Search Engine Marketing: Get More Visitors

One of the things that makes search engine marketing challenging, exciting, frustrating and energizing and any other positive and/or negative attributes you care to assign, is that changes occur quickly and dramatically in the digital marketing industry.

Heck, even the term “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) has not established a universal definition. To many folks SEM refers to the various forms of paid marketing, such as pay-per-click advertising.

To others, SEM encompasses paid search marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), for developing non-paid traffic.

Regardless of the terminology, paid advertising and SEO are the two general ways to get more traffic to your website.

Ideally, your website marketing efforts would include both, however the most non-optimum circumstance is not taking advantage of either.

How about you? What do you do to get visitors to your website?

How To Select a Website Name

If you are selecting a new website name, which one should you choose? Here are some tips and guidelines for choosing a website name:

A) Shorter website names are better because they are easier to remember, and they are easier to communicate to others. (However, all the really short names are taken).

B) It can be useful to have one keyword in the name to benefit from some extra search engine traffic. However, some companies will use relatively short names that have no keywords and no other meaning, and then build a brand around it. (Think “Google” or “Kodak”). That works great as long as you can gain enough attention to get people to look for that name.

C) If your own personal name is available, that may be useful for certain professionals, artists, or anyone who wants to publish a website using their own name. In fact, if your personal name “is” still available, you SHOULD buy it! For less than $10/yr you would have the opportunity to build a website for your name at any point in the future.

D) What about choosing “.com” “.org” “.net” and all the other “top level domains”? (The top level domain, or TLD, is the last part of the website address). In simple terms, “.com” is the best TLD. But if you are a non-profit, you should get “.org” since that is its intended function. If you buy a website name with anything other than “.com,” just realize that you will lose visitors to your competition because, out of habit, visitors will type your name and type “.com” at the end. By the way, even if you are a non-profit, you should buy “.org” as well as “.com.” You can “redirect” the .com use of your name to your .org website. For example, if your non-profit is named “ABC,” you should by abc.com and abc.org and redirect abc.com to abc.org. What that means is every person who types in abc.com will be sent to abc.org. In fact, it is not uncommon for a business to buy their domain with a number of endings, and even common misspellings of their website name and redirect them all to their primary website. (Actually, there are other strategies that get more complex, but that is beyond the scope of this article).

E) What about buying a website name with hyphens? If you have the option of buying abc-business.com or abcbusiness.com, the non-hyphenated version is best. Hyphenated website names are not the first choice one would make, but they can provide website names that might not otherwise be available. A disadvantage is that if your business name is ABC Business, and abcbusiness (no hyphen) is not available, if you buy abc-business.com (hyphenated) and promote it, some of your potential visitors will end up going to the non-hyphenated website. Alternatively, if both versions are available, you can buy both, and redirect one to the other, to exert greater control over your business name.

Price Test Flowchart for an Undeveloped Product

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What’s the best price to charge for a product? How about, what’s the best price to charge for a product that’s not even developed yet?

Market price-testing is a simple concept: It’s mostly about finding the price that makes the most money.

For example, if you market test the prices of $50 and $100 for the same product, you might expect to make more money on the $100 price.  However, if you sell more than twice the amount of the same product by charging $50, then the lower price would be the most profitable one.

Of course, you really have to analyze this against all your costs, to reflect your overall return-on-investment (ROI) of producing, marketing and delivering the product.

Although in another example you may very well sell less of the same product at $100, as long as you make more overall profit than selling a larger quantity at $50, then the $100 is the way to go.

Oh! Of course, from a business perspective, sometimes it’s best to select the price that creates the most customers, regardless that it may not generate the most profit, simply because more first-time customers means greater opportunities for increased sales later on.

And just to make things more interesting, there are examples of selling a product at a higher price that results in a larger volume of sales than offering it a lower price.

Still, the more pertinent question for this article is how do you determine what’s the best price for a product that’s not even developed?

Market Testing For The Best Price

The accompanying flow chart illustrates a simple way to test 4 different prices via online pay-per-click advertising (in this case, using Google Adwords). This particular example is also constructed to determine if the product in question should be developed at all. (In this example, what is being tested is a potential information product).

An important purpose here is to spend a small amount of advertising money upfront – before creating the product – to determine if the product will be profitable enough to bother developing in the first place.

Another important purpose of this test is to determine the response levels of four different prices. The responses are then evaluated to determine which price is the most profitable.  Of course you would also evaluate the results against your business intent:

• Do you want to use the price that generates the highest ROI?
• Or do you want the price that generates the greatest number of responses with an acceptable ROI?

Price Testing Flow Chart

In this flow chart the four prices are rotated and displayed to searchers looking for the keywords specified for this product. (The same keywords are used for all four ads).

Google Adwords allows rotation of the ads to searchers and provides good metrics to evaluate the responsiveness of each ad. (Which, in this case, is simply how many clicked on the product landing page).

