Real Web Marketing Blog

An Outflow State of Mind

by John Eberhard

I was counseling a client recently on developing an outflow state of mind. And by “outflow” I mean sending out promotional messages to your target public.

It is more vital than ever for small business owners these days to get into a state of mind where you are continually and regularly outflowing to your public. You have to be continually sending out messages to your public to remind them that you are there, to tell them about your latest offerings, to let them know about your latest sale, and to give them compelling reasons why they should buy your products or use your services.

I find that too many business owners never send out much in the way of promotion at all, or if they do, they send out one big push and think that they are done. Outflow and promotion have to be a continual and continuing process. You should be thinking every week about how you can get out some type of promotional outflow.

I think it is better to have a regular flow going out every week, even if it is a smaller flow, then one single large promotion. For one thing, when you continue sending out promotion all the time, you are not only continually reminding the public that you are there, you are also demonstrating your ongoing survival and unkillability. For another thing, one single large promotion is soon forgotten, but if someone keeps seeing your communications, they remember you and will tend to think of you when they need your product or service.

Here are some tips on developing this outflow state of mind:

1. If you have a blog, write something and post it once a week or more. This takes a little creativity to get going, but it is vital and besides that, it is free! You can of course post an article (300-700 words) about your business or industry, but you can also post short comments of 100 words about something you noticed in your industry like a current trend. You can post a link to some other web site where you saw something interesting. You can put up a video in your blog, using the embed code that appears to the right of any YouTube video (use the HTML editing mode on your blog to do this).

I find that I can write an article once a week for my newsletter and blog, often just based on something that happened in the prior week with some client (like I’m doing now).

And don’t forget that every time you post something to your blog, you should go to www.pingomatic.com and send a “ping” (a notification) to all the blog search engines, which is what brings traffic to your blog to read your new article or post. Writing a regular blog post and then pinging the search engines is a great way to get out promotion, and it’s free.

2. Compile a list of customers and/or prospects if you don’t already have one, and send them formletters or postcards. Ask them for more business, ask them for referrals, comment on something in your industry, give some tips, remind them that you exist.

3. Compile a list of email addresses of customers and prospects, and compile an email newsletter to them. Get on one of the online email services like Aweber.com and they have templates for HTML newsletters that you can use that look great. Once again, ask them for more business, ask them for referrals, comment on something in your industry, give some tips, remind them that you exist.

4. Get on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Post updates on what you are doing with your business. These don’t have to be “Buy my new _____ now, click here” type messages, but can be more subtle, like “I am consulting with a new client today on how to expand his business.” On most of these sites it is wise to also sprinkle in some personal stuff, such as “Just got back from a great weekend in Arizona.” Observe what other people do on the site. Of course it also helps on these sites to have lots of friends or followers, so you have to spend some time developing that too.

Remember, promoting your business regularly is more important than one big blast. Your frame of mind should be “What can I send out to promote my business this week?”

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Email Marketing 2009

by John Eberhard

I started email marketing about 10 years ago when it was a pretty new activity, especially doing HTML emails, where it looks like a web site with graphics and so on.

Back then, you could rent email lists of various types of publics who had opted in to receive email on a certain topic. I sent emails out to literally millions of people on opt in lists back then.

You can still rent email lists of various types of publics today, but in my experience this is not very successful any more. I have not seen good results from rented lists in at least 5 years. Why? A huge outpouring of commercial email several years ago, promoting Viagra or stocks or enlargement of certain body parts or whatever, killed the market. Everyone got too much email. So in my opinion, for the most part, sending email to rented lists is dead.

Your Own House Email List

But there is still a very effective way to use email in marketing today. That is to build up your own opt in email list, also called a house list, and send your newsletters and other offerings to that list.

Of course it’s more of a challenge to get people to give you their email address today. You have to offer something of value, either a newsletter that they want, or some free information like a free report or white paper that you create. But it can be done and it is very important for you to do so.

I used to use a desktop based program to send out emails and manage my lists. I have now switched over to an online email and autoresponder service called Aweber.com, and I recommend this service. Other top services include Constant Contact and iContact. All of them cost around $20 per month.

I recommend for everyone that has an email newsletter to start using one of these online email services as soon as possible. Why? Because eventually your email list will get big enough that you will not want to manage it by hand, adding and removing email addresses and so on. You will then want to get onto one of the online services.

But the problem is, that once you put up your account and want to start mailing to your already existing list, Aweber, Constant Contact and iContact will all require that a new “opt in” message be sent out to your entire list, asking them to opt in again. You will now only be allowed to send to those who opt in again on the new system. That means you will lose between 70% and 90% of your email list! Or like me, you will have to continue sending using a desktop program as well as sending out using one of the online services.

