Take This “Internet Sales” Test For Your Site

Take a look at your website, now pretend that each word on the homepage is being said to one of your prospective customers after they said “I might want to buy from you”. Would what was being said to them be relevant?

When was the last time you thought that spending money on Internet Marketing such as Pay-per-Click or SEO was going to increase sales?  It will if the people are sold, but getting them to a bad website that is not relevant to their needs (think of a sales guy babbling on  while you want him off the phone so you can work again, thats a bad website.)

A great sales person has an elevator pitch, knows how to summarize his solutions, he listens to peoples needs, he handles objections and helps people (even if they are not ready to buy at that moment).  A company website needs to be a great sales guy, not a great marketing guy (he did his job already by getting people to the site).

Kill the Brochure Site

I cut my “Internet Business” teeth in an “old school” manufacturing company. It was an $8 Billion company and at 1st did not look to the Internet to do anything more than have brochure materials online.   As the person in charge of the company’s Internet strategies and initiatives,  I knew I had to lead the company in the paradigm shift that was happening in driving B2B lead generation (people were going online 74% of the time to source a new supplier etc), and I knew this meant speaking the “old school language”.  A website had to be more than the digital equivalent of a brochure holder.  It had to be a digital sales person.

Emulate the Sales Group Online

My internal clients at this big old company were in “Marketing”.  I soon realized that the information I was missing the most was from Sales.   Each division of the company had a “Sales & Marketing” group, however I was only ever speaking to 1/2 of my client. Each of 300 or so sales people for the company knew how to present the company’s value to a prospect in less than 1 minute, they had the relevant materials with them to present and knew when someone was a qualified buyer.

In the end, I created a B2B website that acted like a Sales person, qualifying a person as a lead before closing it (the sales people still closed the sale, and made me feel like a hero every time I met them).

The company had a very strong brand in its industry, and the website got some decent traffic, but proportionately few leads were driven from it.  Marketing people spent lots of time with excellent interactive marketing agencies running Internet marketing campaigns that drove online leads, however the company’s website was left largely untouched by Marketing as a lead generation tool.  That was till I spoke to Sales.

Websites are Internet Sales, not Internet Marketing.

Websites perform the same job as a sales person. Think about it.  Marketing is generating traffic to sales, and sales is converting that traffic.

The Internet is so new that people have not realized the two functions are still there, its just the medium that has changed.  Companies today need to step back to traditional marketing and ask if something is a Sales or Marketing function, then approach it as such. Here are some typical “Internet Marketing” mainstays.  Lets look at them and classify them as they really are.

1. PPC – Marketing
2. SEO – Marketing
3. Websites – Sales
4. Social Networks- Both
5. eMail Campaign- Marketing

You can see that I’m calling Websites “Sales” and not Marketing.  I firmly believe this and there is a company with $350K/month in additional sales to prove it.  A website recieves traffic to to from Marketing which generates it online or off.  It is now the websites job to receive people looking for information and answers and convert them into buying customers.  Sounds like sales to me.

Lets Talk Resources

I love marketing people, but they are not normally sales people.  I have also seen sales people come back to “corporate” and fail in marketing.  The reason is the two functions are separate and involve separate strengths and talents.  The Internet is new, so if ou have not figured it out yet, let me be clear.  It is the same online as offline. When you have someone great at producing traffic for your website, don’t put them in charge of converting leads or online purchases.  If you have someone great at increasing conversion rates on your site/s, don’t assume that they can manage Google Adwords or Banner Ad campaigns.  Some people can do both, just don’t assume.

Another factor is specialization.  There is a lot to profiting online.  No one person can be at the top of their game in both Sales & Marketing skills and techniques.  PPC is a full time specialty now, as is SEO, as is web design etc and so forth.

