When is it okay to ask for someone’s email address?

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We recently launched a Worpdress plugin called VideoSqueeze and it’s had a great response so far. One topic which seems to crop up a fair bit though is about the fact it’s somehow spammy, sleazy and just not the correct thing to ask someone for their email in exchange for content.

If someone is asking for your email in exchange for poor content that has little or no value, purely so they can then send you a ton of sales emails on “How to make $10,000 online in 3 hours” then I agree, it’s not good. But then that’s no different to sales and marketing tactics in offline business like the idiot that knocks on your door on a Saturday afternoon trying to sell you cheaper electricity. That’s an unacceptable way to try and generate sales and just pisses most people off in the same way cold calling does.

So when is it okay to ask for someones email online? People have next to no time to read pages of emails these days and so someones main email address is a valuable piece of information. If you’re going to ask for someone’s email you need to make sure they will want what you’ve got enough to make them trade with you and then you need to make sure you handle that email address with the ultimate respect. (more…)

Traffic Spike from Direct Traffic?…Possible Hot linking

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I noticed a huge spike in traffic recently to this blog and Google Analytics identified all visits as around 2 seconds and all as direct traffic. This immediately made me suspect image hot linking.

For those who haven’t come across hot linking of images, it’s when someone links to an image on your site directly, therefore stealing it. So rather than purchase an image or create an image of their own to use, they trawl through Google Image search of similar, copy the path to an image they like and then use that image on their site. Because the images are hosted, in this case, on my blog…. every time those images get loaded elsewhere they register as a hit on my traffic.

So what can you do? (more…)

Some more Google Adwords tips

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Hi all, over the next few days running into Christmas I’m going to post a number of tips to help tweak your holiday marketing and also carry you into the New year with some great tips and tricks to really step up your Online Marketing.

Let’s kick off with some Google Adwords tips…. (more…)

Cold calling: Because you’re desperate

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Sales CallI had a message left on my office voicemail last week from a smooth talking sales guy who informed me I needed to call him back regarding a “legal matter”. That was all he said apart from quoting his number and company name.

The Voicemail immediately got my back up because I pretty much knew it was a sales tactic to get me to respond and after googling his company I could see he worked for a legal help company who help businesses with various employment  laws in the UK. I obviously didn’t call him back and wouldn’t do business with this company now out of principle. Then this morning I got an invite from the Managing Director inviting me to their legal event, at the end he signs off “P.S. Looking for a good night’s sleep, book now!” – which is ironic considering some people would have already lost sleep worrying that his sales guys had a law suit lined up against them! (more…)

I rank top, beat that.

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So you rank top for your main keyword in Google? nice, how much business does that generate for you? ….hello?

I speak to new people every day who tell me how they aren’t interested in PPC  and that they have lost money, never had any real success with it and they already rank top for their main keywords. That’s like me saying I’ve purchased a new kitchen and never managed to get the thing constructed properly. The reason is I have ZERO experience with building kitchens and therefore I should be listening to the guys who do it every day and demonstrate great results. Why do some people think Internet Marketing is any different? To run a successful online marketing campaign you need to know what your doing, you need to have made mistakes, tested what works and actually had some success.

Google make it sound all very easy to setup an Adwords campaign and that’s because it IS easy. What is not easy is to actually construct and then optimise a profitable campaign. Anyone can enter a bunch of keywords, write some ads and throw $50 in the budget… it’s making a profit on that $50 which is important. (more…)

Target your Ad Inventory by country

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Today’s post is aimed at publishers who already operate a Website(s) but want to take their advertising beyond just Adsense or another third pary Ad network and sell their inventory out to individual companies.

Being able to serve your Ad space efficiently is very important not just for your client but also for your bottom line. For example if you run a Website that has traffic from all over the world then you can split your advertising inventory and serve specific Ads to specific audiences / countries. Say you have 2 UK clients, 3 US clients and a client in Australia. Now rather than serve 100% of all your ad impressions to each client you can specify which Ads are shown when certain geographical criteria is met. So now your US client only has their Ads shown to US traffic, and that is extremely valuable especially if the other percentage of traffic is currently being wasted on them due to the fact they only sell within the US.

There are a few different advertising server options (more…)

Are Adwords conversions accurate?

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Being able to track Adwords conversions is extremely important in order to run a profitable Adwords campaign but how do you know the conversion numbers are accurate?

