Natural vs. PPC
He wasn’t too concerned about not having great rankings because he feels that the overwhelming majority of people click on paid ads rather than natural results. This of course is not the case. Most people click on natural results, and if you have a listing in both places you have an even greater chance of capturing a particular web searcher (3 times as likely according to Google).

Why do PPC if my affiliates are doing it?
He pays his affiliates a 20% payout and the terms he would have to bid on are quite cheap and convert well. Why would he rather pay a big commission to an affiliate if he could get sales at a cheaper cost? Also, having an additional listing in the paid results means he has a better chance of getting the sale. Think about it, if he is listed naturally, also has a paid listing, and has one or more affiliates with paid listings, then he is dominating the results for that search.

The other beauty about PPC is that it can be tracked down to the sale and down to the keyword. Why not build out a campaign of a few hundred keywords and see what the cost per conversion is and whittle it down to the ones that are the most profitable and in your budget?

Not having relationships with affiliates
Affiliates are like salespeople for your company. Would you ignore your salespeople? Would you not attempt to help the less successful salespeople or reward the top performers? Would you not keep them aware of new offerings, specials, product changes, market changes, etc.? If you want them to be effective and work hard for you, you need to help them, educate them, and reward them. This particular site owner had no relationship with his affiliates, they may as well have been strangers!

Keeping ties with original webmaster(s)
He currently has relationships with two individuals that maintain and market his site, and have been doing so since the beginning. It’s nice to form lasting relationships with people, but sometimes you outgrow people as your business grows, much the same way a small business usually outgrows their accountant once their business expands and gets more sophisticated. The people he is working with haven’t updated the site in years, don’t seem to know the first thing about Internet Marketing, and in fact have given him bad advice in regards to certain SEO techniques and tactics.

Oh, wait I forgot, everyone and their mother claims to know SEO and Internet Marketing now…

Making Assumptions when Real Data Exists
The beauty of the Internet is that EVERYTHING can be tracked. Beyond basics like traffic, visitors, and sales, any site owner should know key performance stats like conversion rate, cost per conversion, number of orders, average order amount, percentage of repeat vs. new customers, etc. This person didn’t know any figures besides total sales and total orders, and those figures were obtained through a notebook!

Web analytics are the most powerful weapon in a site owner’s arsenal. Once you have a steady flow of traffic and business, you really need to make the most of that and dive deep into user behavior to understand how your site is living and breathing and how your customers are interacting with it. Google Analytics should be the bare minimum, but once established one should make the investment into something more sophisticated like Omniture Sitecatalyst to really get a handle on what’s going on.

Email Marketing, or lack thereof
Expanding on the above topic, I asked this person if he does email marketing. He said no because he didn’t think he had many repeat customers. First, how do you know how many repeat customers you have if you aren’t tracking it. Second, maybe you would have repeat customers if you did email marketing and sent them special deals to entice them to come back and place another order. Email marketing can be a beautiful thing because again, it can be tracked. You can get a bottom line number on how much revenue each campaign generated to see if you are getting a return on your investment. You can do subject line testing to maximize open rates; you can even see where most people are clicking in the actual email!

Not being aggressive
When a small company like this gets some success on the Internet, they have a hard time changing their mindset from thinking small to thinking big. They are reluctant to spend money to hire trained professionals to work on their site. They keep the ‘mom and pop mentality and are not aggressive in trying to make their site work harder for them. Sure, he’s making a million dollars per year. Not bad… What if he invested 50k a year and made another 500k per year, would it be worth it? I think so! Besides, even the niche spaces on the Internet are facing increasingly fierce competition. Him and many others have a great head start and that history gives them an edge, especially in their ability to rank well naturally, but that doesn’t mean someone who is savvy in Internet Marketing and E-commerce couldn’t come in and overtake them in due time.

Not wanting to get as many customers as possible
This builds upon the previous topic, but there are many different ways to get customers on the Internet. Some cost money, some do not, but it can all be tracked down to the sale. Why not experiment with every shopping engine, every PPC engine (not the low-end shady ones) and see if you are getting the ROI you want? Him and many others assume things are not going to work or don’t realize how sophisticated tracking has become.

The shame of it all
I have witnessed others that fall into this category who made a smart move and got on the Internet early, only to see their success slowly dwindle until they didn’t have much of an Internet business at all.

One example is a lead-gen site I ran for a number of years with a few business partners. It was a very clean business with all revenue coming from sales of leads and sponsorships. At it’s height it was making just shy of a million per year with the vast percentage of that being profit. I left the company several years ago to take an executive management position at a large Internet Marketing agency and they never replaced me. They left the site as is, did no marketing, and just relied on existing natural results to drive traffic and leads. This was another niche industry which has now been targeted by some heavy hitters, and as a result, the company I left is making under 200k/yr now and may be closing up shop soon.

The game has changed. The barrier to entry has grown considerably, and to be successful now you need to be constantly working on marketing your site, making it convert better, and trying to maximize revenue from repeat visitors. This requires an investment, but an investment that is essential to survival and success in this new age of the web where things are getting more professional, and e-commerce is getting down to a science. It’s a war out there, treat it as such!