Social Media in Sales & Marketing

I’m not saying that there is not some cross-over.  Social media is a place where a company can both drive r.  Social media is a place where a company can both drive traffic and build relationships that “Sell”.  I’m just pointing out there is a distinction and the sooner a company stops expecting a sales tool or person to do marketing and a marketing tool or person to so sales, the better we are.

80% of websites have adequate traffic to achieve their goals, they just don’t handle it well.

My last post was about the Internet Strategy Checklist my firm uses to “cover all the bases” with clients when brainstorming their Internet Strategies (albeit a useless list if I don’t already know the client’s audience, objectives and opportunities).  The list is arranged with the most important Internet marketing strategy components first, from the perspective of priority and hierarchy of what needs to be done 1st.  The 1st category on the list is Website Optimization.

Don’t Throw Money at a Bad Site

Without a website that can handle traffic, there is no sense of giving it any.  So often companies get caught in the idea that sending more traffic to a site will result in more sales, and they are normally right, but not normally making profiting off of it the way they could be. The 1st thing we do for clients is audit their incoming traffic.  If they are paying for clicks, we figure out the return on investment and estimate how they can better convert these “paid for” visitors once on the site.  This is a minor step in the big scheme of things, but it does “stop the bleeding” so we can get to the point of getting sites on a path towards optimal health.

You Know Where to Find the Yogurt.

A good website is like a grocery store. People coming in have a sense of where items they want might be located and easily follow directions and conventions to getting what they want.  This is no accident.  Retail Strategists lay out stores be easy to navigate and promote.  Sound familiar?

Website Optimization is getting the most out of people visiting an online property.  This might be apply to a landing page, micro-site, website, online catalogue, online slide deck, Interactive tool etc.  If your web presence is not handling visitors well, then paying to sending qualified traffic to it in large part a waste of money.

Good website optimization often starts with the website homepage strategy and how site visitors handle people once they arrive at it.  I wrote a post on this a while back, click here to read it.  The best place to start is to look at your website analytics and see were the top “landing pages” are (what pages people are entering your site) and then optimizing your landing pages (another previous post).

Keep Your Promises

When I look at a site for the 1st time, I look at its “Promises”.  What is the site promising the site visitor?  Then, is the site delivering on its promises.  This starts from the ad or search result that got the user to the site.  Do they arrive on a page that fulfills the promise of the search engine (This shows why SEO without strategy is worthless, as it can just create “broken promises”.  If you have a decent landing page and are getting more than a 20% bounce rate on it, it is likely caused by “broken promises”.  I don’t want this to be an SEO post, but having an integrated SEO strategy is part of Website Optimizing (sending qualified traffic in any way is part of it).

Focus on Website Optimization

Focus on website optimization as your primary web focus.  This starts off by making sure the site is simple and well organized from the user’s perspective.  Then it goes further into “giving people what they want”, when they want it and how they want it.  It also means spending time on statistics and testing out different things (check out

Achieve your Customer’s Goals, Forget Your Own

Your customers have their own goals when they are your site (forget about your site’s goals for a minute).  Once your site is organized from your site audience’s perspective, you need to set up analytic goals and track the “Goal Funnel” to see where visitors are falling off in trying to achieve THEIR goals.  Once see where they are dropping off, you can critically look and very likely see why.  Then you can fix it.

Now lets talk about your company’s and its site’s goals.  These are really just the goals of the site visitor.  If you achieve their goals, you will achieve yours.  (This needs to become your mantra.  Design it from your visitor’s perspective, give them what they want and help them achieve their objectives, you’ll profit from it, have faith).

Try User Testing

It is so easy these days to get user testing (See Get Tested) there is no excuse not to watch people trying to achieve their goals on your site on a regular basis.  This is the catalyst to website optimization because after watching your target audience trying and failing at core basic stuff, you will be compelled to do something about it.

Measure Progress

Your site needs “Core Metrics”. These are what you need to measure.  These metrics need to be from analytics, sales (or leads) figures, feedback data, and anything else that you could measure that would show that website optimization is working.

