, fail at it and
leave it alone. Which is a shame because people are there to help you.

If you want
help setting up a campaign and are a new customer, try
calling 0844 338 0341.
This is the number taken straight from Google’s own website. (This number
may well change).

I spoke to a very helpful chap called Jamie Bain.

Specifically the company is called Google Ventura and the good news is
that they will help you set up a campaign and they don’t charge you any
money. If you already have an account, you will need the more traditional
technical support, which can be found at https://adwords.google.com/support/

As always, if you would like an introductory consultancy to see if we
can help and train you with your internet marketing for better results,
simply sign up at http://www.mklink.com/getstarted
today or call 01454 852414 and we’ll be happy to try
and help.

’till Next
Time,

Mike Knight.
Internet Marketing Advice & Training for Businesses since 1998.

Comments (0)

June 4, 2009

Twittering on

Filed under: Social Marketing — admin @ 9:35 am

New Techniques: Social Marketing

Marketing Opportunities and the Social Web – Twitter (www.twitter.com)

Traditionally when we come into contact with any of the main media channels
e.g. television, radio, papers and magazines etc, we’ve become familiar
with the actual ‘content’ that we were interested in being
interrupted by obvious commercial advertisements. This
model has followed us onto the web – we’re all used to seeing
adverts on the sides of websites, popping up, dropping down and so on.

Many of us are using many social web services for free e.g. YouTube, facebook,
Myspace, and we sort of expect to be advertised ‘at’ as part
of the deal. There are however many new kinds of channels that are being
generated by the users e.g. blogs, and micro blogs, that aren’t
subject to this old model of promotion.

These new kinds channels could still let you tell people what you do,
but can also let you learn about your potential customers, because they
provide a platform for exchange and sharing of information. This could
not only help you to better cater for customer needs, but it gives out
a better chance to build up a less threatening relationship with your
customers – blogs are a good way to do this.

Micro-blogging provides an opportunity to do this provided it is done
carefully.

Micro blogging is essentially blogging but on a more ‘intense’
scale – there a lots of short posts, lots of comments received and
sent frequently. Twitter is an example of this.

After signing up at the website twitter.com (which is a short process)
you can let other users know (via email, mobile phone etc) in lots of
short posts or “tweets” exactly what you’re doing and
planning to do. You can send email invitations, and add your thoughts
to theirs, ask questions or post events.

Twitter says that it enables you to stay “hyper-connected”
with a system that allows you to essentially “follow” exactly
what the people you are in contact with are doing at any time, or be followed,
and anybody can stop following at any time.

You can search for friends who are signed up to Twitter, and build up
lists of friends. There are even websites that show who the top users
of Twitter are (based on how many followers the have) – see twitterholic.com

The huge numbers of followers shown will give you some idea of just how
popular Twitter is becoming. Although there are large numbers of Twitter
subscribers, you are likely to be only posting to a small amount of people
(your followers) with your ‘tweets’. The more interesting
your posts are to your followers, the more likely they are to keep following.

This has implications for using Twitter for marketing purposes. If you
were to start posting obviously commercial posts, quite apart for risking
being seem as a spammer, and being blocked or kicked off the service,
you are likely to lose followers very rapidly. There are still however
lots of blogs and websites out there giving advice on how to use

Twitter for marketing, for example, try typing “marketing using
Twitter” into Google.

As is so often the case with the Web, whatever we do or think in ‘real’
life, it is reflected there, and in this sense it’s natural that
we should want and be able to use social websites for marketing and commercial
purposes.

If you’re interested in or already a subscriber to Twitter, you
may want to explore the many other social ‘microblog’ websites
out there including friendfeed.com or www.plurk.com.

Source: Twitter

MKLINK Marketing Tips

Comments (0)

Ebay Classified

Filed under: Ebay — admin @ 9:28 am

Getting the Most from Ebay – Classified Advertisements

Most of us think of Ebay as being essentially an online auction site.
You either need to sell or buy via the website in order to make use of
it. There is however another way to use Ebay to get good quality leads
for your business at very little, without needing to send or receive money
via the site’s normal channels.