• Get links!!! – You can read a good primer on this in my Link Building Basics article, but this is definitely one of the most important things to do if you want to obtain decent rankings. I recommend kickstarting a link building campaign with a combination of directory listings and some paid text link ads.
• Get your name out there – Post to blogs (blog outreach), submit to forums/message boards, and use any other social media that is relevant to what you are trying to promote. Be careful not to just post commercials, you need to post something informative and relevant that can help the community. Often times, giving free information and advice is the best way to generate tangible revenue.
• PPC (Pay per click) – Pay per click, also call SEM or Search Engine Marketing, is a keyword targeted advertisement. While you do have to pay for these listings rather than organic/natural listings which are free, PPC can be a beautiful thing as long as campaigns are properly built out and the cost per conversion is tracked. The best aspect of PPC is that it is instantaneous. No need to wait for the engines to spider your site. You pay to be listed and you’re there (once your ads are approved) and everything can be tracked so you know your total spend, cost per click, and cost per conversion (lead, sale, etc.).
• Press Releases – another technique to create a buzz while providing an SEO benefit is to send out a press release. You can do this electronically through PR Web and they will distribute it to a list of media contacts. Keep in mind that the release will have to meet their guidelines and be approved, so be creative and make it newsworthy! These releases are indexed by Google and if picked up by other news sites can really help get you noticed.
• Keep building out content – depending on the type of site you are running, this could be anywhere from essential to important. Obviously if it is anything content based or a site where you require repeat visitors, you need to keep it fresh. Also, you want the spiders to see a freshly updated site where new content is added regularly. Make sure you build this content out in a strategic manner to target phrases that you want visibility on.
• Analyze statistics – this is extremely important for any site, but especially a new site. You want to look at your analytics to see if there are any usability issues, what marketing efforts are working and what aren’t, and when you do get indexed, what phrases are bringing you traffic. You may be surprised and find that you are getting traffic for phrases you didn’t target and not getting traffic for the ones you targeted. This may open the door to some opportunities or may require you to go back to the drawing board.
  
  One key thing to keep in mind is make sure you have a reasonable sample before making snap judgments. If you’ve only had a handful of people come to your site, don’t make the assumption that their behavior is indicative of a trend, especially if they all came from a single source!
• Monitor competition/industry – this should always be an ongoing task. Keep abreast of your industry by signing up to Google Alerts – they will notify you of any stories related to a keyphrase you submit. Make sure you always monitor your competition! Think of it this way, if you were fighting a war wouldn’t you rather have a satellite watching the enemy’s every move rather than fighting blind?

This is just a brief list of things you should be doing, most are ongoing and never ending. Internet marketing and search engine optimization is something that can be easily taught, but it is a never ending battle. Gone are the days when a site could be optimized, launched, get top rankings, and stay there for years with little to no work. The Internet is a different place now, and to compete in this space requires constant effort.

Best of luck with your new site launch!

I thought a great way to kick start this site would be to offer some FREE web site audits to a select group of lucky people. The only catch if you call it that is I want to document the analysis on this site. What will the site audit include you ask? Here are some of the things that will be looked at:

• Search engine friendliness – How does the site look to search engines? Are there any issues that are making it difficult for you to obtain rankings?
• Links – Recommendations on how to improve the quality and quantity of the links pointing to your site
• Content – Are there enough content pages, are they keyword rich, are there enough words on those pages?
• Call to Action(s) – How can the placement of them be improved to increase conversion rates?
• Technical issues – Mirror sites, re-directs, errors, and more will be looked for.
• Design/Usability Analysis – Is the design aesthetically pleasing and more importantly, is the site easy to use?
• Misc. Marketing Recommendations – Maybe you need to build out a pay-per-click campaign, maybe you should do more Social Networking, or maybe there is a way to monetize your site that you haven’t thought of…

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please go to the FREE Web Site Audit and fill out the form.

All the best,
Brian

Check out this commercial for Jack Links Beef Jerky on Youtube. Many people wonder how they can effectively use YouTube as a marketing vehicle, and this is a perfect example on how it can be done.

Most of the popular videos on YouTube are funny videos, many of which are a little too unconventional for TV and this grabs that audience perfectly. The videos are well done, funny, and just happen to advertise the company’s beef jerky at the end. Rather than a typical commercial that no one would ever watch or talk about, this company did something creative and as a result is getting tons of views on YouTube. Best of all, after their initial outlay of money to produce the commercials, the advertising on YouTube is absolutely free!

You can view the whole series of commercials by clicking here. Has anyone seen any other good examples of marketing on YouTube?

So, what is Internet Marketing? Just like any other term thrown around the Internet, it has lots of different meanings but here is the basic definition as I see it: “To use multiple online techniques to drive traffic to a user friendly web site where the desired conversion can be obtained”. That’s the bottom line right, to bring people to a site and get them to take action?

Here are some of the topics I plan to talk about over the coming days/months/years:

• Traffic – various techniques to drive traffic to a web site, whether you are looking for relevant traffic or in some cases, eyeballs alone.
• Conversion – how to analyze and optimize a site’s performance to drive the highest rate of conversion possible (sales, leads, etc.)
• Analysis – what are the definitions of the key metrics, how they can be viewed to get a total picture of a site’s performance, various tools out there like Google Analytics on up to more expensive players like Omniture.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – the basics of proper SEO- it’s really not rocket science but it is ever changing. I will layout the formula for a ’search engine friendly’ web site.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) / Search engine marketing (SEM) – another one of those names that is in a state of transition. I’m old school, I still call it PPC! I will talk about how to build out and optimize campaigns, techniques on driving the lowest cost per conversion (CPC), what the new Google Quality Score really means, etc.
• Link building – various ways to obtain links, both paid and unpaid, the good ‘ole PageRank and how important it is, etc.
• Social networking/Web 2.0 – how can this be integrated into an Internet Marketing campaign, how effective or ineffective can be…
• General site auditing – how to quickly determine the issues with a site that effect it’s ability to get indexed, it’s ability to convert, etc.
• Ethics of SEO – black hat, white hat… How about grey hat? Learn about some of the grey areas in SEO that are currently up for debate (Text link ads, Blog outreach, etc.)
• News – if you know anything about this industry you know it is constantly changing – I’ll try to post newsworthy items on here as well.

Most of all, I look forward to interacting with people and discussing some of the hot issues in the industry.

All the best,

Brian