A Website Core Metrics Example

Website Optimization Summary

Give people what they want, do it from their perspective, make it easy and test test test. You likely have an SEO program.  Now you need a Website Optimization program.  They two have a lot in common.  Neither give immediate results, seem simple but are not, and require a strategy and lots of work.  There are there are website optimizing companies that provide such services, and even pair them with an SEO company.  I suggest getting  website optimization services before sending paid clicks at your site.  So many companies build something and leave it.  In reality, you can often get 100% better performance out of a page or navigational path through optimization.

Here is a checklist to use when developing or reviewing your Internet Marketing Strategy. This was developed for the clients of our Internet Strategy Firm, 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
    
  • 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

People Don’t Read Your Website… They Scan it.

Make it Easy to Scan your Information, and They’ll consume it.

Anyone writing copy for web needs to understand how to write web copy. The reason is that copy writing for the web determines how and what of what your write actually gets read.  If you write to have your copy scanned, then you are writing good web copy!

Headlines

A page’s headline needs to interrupt and be relevant. It does not need to be descriptive, explain or introduce anything.  It just needs to stop people and get them to the Sub-Header.

Sub-Headers

A Sub-Header needs to engage a website visitor while expanding on the headline and its relevance to what the subject of the web content.

Image Captions

Following reading the headline and Sub-Header of a page, people will turn briefly to images and then read the image caption. This is why it is so important to write the best image captions possible, as this is what people are reading to determine if going further is going to be a waste of time or not.

Bullets

Write in bullet form;

• As much as possible.
• When appropriate.
• When a paragraph is going to be too large.
• When you want it read.

Paragraphs – short and start bold

Keep your paragraphs short.  I suggest 6 lines or less. It really helps to bold the first part of your paragraph (no more than 1/2 of it), and place the most "to the point" copy there.

Use your Colours

Use your website colours as the colours for your headline and Sub-Headers. You don’t have to use the exact colours, but doing this will help your copy stand out a little.

Calls to Action

Calls to Action (what you want people to click on to fill out a form, become a sale or go further in the sales or lead process) should not be copy unless it is also accompanied with button that repeats or expands on the text link.

Perfect Example

Just look at those image captions! This comes from www.eightbyeight.com , the website of an excellent eCommerce optimization company.  I have met Amy Africa who is a partner at Eight by Eight and knew I would fine the best practices she and I both advocate.

I hope this helps!

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.

A lot of people do not understand Internet marketing fundamentals . So, for the local, niche and small business people reading this blog, I think it is vitally important to cover the fundamentals around internet business strategy and make sure they are understood and valued, as successful internet marketing strategies will not happen if each Pillar is not given its due attention.

The 4 Pillars of Internet Marketing Success

When I do internet strategy consulting, developing a client’s best internet marketing strategy, there are 4 Pillars of Internet Marketing Strategy I consider.

#1 – Good Web Design

#2 – Good Website Coding

#3 – Driving Relevant Visits

#4 – Maximizing Conversion Rates

Good Web Design

My 1st Internet profession was as a Developer. After 5 years of programming, I thought I knew something about good web design.  I KNEW NOTHING! It was not until I moved to the business side and was charged with increasing conversions, in that case B2B leads, that I started to really consider what good web design is.

Good web design is not making things look pretty .  Good web design is achieving the objectives of the site or page.  Normally the objective is to drive conversions, and the disconnect is on this point.  Sure, things need to look good and professional or they hurt convertions, but this is only part of the Web Design equation.

Business objectives need to drive the design of a website or landing page. There has to be careful consideration of what information is present where, and how it is presented.  The information that the use wants to know must come first with anything you are trying to sell or tell them being secondary.  Good Web Design can place focus of the user better, but its primary role is to answer the immediate questions, and get them where they and you both want them to go.

