Here is a checklist to use when developing or reviewing your Internet Marketing Strategy. This was developed for the clients of our Conversion Rate Optimization Company, and organizes the most common and potent Internet marketing components that make up a good Internet business strategy.

This Internet Strategy checklist has been organized in the order of the most benefitial components to the  the least (generally, and in our experience).  There is A LOT behind this simple checklist, but just using it as an exercise to go through what a company could do for Internet Marketing is extremely valuable.

Later this can be transformed into a phased roadmap as well, as it has all the components that is in your typical roadmap as well, and makes sure something that needs to happen in a phase get covered while developing the roadmap / strategy.

• Website Optimization
  • Website Conversion Rate Optimization
    
  • Landing Pages
  • User Testing

• Data
• Listening
  • Feedback
  • Analytics
    • Web
    • Chat
    • Phone
    • Demographic
    • Social
    • CRM
• Email
• Chat
  • CRM Integration
• Leads
  • Life Cycle
  • Soft
  • Hard
  • Incoming Process
  • Accelerators
  • Stay in Touch Nurturing

• Search
  • SEO In-Site
  • Link Building
  • Paid
  • Local
  • Verticle
• Online Advertising
  • Banner
  • Contextual
  • Social
• Press Releases
• Events
• Publishing
  • Articles
  • Blog
• Video
• Social Media
  • Facebook
  • Book marking
  • Group Interactions (Forums)
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Niche Verticle.
  • Aggregation.
  • Answers (i.e. Yahoo! Answers).

• eCommerce
  • Drop Cart
  • Affiliate

User Testing Times, They are a Changing.

Website user testing is now cheap on a per user test basis.  Every website should undergo interface testing.  If you need user experience testing, and at a great price, read this review.

I have been recommending User Testing for years.  It used to take a lot of time, a lot of work, and be a royal pain in the butt .

That Was Then! When User Testing involved;

1. Convincing the Client of the value of User Testing.
2. Convincing the Client of the cost.
3. Convincing the Client’s boss of the value and cost.
4. Booking a User Testing Facility (Computer Lab or Training Room).
5. Recruiting other eMarketing Folks to Monitor.
6. Recruiting Target Audience
7. Developing handout materials
8. Conducting and Overseeing User Tests.
9. Keeping users focused on goals.
10. Compensating users.
11. Going home and kissing the kids goodnight.
12. Reviewing notes as interpreted by monitors.

There is a lot of pain in there. 1st, finding the right audience and getting them to actually show up is always a challenge.  The part I hated the most was the time of day user tests were held, since most users groups are held after work to allow for people’s schedules.  Well, that was then.

This is now! When all you need to do is;

1. Developer a User Testing Brief (Demographics, Goals)
2. Submit new user testing session to UserTesting.com
3. Review Videos.  See User Testing Example Here .

That’s it!

UserTesting.com

UserTesting.com is simple and effective. No, I am not being compensated in any way here, they don’t even have an affiliate program (although I would love to set up an affiliate strategy and program for them!).  They are the real thing.  A service that makes a difference.  Refreshing really.

How it works – Tell them what you want users to try and do, making sure your target demographic is clear.  Typically it takes about 3 days to get the 10 user testers I want, as opposed to about 7 business days for setting up a User Test.  It also costs $30/user test (see coupon below) as opposed to about $150/user test the old way (My client’s costs have been cut in half as a result).

Here is a screenshot of my account , the test you see are for a client of mine (sorry I had to blur out their name etc for confidentially reasons) that really needed to improve their website. In fact, it was completely insane to throw paid traffic at their site, which they were to the tune of $6K/month, with the site in its current condition. In order for me to illustrate how much their eCommerce site needed a major revision (I don’t believe in redesigns, but that is another post), I conducted a simple 10 user test session with UserTesting.com.

After watching bit of 3 tests, the company stakeholder through up his hands and said “WE SUCK”.