So the sooner you get onto one of the online services, the better. Because then all of those who opt in to your list after you are using the online service are more or less validated by this third party and you won’t have to go through the “Please click here to opt in again because we want to be really, really, really sure that you want to be on this list” process.

Do I think the online services overdo the permission thing a bit? Yes I do. But on the other hand they have to deal with all the privacy Nazis and their anti-spam activities and black lists and so on. So I sort of understand.

What to Send

You should absolutely send an email newsletter to your list. These newsletters should be 80% useful content, 20% sales message. How often is up to you. It can be monthly, twice a month, or weekly. I would recommend that you do it at least once a month.

I also recommend using an autoresponder, and sending them a message right away saying thanks for subscribing. Then you can set it up so that they are sent another message that you specify, a certain number of days later. So you can have one message go out right away as soon as they click submit, then another message a week later, then another a week later, and so on, with whatever intervals in between that you select.

Obviously this gives you a way to set up part of your sales process going on auto-pilot.

I have it set up so that with several of the offerings on my web site, when the person fills out the form, they get a unique autoresponder message for each one. For my newsletter subscription, they get a “thank you for subscribing” message. For my free white paper on web design, they get a “here’s your link to download the white paper” message. For a service more information request, they get a “thanks for contacting us, we’ll contact you shortly” message. And each of the autoresponder messages mentions that they are also now subscribed to my newsletter, and they can opt out at any time.

Aweber also allows you to set it up so that every time you post a new message on your blog, that it will go out as a newsletter, formatted nicely, to your entire opt in list.

You can also send an email promoting any of your products or services as a standalone email.

Overall I find that email marketing to your own opt in or house list is one of the most effective methods in online marketing today. And if you’re doing it in any form, I suggest you get onto one of the online services right away.

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More Social Media Marketing Tips

by John Eberhard

The last few weeks I’ve been writing mostly about social media marketing, on a good overall strategy and which sites you should concentrate on. In this article I’m going to give some more tips on some of the top social media sites.

Facebook

The key on Facebook is first of all to get a lot of “friends.” You propose to someone that they be your Facebook “friend.” My advice is to start out with your actual friends, then start looking at their friends lists and add more of your friends. Then start adding people who have a certain number of friends in common but that you don’t know personally (I do this for people who have 20 common friends). A very small number will write back to you and say “Do I actually know you?” but most will just approve you. For those who write say “No, but we have a lot of friends in common.” Only the most uptight will refuse even then. I have built up 1,700 friends this way.

Having a lot of friends will allow you to promote your business, although you have to do it in a certain way. You can post “status updates” which contain data about what you’re doing business-wise. Such as:

• I just finished designing a new web site (with a link to it)
• I am working on managing client pay per click advertising
• Here is my new video on YouTube (with a link)
• Here is a new ebook I am offering (with a link)

I have observed that if you are linking to something, especially to some kind of property like a book or white paper or something, that tends to generate more interest.

But you can’t keep posting the same thing every day or even post things about your business all the time. Intersperse it with personal stuff, such as things about your recent vacation or your kids or comments about other things. If you use the status update to hammer people about your business offerings all the time, they will “un-friend” you or there is an option to hide your status updates and they might do that.

You can also start a corporate page on Facebook. The way they intended people use the site is that each account is for a person, but for companies, you start a corporate or fan page. Then get your friends to become fans of your business page. The corporate pages can contain your company info and contact info, pictures, videos, and it can link to your blog so that every new blog post appears on the corporate page.

Twitter

With Twitter, you write updates about what you’re doing or post comments about things. But you only have 140 characters to do it. On Twitter want to get a lot of people following you.

One of the first things you want to do on Twitter is seek out your actual friends. You can look them up and find them. You can also go to sites like WeFollow.com and choose to follow various celebrities, musicians, news organizations and so on. You can also use Twitter’s search function, enter some keywords there, and see who is posting things on that topic, then choose to follow them.

Now you start posting things on Twitter about what you are doing, keeping it under 140 characters each time. Use different keywords in the post, describing what you are doing with your business.

By using keywords that you think other people might look up using the search function, you will now start getting people to follow you who have an interest in what you are doing. I have been doing this using keywords like “pay per click advertising,” “social media,” “web design” and so on, and have been getting a fair amount of followers added each day.

I have also observed that if you add a link to some kind of property that you have produced, like I mentioned before, such as a book, video, ebook or whatever, that seems to really increase the number of people following you.