If this were solely a “Price Test,” this campaign could be simplified by ending the test at the landing page to reveal which ad generated the greatest response. However this flow chart depicts a test which goes further by also seeing how many respondents would click on the “Buy” button.

If you were testing different prices with a product that was ready to be delivered, then anyone who clicked the “Buy” button could be charged the indicated price and the product delivery would be executed.

However, in this flow chart example, the product has not been developed.

Hence, each visitor who clicks “Buy” is directed to the Registration Page, informed that the product is not ready, and is given the opportunity to be notified as soon as the product is available.

Of course, not everyone who lands on this page will enter their name and email.  For example, those who would want the product immediately will probably continue their Internet search to buy what they’re after. However, any visitors that do add their name and email would be categorized as “hot prospects” in a database.

So in addition to using this test as a way to determine the best price, it’s also a way to generate potential buyers. (Of course a number of the hot prospects will have been introduced to the offer by any of the other four prices than the price they originally clicked on, so not all “hot prospects” will buy the product in the end with a different price).

From a testing perspective, the amount of visitors who click the “Buy” button represents an important metric, since it would be the best estimate of what percentage of visitors would result in a purchase.

Once the results of the test have been evaluated and the price determined – and in this case, the decision made to even develop the product – then the hot prospects can be sent a series of emails offering them the opportunity to buy the product when it is ready.

In this way, some of the advertising money may be offset by some initial purchasers.

This would also be the time to ramp up all of your marketing efforts to sell this product in volume at the best price.

Future Price Testing

Once a product is developed, price testing for the exact same product can be repeated from time to time, as the market evolves and changes.  Some of the conditions that might indicate an opportunity for a higher or lower price could be accounted for by more (or less) competition, an increase in your brand’s prominence, a greater (or reduced) demand for your product, or even a different business intent for the product itself within your company’s overall business goals.

Of course if the results of the test demonstrate that it won’t be profitable to develop the product at all, then the next step is to abandon this product and test your next product idea.

By the way, it’s worth emphasizing that this article is about “Price Testing,” especially to determine the viability of developing a product. However, there are other types of testing. In fact, testing is an ongoing proposition. For example, once you have determined to develop a product and have determined the best price, a larger body of testing would be directed towards improving various aspects of the ad copy and the landing page presentation, to make the sales process MORE profitable. For more information on this topic visit this link on Internet marketing testing.

6 Basic Mistakes for Ecommerce Sites

Are you selling something on your website and not generating enough sales? You already know it takes effort and resources to drive traffic there. Perhaps you’re generating visitors and potential customers/clients via online channels such as pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, joint ventures, email marketing, social media marketing, display advertising, webinars, etc. And/or, perhaps you’re using offline channels such as direct mail, radio, seminars and infomercials to gain visitors.

Regardless of how you get potential paying customers to arrive at your website, the following six basic mistakes reduce the likelihood those hard-earned visitors will buy your products and/or services.

1. No prominent phone number. Displaying your phone number prominently not only provides a way for potential purchasers to get questions answered when they are read to purchase, in some buyers minds, it’s a credibility assurance knowing the phone is readily available, just in case they have a question after they buy.

2. You’re not attempting to gain email info from visitors who are “just looking.” Most visitors are not going to buy now. But if you offer something of value to these visitors in exchange for their email, you can send them marketing messages into the future to inspire them to buy with a sale or to stay on their radar screen until they are ready to spend their money. (Check out What Are YOU Giving Away For FREE?)

3. Your pages are text heavy instead of visually enticing. Pictures, graphics and videos can convey the benefits of your products and services more effectively and more interestingly than words – and are less boring to boot. If you are trying to sell stuff with too many words and few images, you are losing sales.

4. Your call-to-action buttons, such as “BUY NOW” or “ADD TO CART” blend in with your site and do not pop out with contrasting color to make it easy for visitors to get the goods instantly when they are ready to buy.

5. If you sell a lot of products, and your navigation bar is not segmented into logical and instantly recognizable categories, then you are forcing visitors to read every link to find what they want. Which means some percentage of your visitors are clicking away to another site where the pickings are easier.

6. You don’t implement cross selling and/or upselling for your products, which means your average sale amount is considerably lower than it should be.

What is a Website’s Value?

I’ve purchased a few websites over the years from previous owners, and “How to determine a web site’s value” has always been a part of such discussions leading to a successful transaction (or not).

There is considerably more information available nowadays, but the common theme is what you and I have understood about evaluating the worth of most any item:  The final value of a website is determined between a buyer and seller.

Regardless, following are some tools, tips, theory, technical and practical info on ways to enter a discussion about website value.

Profitable Websites vs. Websites that are Not.

Although the ways to value a website are quite varied, there is a dividing line between websites that make a profit and those that don’t.

1) Websites that cannot prove profitability are subject to greater whimsy in terms of valuation between buyer and seller.