Google Adwords has a facility which allows you to track a conversion when someone clicks through from one of you Google Ads. This conversion may be a signup for something or perhaps a sale. The bottom line is it allows you to run a cost per conversion stat on your marketing to ascertain a return on investment. For example, 5 clicks costing $5 each from Google Ads totals a cost of $25 from which I make one conversion at a value of $30 – Profit = $5.

The issue with this conversions statistic though is how accurate is it? The web can still be a particularly unreliable arena when it comes to scripts and cookies. Everyone has different browsers and different security settings and even a small glitch on the numbers could throw out your stats by a fair degree. So if you’re concerned that your Google Adwords conversions might be showing some inaccuracies checkout these possible reasons: (more…)

How to hire talented people

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I work with some of the most talented people from all over the world – here’s how I find them.

It’s great that with the world of Internet Freelancers you can now hire an entire team of developers, designers and copy writers as and when you need them but how do you get quality? There are thousands upon thousands of freelancers now all over the world lined up waiting to take your project. Newer services like 99Designs even pull a crowd of those people into one place for you and make them compete for your business. But that doesn’t mean you will get quality, it means you will get variety and options.

Here’s how I now get some of the most talented people in the industry to work on my projects – and it’s nothing ground breaking just to warn you!

I used to spend ages looking though freelance sites for talented developers and designers, I would post a ton of Ads for projects and would always get a great response. The issue I always had was getting consistent quality though and hiring people that would stick around for more than one project.

More recently I stopped all the Ads and decided to start going directly to the people who had already demonstrated they were great at what they do.  What I do now is find someone who’s doing something I need really well and then find out who did it for them. Rather than spend ages explaining to someone what you need always try and find someone who’s done it, then find WHO did it.

There is often always a trail to whoever did say development work, they may have a link in the footer of the page for example. Failing that contact the Website owner directly and ask who they use, more of then than not they will happily refer you on. That person is already one step ahead of anyone else and will possibly even get the job done cheaper because of their experience. Companies head-hunt the best people all the time there is no reason why you shouldn’t do the same when looking for your own projects.

Forget pretty, focus on results

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It’s always nice to look at a Website that’s been designed professionally. it makes a big difference to your first impressions about that company and in general a well designed Web page just feels nice to use.

The thing is though every business is different, what might work well for one business may not work well for another. The key thing is, what’s more important to your business? Looking pretty or making sales?

When most people start thinking of a new Website or online business they immediately start thinking about logos, colour schemes and how the photos will fade in nicely on the homepage. All great stuff, but irrelevant if you have no customers. What’s more important is how can I give the customer what they want as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Take ebay for example. Not exactly ground breaking web design going on is there? The logo looks like a 5 year old drew it, but they have millions of users who are happy to use their Website regardless. The reason is, they built something functional, something that does the job extremely well, and that is what their customers want. Another example is plentyoffish - they boast thousands of new registrations every day yet they definitely don’t have the best designed dating website online. There are likely hundreds of dating sites that look far more professional but plentyoffish just concentrated on making something functional that worked. Perhaps the king of them all is Craigslist, it wouldn’t look out of place back in the early nineties but there really is no need for them to design something modern and flashy – in fact if they did they would likely lose all their customers.

Good design certainly has it’s place online and in certain situations is essential. The key is to assess what your users are looking for when they visit and then spend your time focusing on giving them that, quickly and efficiently. If they are looking to purchase $10,000 furniture from you then you will likely want to think about showing them how fantastic looking that furniture is, glossy photos and slick design. If you sell nuts and bolts then keep it easy to search for what bolts they want then give them a super easy way to purchase – keep the design basic, your customers don’t care whether your menus fly out with a swishing noise!

Custom buttons on forms

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A fairly simple tip today but one that can help a lot with form conversion. How many times do you see a form with a tiny boring default grey button?

Take the below form for example…

Name *

 
Email *

 

With a simple tweak to that form code we can switch that boring button to one that says “CLICK ME!”. Look for the code in your form where the button is placed in the form, something like:

< input type=”submit” value=”Submit”/ >

Now change it so you call an image in place of the button like…..

< input type=”image” src=”7.gif” value=”Submit”/ >

So you switch the type to image and then call the image by name (make sure the image path is correct). Give the button an action, for example this form is to access a video so rather than “Submit” I named it “Get Video“.

Name *

 
Email *

 

See how much more appealing that is!? Try it out and test different colour buttons to see which improve your form conversions.

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