Here is what I suggest , get user testing for your site right away.  Start with 3 Tests just to get a feel for it and identify the big issues.  I even have a coupon making it $19/user instead of $30/user (if you use it before the end of May).

Get excited, your about to make discover you site’s biggest issues.

By the way , the service I use is www.UserTesting.com , and to my knowledge they are the only such service.

Coupon

Here is the coupon , good till the end of May, 2009.  Enjoy!

I know a way to increase your business through eMail. It is not the "trendy" way like social media, or the best known way like SEO. But strategically (I am an Internet Strategist after all), it is the most effective over the long run.

Why eMail?

1. Everyone has eMail.
2. It is the primary form of communication for the majority of Internet users.
3. eMail offers "instant" communication, perfect for timely messages.
4. People will give your "non-junk" account if you offer them legitimate & unique value.
5. Most people check their primary email account several times a day.
6. Once trusting a source, people will click through emails at the same rate as return website visitors.

Building It, and They Will Come

I walked into The Red Trolley (Coffee / Ice Cream Shop in the Highland Neighbourhood of Denver) and saw they were now collecting names and emails for "Coffee Events".  I saw about 50 names added in the last week and am sure the place will have a 1000 emails within its 1st 3 months of collecting them.  They are are building their own list.

Just like the Red Trolley, any local business can build its own list of emails.  Customers who come in and sign up are highly relevant and targeted.  Now, each event they host has a potential audience just waiting to hear about it and come pack into their doors.  Powerful!

Relevant, Valuable & Unique

You may not be a local hang out like The Red Trolley, but you can still build your own email list.  In order to build a "home grown list" you need to have something unique and valuable to offer in exchange for the person’s email address.  You’ll recognize most newsletter at least try to fall into this category, as a newsletter hold promise the information in it will be unique and of value, and if that is true, it works as a home grown list technique.  Other common offers are Tips, eBooks, coupons etc.  As long as what you offer is unique (only you are making it available) and valuable, you can ask people to sign up.

The last piece of the sign-up puzzle is relevance.  The thing that is unique and of value has to be relevant to the site audience and targeted at the type of person you want to be your customer.  Offering a 1 in 4 chance to have your teeth whitened is great, but not for the audience of a local hardware store.

Segmenting

I battle this all the time! Sitting in a client company meeting, listening about how the company wants to create a new email campaign to target such and such sub group of customers in such and such market, for such and such product or service.  When I ask how they have segmented their email data I just get silence (I likely get blank stares too, but with national accounts, most meeting are over the phone).

Segmenting email data means knowing details related to that email owner.

1. What did they sign up for originally?
2. What is their interest in what they signed up for?
3. What market are they in?
4. What is their occupation or role as a prospect in that market (do they have buying authority?)
5. What other products did they show an interest in?
6. What other emails have they been sent lately?
7. What stage of the buying cycle are they current in?

You can answer all those questions if you collect them up-front, when prospects are signing up originally.  You don’t HAVE TO ask them all these questions directly, but can still collect good data based on the circumstances of their signing up.  What offer got them there, what product are they requesting info on.  Was the offer for information or did they buy last time.  When you add that information to the info you collect in a registration form, you have a lot of data that can be segmented so the prospect can be targeted in the future.

Form Collection

You can collect ANYTHING in a registration form as long as it is;

1. Relevant
2. Offers to serve the registrant in the future
3. Falls within website registration convention.

Asking for credit card information right away is not following convention, nor is asking for a Social Security Number for example.

eMail Blasts & Auto-Responders

An "eMail Blast" is sending out an occasional message. Saying you want to tell everyone of your customers who signed up to be notified about specials, then emailing them all about your next big sale is an eMail Blast.  These should be as targeted and relevant as possible or people are going to request to taken off your eMail list.

An Auto-Responder is sending out automated messages. You also want these "planned messages" to be highly relevant and targeted.  If someone signs up to be notified of sale and another has purchased from you in the past, they should not be on the same eMail list to recieve notice of your next event, unless that past customer explicitly agreed to be notified of future sales.