Take a look at the following website for a curtain shop in my area of Denver, Co. The design is good as far as look & feel goes. I know EXACTLY what this site does and if I am looking for curtains, I get the all important "ah ha!" a visitor needs to stick around a site more than 8 seconds (its like riding a bull). Not only is the top navigation clear, but so is the sub navigation. I could dig deep and pick on the "scent" of the site due to it not telling me "where I am right now" , or the page title not following the same font style as the top menu, or the menus not changing state when mouse over them. I could, but won’t because the architecture of the site, the layout of the pages, and the presentation of the navigation options make this site better than  80% of other sites right off the bat.

To learn a bit more about Web Design, and the importance of it beyond (or better said, before) "look & feel", see Nail a Niche with Landing Pages and Homepage Strategy & Tips .

Good Website Coding

As a former developer, this is the area I mastered early on, but was all I really knew .  Not only do people have a hard time following things like navigation "image maps" (several links in one menu), but so do search engine "bots".

Another mistake is drop down menus (this is poor web design as well since people can’t "see" the options without having to take an action based on the limited information they get from a main menu title).  Drop down menus are often done with Java Script and search engines don’t read this type of coding and with therefore not follow the navigation.  With the search engines looking at internal links as a factor in ranking a site, sites with image map and java script drop down menus miss out on being more attractive to search engines and the result is less inbound traffic from the search engines. aka, You’re not being found.

Take a look at the site above again. Windows Dressed Up has image navigation. That is killing the site’s search engine rankings. In fact, I was searching for the site, but could not remember its name and tried a few searches like "Window Coverings Denver " and "Drapes Denver " and could not find them.  They did not turn up noticeably in the search results.

These searches could have turned up Windows Dressed Up by this business doing 3 things.

1. Make the navigation images into text links.  You could make them look identical with HTML.
2. Optimize the navigation links names  for search.  To learn more about this, see Know Your SEO.
3. Optimize for Local Search .

There are also so other opportunities to improve search engine rankings.

1. The images to the right could be separated into separate images, each with its own ALT tag providing a keyword rich description of what the image is.
2. They could use better page title tags, and add keyword and description tags, focusing on a Local SEO strategy .
3. They may also want to submit to all the Local Search Engines, Directories and Data Providers since currently they don’t have any incoming links to their site, this would at least give them a start, not to mention help being found by those people using those sites to search locally.

Drive Relevant Visits

This is the one Pillar most businesses focus on despite really needing to first handle Good Web Design and Coding first .  Nonetheless, it is a key Pillar when considering strategy and internet, and where I spend a lot of my time as an internet strategy consultant.  Driving people to a site that is converting poorly is a waste of money if the traffic is paid and a waste of effort if the business is engaging in social media or SEO efforts.

Once a site is ready to recieve traffic and can convert well, it needs to start driving relevant traffic to it. To drive relevant traffic, a business needs to know it audience, where they are online and how to best engage them.  For instance, if you know your audience is interested in "home decorating", are women between the ages of 30 and 60 and reside in the Metro Denver area ( in the case of  Windows Dressed Up ), then you could target them with Pay per Click, Online Advertising, Social Media Ads and a few other tactics that allow you to target by demographics and geography.  You just want to make sure your traffic is relevant and highly targeted, as Internet Marketing is very unforgiving to those who don’t target well.

Maximizing Conversion Rates

To achieve success online, you need more than good Web Design, Good Website Coding and Relevant Traffic. You need to to focus on convertions.  You’re site has at least one objective.  It might be to generate a lead, to make a sale, or have someone donate to your cause.  Whatever the site objective, you need the following to start achieving them;

1. Make it easy – Don’t have too many steps to achieve something.  Registration for example should only collect essential info.
2. Keep it simple – Don’t overwhelm people with too many options.
3. Relevant Offerings – If someone is seeking information about cooking, don’t try to push lawn equipment on them.
4. Good Placement – Make offers
5. Clear Calls To Action – Don’t have a button that says "submit".  Make the button have meaning like "Book your package today".
6. If possible, offer things that are unique and valuable, preferably both.
7. Have special or free offer your site audience would really want.  See #6 above.   This is related to nurturing business and something we’ll go into at a later date.