Ebay classified ads allow you to tap into the potentially large amount
of “ready-to-buy” traffic that use the site, and yet actually
conduct the ‘sale’ away form the site at a later date. Yes
that’s right - ebay have introduced a service that encourages sellers
to do business away form the website.

Just as the name implies, you are allowed to set up a classified advert
in which you can list your asking price, encourage interested parties
to fill out a contact form, or you can list your telephone number so they
can call you. There is no bid or buy button on the ad, no actual bidding
takes place, and details contained in the classified advert can be changed
at any time.

There is a list of possible categories available to advertise your services
in, but typically this kind of advertising best suits higher value, high
‘involvement’ , non ‘commodity’ products that
require more discussion, negation, and information to achieve a sale.
Since nothing is actually sold on the ebay site using this method, no
feedback is given.

Classified ads are displayed on Ebay for different periods depending
on what you are selling e.g. 30 day listings for many services, 7 day
listings for motor vehicle local ads. In most cases other than for example
real estate and more than 6 listings of motor vehicle ads in a year, there
will be typically no final value fee or notice fee. In many cases you
can expect to pay at most an insertion fee of $9.95 (prices are shown
in U.S dollars). Due to the vast amount of traffic that eBay classified
ads could be a very effective way of increasing your promotional ROI,
reducing the cost of sales, attracting new business, and building a list
of quality leads.

For more information go to ebay.com, go to the selling help pages

at http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/selling-basics.html and type ‘classified
ads into the search box.

Source: eBay.

MKLINK Marketing Tips

Comments (0)

An Intro to the Forum

Filed under: Forum — admin @ 9:05 am

A Taste of The Forum

The mkLINK Forum is a much under-used resource available to all customers
who have signed up to any mkLINK Training or support packages. You should
have received details of the forum URL, your own username and password.
The Forum allows you to ask questions to, share inormation and communicate
with members of our team, and other customers. Every (month / week) we
will feature ‘A Taste of The Forum’ in this newsletter. In this edition
we will feature two recent posts that have been of particular interest
to forum members.

Featured Post 1 From Forum Member:

Does it really matter what my page names are please? Isn’t the content
of them going to be more important than the names?

Feedback from mkLINK:

I suppose the short answer is yes to both. The text content of your pages
is obviously an extremely important element of the ‘relevance’
of your page to certain key phrases – if they’re not in your
web page text, then you can’t realistically expect search engine
such as Google to return the pages in the search results for queries based
around those phrases. Search engines read text, not pictures. Hopefully
you can see the huge importance of the page text content in the ranking
of your pages.

Page names or URLs could be judged to be less important by search engines
such as Google in the ranking of your pages. However, Google states that
using relevant keywords in the page name / URL could make the pages easier
for the search engines to crawl, and could be preferred and trusted more
by those deciding whether to click on a link to a page. You will also
notice that when you make an enquiry in Google, often URLs are returned
with the keywords shown in bold if the match the keyword in the search
query. You can deduce form this that yes, including keywords in your page
names URLs may help the ranking of those pages from a relevance point
of view, so it may be worth considering.

Featured Post 2 From Forum Member:

How can I stop people taking copies of photos from my website please?

Feedback from mkLINK:

I’m guessing you’re referring to people using a ‘right mouse click’ and
’save as..’ over your pictures. If you want to prevent this it will mean
putting some javascript into the page. You can find examples of this script
by putting e.g. the phrase ‘block right mouse click javascript’ or something
similar into Google. See http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=block+right+mouse+click+javascript&btnG=Search&meta=

Feedback from Forum Member:

Beside putting some javascript on your page, which will give you some
protection although people can look at the source code and take your image
directly from your server. I find the best way is low-res images and a
watermark which makes it useless for other to take your image.

I am a photographer and have this problem all the time. but am using
very low res images on the public site and with hi res work with a watermark.

There are many other questions, answers, and informative posts on the
mkLINK Forum. It is s unique shared resource which provide answers to
many of the questions you have about the Web, your website, and Internet
Marketing. If you have any questions about the Forum, please call us on
01454 852414.

(Source: mkLINK Forum)

MKLINK Marketing Tips

Comments (0)