Summary

One of the key aspects of marketing is the collection of identities. Your friends on Facebook and your followers on Twitter are identities to whom you can promote your business offerings.

As mentioned you should show some judgment on how you do this. Don’t hammer them all the time with the same offerings. Intersperse it with personal stuff or comments about current events. Observe how others do it. You have to stay real with the general agreement of how that site is operated.

But if you do that, these sites can be a powerful way to reach new people with your message.

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The Social Media Gateway Page

by John Eberhard

I have just started providing a new service to clients, the creation of a “social media gateway page.” This is a web page that gives information about you or your company, and also contains links to your presences on various social media web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and so on. The page also contains links to any web sites or blogs you maintain, all your contact information, and can contain links to any products you sell or any other activities in which you are involved, such as hobbies, charities and so on.

You can see one of these gateway pages that I just produced for my client Stan Dubin here.
http://www.flourishandprosper.com

The purpose of such a page is to easily allow anyone interested in you, your activities or your company, to connect up with you on these social media sites and follow your activities. Another purpose is to connect and display all the varied activities in which you are involved, all in one place.

For instance, if the person visiting this social media gateway page is a Facebook user, this page makes it easy for them to find your Facebook profile and become one of your Facebook friends. Once connected, he will be able to see and follow your regular Facebook status updates.

If the person visiting this page is a Twitter user, the gateway page makes it easy for them to find you on Twitter and become one of your followers. Then they will be able to see your regular updates on Twitter.

Similarly, people can connect up and follow your activities on MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, or a variety of other social media sites.

A social media gateway page can be put up on a separate domain (i.e. www.yourname.com) or as a sub-page on one of your existing web sites (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/gatewaypage).

If you or your company have a lot of activities going on, a social media gateway page is a great way to connect up people to you and get them following your updates on social media sites.

In the case of my client Stan Dubin, whom I mention above, he has a presence on Facebook, three accounts on Twitter (one each for three different activities he is involved in), a presence on LinkedIn, Skype, StumbleUpon, and a V-card (which gives all his contact information). Stan’s gateway page also contains links to several web sites that he runs for employee testing, marriage tips and online marketing tips, and contains links to two books that he has written (where people can buy them of course). And of course the page contains his phone, address and email.

We can create such a page for you, and we can also do two additional actions for you if required:

1. We can set up accounts for you on a wide variety of social media web sites, and
2. We can maintain these social media sites, work the account to add lots of friends, followers, etc., post regular updates on your activities, and respond for you to people communicating to you on these sites.

I believe this type of social media gateway page contains a lot of potential for many people, particularly if you are active on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites, and if you have a number of activities and want to tie them all together in one place. It will definitely aid you in connecting with more people, which is basically what social media is all about.

Pay Per Click Advertising and Geo-Targeting

by John Eberhard

One very useful aspect of pay per click advertising on Google AdWords is the ability to do geo-targeting, or having your ads only appear in certain geographical areas that you select.

In other words, you can select to have your ads appear to viewers in the entire United States. Or you can have them appear only in one state, or in a bunch of select states. Or you can select a specific metro area, such as the Los Angeles metro area, or Chicago, Boston or Dallas. You can even select smaller cities or towns, certain zip codes, or you can even draw your selected area on a map.

This is vital if you are a local business such as a brick and mortar store and can only service people in a certain area. You don’t want to be paying for people to click through to your site in Keokuk if you own a local store in Pasadena.

Many businesses will want to target only a certain portion of the U.S.

But here’s another aspect of geo-targeting that is useful and requires a bit of explanation. Last year I was running a pay per click campaign for a client, and at first he wanted the campaign to be run all across the U.S. We were getting great response, with a cost per clickthrough of under $1.00, and a cost per lead of $8.00.

But the client who was located in California, was finding it hard to close people outside of the state, so he told us to cut the campaign back to just California. So we did, and the average cost per click jumped up to several dollars, and the cost per lead jumped up to $40.

Now $40 per lead today for most markets is still pretty good. Most lead generation campaigns have a cost per lead that runs anywhere from $60 to $120, though this varies quite a bit by industry.

But this experience highlighted an important aspect of pay per click, which is that the average cost you will pay for your clickthroughs is going to be significantly affected by the amount of competition in your specific market, and by market in this case I mean the city or metro area.

For example, if you are a home improvement company delivering services to local homeowners in Los Angeles, chances are that you are going to have more competing companies advertising on Google AdWords, than you would if you were a home improvement company servicing local homeowners in Wichita.