Streaming

Streaming is identifying an audience and taking them through your site in the way you want them to proceed , but more importantly, the way they want to proceed.  Lets say Windows Dressed Up in Denver had Interior designers as an audience.  Calling out to them and leading them into a part of the site that addressed their needs, separately from regular customers would be streaming.  As long as you provided all the information the audience wants, they will be where you can offer them relevant offers and in a place dedicated to your selling to them.  Streaming audience types to areas meant for them will increase conversions.

Test & Tweak

All the best practices in the world will not make the best website.  You need to analyze your site statistics, talk to your customers, learn from it and try new things.  Try a new Headline or image.  Move an offer up.  Take out offers that are not performing.  There is always better results with testing. I think what and how to tweak is a future post as well.

I hope this offers a foundation on Internet Marketing.  It is important to understand the value of each Pillar and approach your web presence from the 1st to the 4th in order to save time and money.

This article is for any Local, Niche or Small Business that is looking for the best online advertising , or wants to learn about the online advertising market (i.e. online banner advertising ). If you are looking to start an online advertising campaign and want to post online ads on an online advertising network , then this article is meant for you. We’ll show you how to place ads online and make the most of your efforts.

Banner Ad Networks

When you see a graphic ad on a site, that ad is probably coming from an ad network that sites use to place advertising on their site. For example, you can see the two small square ads to the right of this, where the sponsors of this Blog show their ads. In my case, I use a popular and effective ad network for blogs called Performancing Ads .

Let’s say you are a local business selling "Guy Stuff". You would want to place ads on sites where the audience is men. You could start by signing up for some ad networks like the ones listed below, and look for sites that match your audience well. Think about who your BEST customers are, then troll for sites that you think would appeal to them. If you see a site on an ad network you think is a match, go to Quantcast.com and see if the demographics for the site are what you expect.

Here is one site you might want to advertise on, and look a great ad spot.

Lucky for you this ad is served my an ad network that allows local targeting, so you can serve your own ad where you see the ad for the BBQ Grill.

Creating an Ad

Prior to placing ads of course, you have to have the ads created, and perhaps a landing page created. To have the best ad possible created, read the post Crowdsourcing Web Design , and to create the best landing page for the ad, see Nail a Niche with Landing Pages.

Before you assign any ad creation work , you’ll need to have a well defined vision of what you will be advertising.  You will also want to make sure the locations you have decided to advertise in warrant the cost of developing an Ad.   I would consider being able to get a minimum of 1000 impressions of your ad each day before considering creating a new ad.

Effective Banner Sizes

When you create ads, you want to make sure you create them in the most common and effective styles.  If you find a great site to place an ad on, but don’t have your ad in the size they offer, then you are going to miss out or have additional work in managing the creation of a new ad.  Here are the most common ad sizes, with "effectiveness" in mind (I did not include some common sizes like regular skycraper because they are normally not effective enough to warrant the time and expense of running).

Here are the sizes I see as being the most effective at the time of writing this article , ranked in the order of effectiveness.

#6 is the 728 x 90 – Leaderboard which was too large to show on this page.

Effective Ad Locations

Here is a great Ad Placement Chart from Google . Here the darker the Ad, the more likely it is to convert. Don’t get hung up on the ad size, but rather focus on the location, as the ad size could vary.

Anatomy of an Ad

1. Colour Scheme – Blend in with Light Backgrounds, Stand out (contrast) with Dark Background.
2. Logo/Brand – If you have a known brand, brand it.  If not, don’t take up the space.
3. Headline – Should "interrupt" the reader and get their attention.
4. Image
5. Image Caption – Will be the most read part of the ad, must inform and intrigue.
6. Call to Action – Needs to be clear.