CAN-SPAM

There are laws that govern what you need to provide email recipients with each time your email them.  The big one is a way to quickly un-subscribe.  Another is to place a physical business address on email.  If you don’t know the rules than you need a provider like AWeber to keep you playing within the rules.

While not CAN-SPAM, a best practice is eMail Marketing is the "eMail Double Opt In".  This is where your eMail Marketing Software needs to offer a way that people are asked to confirm that really want to be contacted by you through eMail in the future.  Ths technique builds a better list and more effective eMail Marketing.

Tools

No one can manage eMail lists with Outlook and excel spreadsheets. Things are way to complicated to take that approach these days, not to mention that takes way too much time and would cost you a lot of emails when your emails got caught in SPAM filters.

You need the right tools to manage your eMails. There are so many great providers of email services these days.  For small business, there are a few companies that specialize and have thus mastered eMails for the "little guy".

1. AWeber – The top Small Business eMail vendor. I use and can recommend them for Local, Niche & Small Business.
2. Constant Contact – I have not used this service personally but hear they offer a good product.
3. Exact Target – I have set some "larger" clients up with this.  They great if you have a serious need for eMail marketing.

I advise you start building your own eMail list and trying to offer real value. In the coming weeks I’ll be sure to create a post that offers how to maximize every eMail sent.

What is a Landing Page?

A Landing Page is the 1st page you intend a site visitor to see 1st.  With search engines indexing every page of your site, any page can be a landing page, so each page has to be designed with that in mind. For our purposes, a Landing Page is a page designed as an entry point into a website.  We all know that the Homepage is one of these, but it can’t be everything to everyone.  No, really.   It can’t!

Why Does a Niche Need a Landing Page?

Your Niche product or service needs a Landing Page so you don’t lose business. 80% of business websites receive adequate traffic, but few handle the traffic very well.  This leads most businesses to believe they need more traffic, ironically to just lose more business.  What most businesses need to do is stop focusing on getting prospective customers to their site, and start focusing on getting real customers through the site.  You can focus on increasing traffic after your site is optimized, and biggest factor in optimizing for converting customers online is Landing Page Design.

Toddler Syndrome – To get visitors through your Niche website, you need to keep them FOCUSED.  That means lessening distractions like navigation.  Think of the visitor as a 2 year old.  They want what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and they want it now!  That is an online visitor’s mentality, and this is what Landing Pages are designed to do.

Keep the Promise.

Website success often boils down to keeping promises.  If you tell a customer that there is a sales rack at the back of your store, it better be there right?  Same with online.  Lets break down the typical Internet Marketing “Promise”.

Offline or Online Ad –> Website –> Form or Shopping Cart .

Simple enough right.  Now think of each stage as a promise.  When a customer finds you online via a search engine, the customer is being promised you have what they searched for, especially if it is a paid result.  They expect to see what they are looking for right away, and expect all the information they need will be one the page the result link takes them to (or else they would not have clicked it). Today’s Internet users additionally wants the information they are expecting to be well laid out for them and from their perspective.

This is why you don’t send everyone to the homepage (unless your niche is so narrow, you only sell one product).   Homepage are meant to offer transparency to an entire site, for information and navigation purposes.  Homepages are not meant to handle a site visitor on a mission, with the attention of a… well, toddler.  When it comes to visitors expecting information on SOMETHING, having information on EVERYTHING is going to confuse , delay and frustrate them, all of which means they leave (bounce) right away.

Keep ‘em Focused

A landing page is about one topic, and has one obvious way to navigate, that is towards the “objective” you set.  For a niche product or service, you need to lay out a landing page that provides all the information a customer wants, and in a way they they are willing to consume it. Here is an excellent Landing Page “Wireframe”  This layout has excellent psychology, and keeps the user focused well on what they want.