And the more competing companies there are advertising on Google AdWords in your market and competing for the same keywords that you are targeting, in general the higher your costs will be for clickthroughs. The cost you pay for a clickthrough is all based on bids. And so in general the more competing companies, the more those competitors will drive up the bid costs.

Now you can set your bid at whatever you want, but if your bid is significantly lower than the competitors in your industry in your market, you will find that your ad appears at the bottom of the stack, or even worse, on page two of the results. And in those cases, you will not get too many clickthroughs. No one’s going to be coming to your site.

In the case of my client mentioned above, when we started the campaign nationally, he was getting a lot of clickthroughs and a lot of leads in cheaper markets, where there wasn’t a lot of competition for his keywords. But when we cut it back to just California, he was now in mainly several pretty large markets: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. So his bid costs and cost per lead went up.

So how can you use this data? First of all if you are in a highly competitive industry in a large metro area, you know your bid costs are going to be higher. How high? Well you can start a Google AdWords account and use the Traffic Estimator tool and that will give you an idea. It all depends on the number of competitors.

But here is another interesting way to use this. If you sell a product or service that can be delivered nationally, and you want to start a pay per click advertising campaign but need to keep your costs down, you can start your campaign only in selective smaller metro areas. In other words, stay away from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, but start out with smaller markets. The competition in those markets will likely be less and your costs will be lower.

Social Media: What Works, Not Just the Latest Shiny Object

by John Eberhard

Eric Qualman, in a recent article on Search Engine Watch, talks about how many companies will jump on the social media bandwagon just because everyone is talking about a certain site. He likens it to following the latest “shiny object.”

I try to keep up on the latest social media trends and websites. But I also temper this with the fact that I don’t really care about the latest shiny object or seeming cool. I want to use techniques, media, and websites that will actually get results for clients. And the bottom line is driving actual traffic to a website, and getting leads and sales.

Last week I talked about a bigger, more expansive social media marketing program. In this article I want to talk a little bit more about how to get results with some of these various media.

Regular Engagement

With Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, the key is not just to start an account on these sites, but to be engaged with your account and with others there on a regular basis.

This means, first of all, to develop a decent number of “friends” on Facebook and MySpace, “followers” on Twitter, and “connections” on LinkedIn. Start with your actual friends or business connections, then start connecting with their friends.

Secondly, it means posting something on those accounts regularly, preferably daily or even more than once a day. Tell people what you are doing in relation to your business, such as “I just closed a new big account,” or, for me for instance “I just completed designing a new web site for a client,” and then including the link to the site. You can post things about your personal life too, and intersperse these with the business related stuff, such as “just got back from a great weekend at Big Bear Lake” or something like that.

After posting links to various web sites I had designed recently, a Facebook friend wrote me and wanted a meeting, then signed up for a web design project. The point is that if you have a good number of friends or connections, and you communicate about your activities (but not in a non-stop, obnoxious way) you will connect with people who need your services and you will get business.

My friend and client Stan Dubin was recently talking to me about Twitter, as he has had good success there with 3,000 followers. He said the key is to post things regularly, and to engage in actual conversations with people. He also advised people to start multiple accounts on there for the various activities you do, such as one for your business, one for being a musician (if you are), one for your hobby, etc. He has three accounts on Twitter.

I started posting more than once a day on Twitter for my website marketing activities, using various keywords in the posts such as “web design,” “pay per click advertising,” “social media marketing,” and so on, and immediately started getting 20-25 new followers per day. So when you post Twitter try to use keywords in your posts that you think people will search for.

Summary

So the moral of the story is to communicate regularly on these social media sites, engage in conversations, make friends, and don’t be afraid to communicate about your business (but not non-stop). Business will follow.

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A Full Social Media Marketing Program

by John Eberhard

Social media marketing is a challenge.. The trick is not to put up a presence on some of the sites (that’s easy), the trick is to figure out how to use that presence to market yourself and actually help your business. And the trick is also to not just spend a lot of time on these sites, but to make that time well spent.

The first thing to know about social media sites is that most of them are for the purpose of social contact with other people. In most cases, with some exceptions, they are not primarily for the purpose of marketing yourself or your business.

That doesn’t mean you can’t promote your business on social media. But you have to do it tactfully and you have to get a feel for each site and the general agreement level on how much it is OK to promote.