Ad Tips

1. Don’t auto-start audio.  If you have audio in an ad, make the user choice to hear it.
2. Sell an Offer, not a Product – Instead of Free Shipping, why not pay them for shipping.  Negative Shipping is an offer!
3. Don’t have anything blinking – it just annoys people.
4. Call to Action should stand out.
5. When trying to blend an ad into a site, don’t give the ad a border.
6. Use Animation if appropriate
7. Stay away from Red.
8. Use the word "Free" if appropriate.
9. Use a short message.
10. Direct Traffic to a custom landing page for that offer/ad.
11. Change out banners often to stop people from getting used to them.

Online Advertising Terms

Channel – The type of sites you want to target. i.e. Automotive.
CPI – The Cost-Per-Interstitial ad, which is an advertising page that is inserted in the site navigation flow like TV commercials.
CPV – Cost Per View
CPM – Cost Per 1000 Impressions.

Ad Networks

Once you have concluded your contest, and have the banners created. You are ready to return to the ad networks and sites you have decided to target.

• AdReady.com – Pre-Made Interactive Ads.  Easy for Small Business to get started.
• Clicksor.com – Friendly, helpful and affordable.  Good targeting.
• MyADMarket.com - Great Tutorials. Good place to start learning.  Great for targeting.
• AdOnion.com – Great for teenager audience, especially boys
• Project Wonderful.com – Targets niche BLOGs & sites with modest traffic.  Inexpensive.
• Tribalfusion.com – Place ads on Niche Sites.
• Advertising.com – For more experience Marketers.
• Doubleclick.com – Higher End Ad Network.  A Place to "graduate to".

Example

Here an an example of a well done banner ad. This is an up-and-coming online T-Shirt company called MyTShirtCompany.com doing a great job with Online Advertising. Notice the choice of Banner Ad, and how well the ad blends into the current site. I am sure this company is experimenting with placement, and their choice of advertising on a job search site is more of a test than a strategic placement. Who knows, it might just work well!

Its also nice to see the website system that drives this site (A project I directed) being used so well. I recently wrote an Internet Marketing Manual for the Application Service Provider (ASP) of this system with much the same information in it as in this post, so it appears my advice is being taken already and applied quite well.

Part of the Mix

I hope this helps businesses start or improve their online advertising.  Now is a great time to be into Ads as the economy has lead to lowering costs and less competition, while at the same time, the ad networks have released better targeting, especially for local ads.

Just remember, this needs to part of your online advertising mix.  For a word on that topic, visit
Banner Advertising Is But One Small Component Of Digital Marketing from Twist Image who is indexed as part of our eMarketing Search Engine as a great place to find Internet Marketing information.

Crowdsourcing Web Design Changes Everything

It used to be that designing for a site meant selecting a web designer and being limited to the talents, ideas and inspiration of that web designer. Then came crowdsourcing . According to Wikipedia.com , crowdsourcing is taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an “open call”.

This works great for web design! You can also use it for Logos, Stationary, and even T-Shirt designs!

Before you start Crowdsourcing Web Design

1. Decide which design crowdsourcing site to use. The choices right now are 99Designs.com or CrowdSpring.com . Browse through each site, checkout the categories you will be listing in and see where you think you can get the best value for what you are looking to get.
2. Be ready to go public. This is a public process. 99Designs.com allows you to set up a private contest, but it costs more. Ask yourself if your competitors really have nothing better to do than find your contest, and if they don’t, will they actually do anything about it after they see it?
3. Have a clear vision of what you want your design to convey. You should also be clear the objective of what online presence. The key here is for you to be clear on what you what to convey through the design.
4. Make sure you have the time to write a good design brief. The design crowdsourcing site you use will walk you through this, you just need to make sure you take the time to fill it out thoroughly. Remember, designers will only give you what they think you want, so that is what you need to communicate to them. If you have a Marketing Summary already, use it!
5. Research how much you should spend. Take a look at contests similar to the one you will be creating. How much are they offering to the designer. You will notice that the greater the reward, the better the contest entries. This is already the “cheap” way to go, don’t be cheaper!
6. Know there will be additional “middle man” charges of around 20% on top of what your set the contest for. You need to factor this cost in when you set the amount the design contest winner receives.