2) Websites that can prove profitability can be more effectively valued, but the ultimate worth is still subject to many factors that have varying degrees of importance between buyers and sellers.

In either case, sellers tend to believe their sites are worth more than some hypothetical reality, and buyers tend to believe they are worth less than some hypothetical average, so establishing some basis for discussion at least can allow a discussion to occur.

Free Tools for Website Valuation

There are a number of free tools for determining a website’s value, including:

http://directory.sootle.com/website-worth/

http://dnscoop.com/

http://tidget.com/

http://valuemyweb.com/

http://yourwebsitevalue.com/

Independent of the relevance (or not) of such free tools, which arbitrarily assign value to criteria associated with a website, here’s the most useful I’ve encountered.

http://ebizvaluations.com/

This tool includes user-input data as part of its evaluation. I also like the tools comparative analysis against a database of actual website sales.

“This tool values your site based on what hundreds of similar sites have actually sold for. As it’s a tool that is grounded in reality, it can offer an reliable estimation of your web business’s value.”

Theory and Technical Info on Website Valuations

If you want to gain insight into the subject of website valuations, I recommend the following two articles. They are both somewhat lengthy (6 pages each), but offer a good theoretical and technical overview.

The first link is what I consider to be a relatively simple and generally useful overview of the theory of website valuations.

What’s Your Web Site Worth? By Georgina Laidlaw.

The Ultimate Web Site Valuation Guide By Clinton Lee.

The second is more technical, and is an outline of what is behind the ebizvaluations.com tool above.

In the end, the final value of a website is determined between a buyer and seller. But the preceding info can help both buyers and sellers understand a broader spectrum of variables to consider for discussion.

The Ultimate Answer to More Leads and Customers

1) How do you convert more of your website traffic to leads?

2) How can you convert more of your visitors to customers?

These are critical questions for any business person interested in making their website work harder for them.

Although converting Internet traffic to leads or customers is only one component of the entire sales process, it’s a very fundamental and critical one.

The answers to both the questions above is not one of opinion or conjecture. The ultimate answer is obtained via testing. And the more testing you conduct, the better. (For more info, click “Testing” Your Way To Internet Marketing Success and view the video).

Testing is not a new thing. In fact, back in 1923 Claude Hopkins emphasized its importance in his book, Scientific Advertising.

What is new is how readily it can be conducted. As a point of comparison, I have a background in direct mail marketing, which includes testing different copy for the letters themselves, as well as different headlines, different envelopes, different offers, different calls-to-action, and other components.

I conduct such tests using volumes of Excel spreadsheets in conjunction with special codes in all the letters to ascertain which variables and combination of variables generate the greatest number of responses and sales.

Each test takes weeks to write, print and mail all the versions, and then measure all the responses. After the results are tabulated, I repeat the process to increase the responses even further.

If this sounds like a lot of work, well … it is.

But since 2006, sophisticated online testing can be conducted using Google Website Optimizer. Although this doesn’t work for direct mail letters, it works fantastically well for websites, which is the point of this article. (However, as a bonus, it can be used to test some variables for direct mail, as well).

Google Website Optimizer is a free testing application that helps online marketers answer the two questions above (and more).

In brief, Google Website Optimizer allows marketers to test different versions of complete web pages as well as specific elements on pages, to let your visitors tell you which variables help them to buy your products, or download your information, or whatever it is that you desire visitors to do on your website.

Following are two general categories of online market testing that can be executed via Google Website Optimizer:

A/B Testing

A/B tests allow you to test two or more versions of different pages against each other to see which performs best. If you are testing 3 different versions of a page, then you are conducting an A/B/C test and so on.

A/B tests are especially useful because they allow you to test major design decisions by placing two or three completely different designs against each other to find out which one resonates best with your visitors.

Of course, the downside is you can not pinpoint the elements that persuaded more visitors to convert.

Multivariate Tests

Multivariate tests allow you to test multiple elements of a page at the same time. This way you are able to test different headlines, different images, or different colors on a single page.

You can always think of A/B tests as a simplified version of multivariate tests.

The beauty of multivariate tests is the speed in which testing multiple elements can be conducted, and distinguishing which combination of elements inspired users to convert.

For more info on Website Optimizer, visit the following links:

Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer Blog

Marketing Speed vs. Marketing Investment

1) Online marketing can generate responses very FAST - but the very fastest responses can cost the most, and in the short term, generate the lowest return on investment (ROI).

2) Online and offline marketing can use cash resources very EFFICIENTLY, generating the highest potential ROI – but focusing on the most efficient use of capital can be slower.

Most businesses desire a combination of marketing speed and efficient use of capital, hence they fall somewhere in the middle of those two points.

The “Time” variable supports marketing refinement through the process of testing, testing and testing. Market testing unveils the most effective ways to streamline your marketing activities, which can include determining the best copywriting, the best ad captions, the best graphics, the best email headlines, the best offers, etc. Nowadays, market testing is faster and more cost effective than ever.