Tell The Web Designer

Before you engage a web designer to create a Landing Page for your Niche, you need to determine a few things;

• The Landing Page’s business objective (There should really be only one)
• The copy and content for the page.
• The Branding for the Page (if it will help with the sale, use your website header, if it doesn’t, don’t)

The free Landing Page design wireframe shown below is a “how to” of how to approach laying out a Landing Page.  Don’t worry about images and making it look good yet, that happens at a later phase with a designer (see Crowdsourcing Web Design )

Download the wireframe shown above in PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress .

Once you have a final draft of the above wireframe, take this to your Webdesigner so he can create the web page, add images and complete the look and feel, making it consistent with the rest of your site (if they don’t do this, get a new web designer ).

You have 5 Seconds

Online vistors SCAN.  Write your landing page for scanning, not reading.  Within 5 seconds a Landing Page visitor knows if they are going to stay.  keep it simple and relevant.

Embrace the Space

White space can be used to bring emphasis to areas of a page you want a visitor to have their attention focused on.  Make sure your page does not look crowded, especially around your form or call to action button.

Always Be Relevant

A Landing Page needs to be extremely relevant to the visitor, especially the headline. For example, if you have products for women and men create a separate Landing Page for each sex. You need to be as targeted as possible, even if that means having dozens of landing pages. If you do search engine marketing, you more likely need to create landing pages at the Ad Group level, not the Campaign level.

Sell the Offer

Landing Pages promote offers, not products. You don’t need product details, company information or more about your services. You just need to confirm that they are on the right track, get them excited about it, and give them a clear path to go down.

Lose the Navigation

A Landing page needs to be without Top and Sidebar navigation. You want to keep them focused. You can have footer navigation which tells the user the page is part of a greater site, a must for some and key to search engines, especially when evaluating the quality score that determines your cost per click, should be be doing paid search. You should also have your logo linked back to your site.

Image a Better Life

Images can help or hurt. A fantastic image can lure people away from your objective. Imagine using a celebrity wearing your type of product only to have people leave in pursuit of more information about that celebrity. You images need to promise a better life if they purchase from you, leave it at that.

Also, the image needs a caption These captions are more likely to be read more than any other text on the landing page.

Write for Scanning

Writing Copy online is a bit of an art. Here is a basic formula to follow;

• Headlines are to capture attention.
• Bylines (Secondary Headline) are to expand on the Headline, fitting in what you could not say with a Headline alone).
• Write in point form as much as possible, and keep each point short
• The 1st few words of each point should be focused on selling the offer, and be in bold.
• Use Video when you can, and keep it short

Test with Constraint

I spend far more time testing what I have, then making more new stuff. That is because time spent testing pays off more than time creating new online content.

Test the following (Ordered by importance).

• Headline
• Image Captions
• Call to Action Button or Form
• Graphical elements.

Test one thing at a time, its the only way you will really know what caused improvement or damage. Also, don’t stop a test till you can be sure the results have meaning.

Make a Template

If you are going to have several, even dozens of Landing Pages, don’t pay a Web Designer for each one. Have the first one created as a template, where text and images are easily swapped out. Make this need clear to your web designer.

No Example?

We debated for a while on including some examples of the Landing Page wireframe discussed here and in the end concluded that people would just copy the pages and end up with what they saw, not what they need.

Work with your web designer and this wireframe to get something for your business niche. If you are looking at paying more than $500 for the Landing Page Design, I highly suggest looking at crowdsourcing the web design instead.

I have every confidence if you present a good set of requirements, and ask for the wireframe to be followed above (plus your site’s footer links, and header if appropriate), you will end up with an extremely strong Landing Page, ready for testing to further capitalize on it.

If you’d like to know more on the subject of Landing Pages, check out the excellent Blog Unbounce

Cause People Under 50 Don’t Use the Yellow Pages Book Anymore.

With most local business searches happening online through local search engines and local search directories, local search marketing and local search advertising are more important than ever. A huge part of local search optimization is the local search directory. There are now dozens of places online to find local businesses, so knowing the best local directories for local search and how to submit to and get listed with all of these local search engines and directories is extremely important to today’s local business.