Create a Design Contest

Now let’s walk through the design crowdsourcing process I used to get the eMarketing Matador web logo and header image you see in the header area of this site. For just over $200, I got 7 very talented designers to submit 27 designs, and compete to win the design contest.

In this case, for the logo/header contest, I used 99Designs.com . At the time, I was more impressed with the logo/header designs I saw on 99Designs.com , and they appeared to be going for about $50 cheaper.

In submitting my contest, I did not select a lot of the options available, which all cost extra. Some of these make sense, such as promoting the contest in the forum area of the site, especially if you are in a hurry and want the attention of the best talent. For me, I give the design period about 5 days, ensuring me time to work with the designers through feedback etc. You can also highlight the contest etc and make it stand out. All these things might work, but how much more than just throwing the additional costs into the contest reward is debatable. I personally would rather see the extra money go to the Designer.

Here is my Design Brief for the eMarketing Matador Web Logo/Header

In the Design Brief , there was 4 key points I wanted to make;

#1 – I gave the address of the site so they could see where the logo/header image would live.

#2 – I “sweetened” the pot by offering to recognize the designer and link to their site. You can see this in the footer of this site.

#3 – I wanted the design or part of it, to have good icon appeal. If you look at the address bar, you will see the icon for this site.

#4 – I pre-paid the prize money. This showed I was serious and that someone was going to win.

Once published, a Design Brief looks like this to prospective designers

You can see that the summary is just that. I used it to give the basic and vital information, as well as provide the incentive related information of what I was going to do above and beyond just the contest.

Below are the different entries I received.

You can see I got a lot of variety to select from. It is amazing what 7 different designers will come up. Each has their own style and interpretation of your design brief. This is where crowdsourcing design excels. With a single designer, you get one set of “vision” and “talent”. A single designer also does not have brainstorming access with other designers trying to achieve the same task. Let one talented designer see anothers work, and the clients feedback to that work, the quality and direction of their own work will end up being more targeted and what you want. This is where you win!

Tips to Getting the Best out of Design Crowdsourcing

1. Give Timely Feedback – I try to check my contests at least twice a day and provide feedback for each design. I rate the ones I don’t like and the ones I do like, I let them know. If I see something with potential, or going in a direction I like, I let the designers in the contest know so they can all go down the right path together. Design feedback is crucial.
2. Get a good start – If you don’t see at least 5 designs submitted after a couple of days, review other contests and see what the bids are there. You might need increase your bid a bit. For this contest, I raised the bid by $20 once and saw better results after.
3. Build a relationships – If you see someone with talent, keep in touch. You may want to go direct to them in the future, cutting out the competition and middle man. Going direct to the designer will easily cut costs by 2/3′s. Worse case, you can let the designers know of your next competition and have them “raise the bar” a bit.

The Winner

In the end, the winner of the contest was UaLz, a university senior taking time out of studying for finals to made some much needed money to pay rent etc. If you’d like to use him, his email address is duffu_duff@yahoo.com.

Here is a close up of my Logo. It is not what I thought I wanted. Its a lot better.

Visit the Contest

To visit the contest I hosted for the eMarketing Matador logo/header image, simply visit 99designs.com here.

Related Article on Landing Pages

I recently wrote a post on Landing Pages, which are perfect for Crowdsourcing. One page, simple goal. Its a good place to start!

Listen to Seth

I’m a big Seth Godin fan. He’s a great Marketing author, blogger and Entrepreneur. He wrote an article “How to live happily with a great designer” that captures the essence of working with a designer, web or not, crowdsourcing or not. I recommend reading it before working on any Web Design Brief to any Web Designer.

Remember: You can do this!