Let’s talk about some of the top social media sites:

Facebook and MySpace

Facebook and MySpace are similar in how to interact with them. The basics are:

1. Sign up lots of friends. I first located a lot of my personal friends and business associates, then starting proposing being friends to people who had 20 or more friends in common. I have built up over 1,500 friends on Facebook in this way.
2. Put up a corporate page for your business. Ask your friends to sign up as fans for the corporate page.
3. Post something regularly (daily) in your status bar, including promoting your business. But work these promotions in between personal notes too, posting pictures, doing quizzes, etc. If you are just pitching yourself and your business every day it will turn some people off and they’ll turn off your posts or disconnect you as a friend.

Twitter

Start an account on Twitter, start following people that you know and in your line of business. Then start building up lots of followers. You do this by posting things regularly (daily), especially about your work and what you’re doing. Observe how others use the site, especially those with lots of followers, and emulate their example.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business directory, probably the biggest among many. So start an account on there and start making connections with people you know and business associates. Then search their connections and connect with more people. Then post things regularly on what is happening with your business. Here it is a business directory so you don’t have to intersperse it with comments about your girlfriend or the movie you just saw.

YouTube

YouTube is the biggest of many video sharing sites. So the first trick is get a video produced about your business, and then upload it to YouTube and other sharing sites. Your video can be simple, i.e. a slide show video. It is better to have a number of short videos than one long one. YouTube has a time limit of 10 minutes, so your video has to shorter than that. When you upload the video, make sure you add in keywords and your URL. Also make sure the end of your video shows your URL and phone number.

Squidoo and HubPages

Squiddo.com allows you to put up a “lens” which is basically a page, on pretty much any topic you want. You can enter anchor text into the text of your article, because guess what, Squidoo is “friendly” to using their site to market things.

When you create a Squidoo lens, it can contain an intro with picture, the main article, photos from Flickr.com, videos from YouTube, links to your web sites and blogs, a guestbook for people to leave comments, and a place to put your Delicious.com links. So you can put up a lot of content related to your main article.

HubPages.com is another site you can use to put up articles. Unfortunately, they are not quite so friendly to the guys from the marketing department, and they will  shut down pages for being overly promotional if they contain more than ONE link to your web site or sites. On HubPages you can put up your article (with one link), photos, links, an RSS feed, news, comments, and a poll. So you can add a rich palette of content to these pages as well.

Social Media Directories

There are many social media business directories, such as Plaxo, HotFrog, FriendFeed, Xanga, Vox, Mashable, iKarma and many more (over 40). The idea is to put up a listing for your company, with a picture, company description, service or product list, contact info, and links to your web sites and blogs. Also include links to your other social media accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. And the idea is to put it up on every single directory you can find. On many of these sites you can post regular updates on your activities and you should do so.

Social Bookmarking Sites

There are two purposes of social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon. One is to create an account and put in bookmarks to all your favorite sites, making it easy to find your favorite stuff. Another is to bookmark your site and various pages on your site, your blog, your social media pages and so on, and each of those bookmarks will count as a link to those pages. This helps with search engine ranking and it can help people to find those pages as well.

Summary

1. Start accounts and corporate pages on Facebook and MySpace, then get lots of friends, then post regularly on your business, interspersed with personal posts.
2. Start accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn, then post things to them on a regular basis.
3. Get some videos of your business and post on YouTube and other video sharing sites.
4. Put up article pages on Squidoo and HubPages
5. Put up a listing on every social media business directory under the sun, moon and stars with links to as many of your social media pages as you can. Then post updates on your activities.
6. If you can put updates on all these sites daily, that is ideal

If you do all that and post updates to these accounts on a regular basis, it will have quite a positive impact for your business.

Blog: Under a Separate Domain or Under Your Main Website Domain?

I was recently having a discussion with fellow Internet marketer Andromeda Edison of Internet Image Management, on the subject of whether it is better to have a blog set up as a separate domain, or as a subdirectory within the domain of your main web site. Here's what she has to say:

"This depends and each situation I evaluate it newly.

"Some basic rules that I use to decide:

"1) If the keywords we are trying to get listed for are high competition then put the blog on the same domain as any link you an get to a blog post will help the overall site
"2) If you are working on a less competitive keyword you might want to do it separate (but if the competition is likely to increase with the popularity of the product or subject, you still want it on the same site)
"3) If you are working on reputation management for a name or brand then it should be on a separate domain.
"4) If you are going to use the blog only for "other" keywords than the one on the main website it can be separate though sometimes any PR you have on the main website will hep the other keywords - so this one can be a toss up.
"5) If you are working on a separate O/L or branding campaign for an individual in the organization it can be separate.

"I usually discuss this with the client and work out the long-term and short-term goals to help decide."