The Local Search Engines, Directories & Data Sources below are listed in order of importance to a local business, and it is critical to be in as many of them as possible , especially those ranked near the top. That’s why the list below was compiled.

Losing Business? Perfect Example

I was doing some research on Twitter.com , a place where people give short updates of what they are doing etc, and I came across this perfect example of a local business losing business because they were not listed well locally.

In this case, a local franchise of Kona Grill lost business because this person could not find its location via MapQuest.com or her GPS unit. From reading this article, you’ll learn how this incident could have been avoided.

Where to Start Listing Locally

Submitting to all these directories will take about 13 hours, which is a lot of time! Even worse, its tedious.

So start with Universal Business Listing (UBL).   I don’t mean this to be a review of Universal Business Listing, but they are the “big one”. They feed listings to almost everyone else online, as you can see in the Notes area of the table below. Plus they also get you in 411 and GPS directories. The cost is nominal, and included in that is the cost of listing with other paid directories like the Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Dex. You also don’t have to wait 4-6 months to get into InfoUSA which is all important online and off. Do the math and you’ll realize that its well worth it, plus , it gives you one place to make updates with in the future, not 26.

After submitting to UBL, hit at least the top 5 local search directories not covered by UBL. Do the rest too, but you’ll be leaving a lot “on the table” if you don’t hit at least those top 5).

Get Listed With These Local Search Engines, Directories and Providers

The above list was compiled by using a formula based on the popularity of the Local Search Engine/Directory, its recent increase or decrease of popularity, the significance of the sites it “feeds” and where it get “fed” its information from.

The Importance of Online Local Listings

Besides the fact that over 75% of searches for information on local businesses &services occur online, there are other compelling reasons to get listed on as many Local Search Directories as possible:

User experience – People tend to start with a general search online, then go from there. Eventually they locate the information they need, and if they have a good experience, will seek out that information resource (site) again. What this means for local business searches online is someone who searches for “Ice Cream” with a Zip Code, will end up a map of results from the search engine (why you need to be in Google, Yahoo and others) as well as results from local search directory sites like Merchant Circle, City Search and others (see the list above). If a user knows where they want to go already, they will use the map feature, if they are looking for reviews and opinions from others,they will go local search directory instead.

This is the current user experience today. It is not flipping through the Yellow Pages. Yes, the fingers are still doing the walking, only now its more like a tap dance on the keyboard, so you need to be part of it.

Reach – From the above ice cream example, you can see the reach you get from being listed. But data collected and managed online now goes a lot further. Not only is mobile local search picking up steam with the iPhone and similiar devices, but I often find places with my GPS while driving as well. (Gas, Food, Florists, Coffee Houses). Being online as well as on everyone’s GPS is pricless. Its being right where people are already looking.

Ranking – The better your search ranking with search engines like Google, the more often your site will be found, bottom line. When you are listed oline, you have a web reference to your site. The more references that are relevant the better. The more popular the site referencing you, the better. Listing with Local Search Directories provides you a way get popular and relevant sites linking to yours. Things are never really this simple, but you get the point, these links have value to your site ranking, and therefore to your business.

Writing for Local Search Engines & Directories

Steven Brier over at Local Internet USA brought up a good point to me recently, in that the focus on submitting to Local Search Engines and Directories is not so much about the time it takes to submit to them all, but rather the work it takes identify your keywords and create some compelling and attractive copy that will draw your target audience in from these local search engines and directories.  This obviously comes from a professional who see the results of well thought out copy.

Before submitting to search directories, your website should be optimized with your keywords.  You’ll want to make sure these make it into your listing copy where appropriate.  Here is more information on Local SEO for your website .

Note: This list does not cover local niches. If you are a restaurant for example, you will want to list with local directory sites like UrbanSpoon for instance. If there are niche directories with local listings, get in them as well! I’d put such a directory near the top of my list.

Now that we’ve discussed how to do SEO properly and how to get listed locally everywhere online, I’ll put some time into local online advertising (and not the useless opportunities you’ve been approached with by some sales guy).