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This Just Tested: How PPC specificity drove 21% more clicks and cut costs 66%

June 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It has been a while since we have published Pay Per Click (PPC) ad testing. Lately, it can seem like PPC has taken the back seat to topics like social media and mobile. However, PPC remains an integral part of the online marketing campaigns for many of our own Research Partners, so we are still testing to discover the most effective ways to craft PPC ads.

So enough introductions and segues, let’s get down to the test.

Background

This experiment involves a business-to-business (B2B) software provider. They were trying to optimize one of their best lead generation conversion paths. They started by focusing their test efforts on the channel driving traffic through this process, the PPC ad.

At the end of the day, they would end up testing and optimizing the complete conversion path (from PPC ad to form page). And the overall gains this company achieved are going to turn some heads on today’s web clinic, but for the sake of this blog post, let’s just look at how they optimized their paid search marketing campaign.

The original PPC ad

ppc 1 This Just Tested: How PPC specificity drove 21% more clicks and cut costs 66%The original ad used mainly vague qualitative statements (e.g., “award-winning,” “business software,” “fully integrated”) throughout, giving the ad little distinction from others.

Of course, there are limited characters within a PPC ad and it can be difficult to include deep specifics for certain claims and offers. But, as we will see from this test, sometimes it pays to get creative with our ad copy.

The new PPC ad

ppc 2 This Just Tested: How PPC specificity drove 21% more clicks and cut costs 66%For the test, we were able to fit a bit more specific language on the second line of this ad. We included exact figures that underscored the popularity of this software. They have more than 6,459 current customers and their software is the top used by businesses.

It is important to note that, though “award-winning” could be expounded and specified, we had to balance the information we wanted to include in the ad with the amount of characters available. So we made sure that “award-winning” was explained immediately on the landing page customers reach by clicking on this ad.

The results

Overall we saw the click-through for the new ad increase 20.9% with no significant increase to the cost-per-click. For such a crowded market, an increase like this is nothing to turn your nose up at. This PPC was just one part of a holistic optimization strategy that, in the end, decreased the cost-per-acquisition by 66.4% and increased revenue by 267.9%.

So what’s does this mean for you?

This test underscores two key principles that we should all walk away with:

  • First is the value of SPECIFICITY. Using clear statements provides a greater value perception in the mind of the user. If we want our PPC ads to stand out, we ought to use quantitative statements instead of (the much more common) qualitative claims. It’s a simple strategy, but it can have a significant impact on our efforts.
  • Second is the importance of STRATEGY. This takes the complete picture to see clearly, but small gains are more powerful as part of a holistic optimization strategy. This 21% increase would be multiplied tenfold at the end of the day after we had optimized each step in the conversion funnel of this offer. So, when possible, test holistically.

Dr Flint McGlaughlin will be talking more about this second principle on today’s web clinic, as he walks through the entirety of this case study from PPC ad to the form submission page. He will explain in more detail how this company’s testing strategy took a 21% gain and multiplied it tenfold.

Related Resources

Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold

PPC Innovation: How will Google’s new lead capture extension affect your pay-per-click campaigns?

Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 2

This Just Tested: How PPC specificity drove 21% more clicks and cut costs 66%

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , , , , ,

Headless Body In Topless Bar

June 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

bar Headless Body In Topless Bar

That was a New York Post headline.

It was a great headline for the New York Post. I think it’s fair to say they understand their readers.

Is it a good headline for a post on PPC Blog?

Maybe icon smile Headless Body In Topless Bar

You tell me.

In a minute.

But first….

A Post About Headlines

Today we’ll look at the headline in the context of PPC. This topic is probably nothing new to PPC veterans, but if you have a background in traditional media and copy writing, hopefully it will give you a way to approach PPC, and search marketing in general.

We can think of text ads as being headlines. They serve a similar purpose to headlines in traditional media. Their purpose is to grab attention. Unlike traditional media, text ads lead to a second headline, and copy, on a separate landing page. So the two need to work in tandem in order to be most effective.

In traditional media, the headline writer simply wants to grab attention from a reader who may not have been interested in the topic a second ago. They want you to read and, at best, recall a message, but there’s not a great deal of jeopardy involved if you don’t. The PPC headline leads the reader to take a specific action, and that action typically involves handing over cash.

In this respect, the stakes are higher for the PPC copywriter.

The Role Of Headlines In Our Culture

All our media has been reduced to the headline.

The sound bite. The lead story. Digg. Reddit. Social media. Our inbox. Our feed readers. Everything is being aggregated and reduced to headlines. Our culture has infinite messages, yet there are still only 24 hours in the day. What media you consume, and what you buy, is typically “directed” by the few words that make up a headline.

No wonder marketers place such importance on headlines. Those few words lead to everything else.

Brevity

Our media has been reduced to headlines because time is short. Headlines summarize. Headlines must be both brief, and loaded with meaning. They must hint at something deeper.

Relevant

Ad text and the landing page headline must resonate with your audience. The key to writing a good headline is to first know your audience.

PPC is a great test bed for getting to know your audience. Tim Ferris, the author of the book “The Four Day Workweek” used PPC to test a range of title ideas for his as-yet unnamed book. The ad text that generated the most clicks became the title of his book. The audience “told” him the name they deemed most interesting by clicking.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions.

Search is a hunt and find medium. Unlike the newspaper or magazine, PPC is not about grabbing disinterested, passing attention. It is about being directly relevant to the searcher who knows, of thinks she knows, what she wants. It’s about reflecting the searchers own perception of what is good and relevant.

Any headline (link) not directly relevant to the search phrase will likely be ignored. This is why repeating the keyword term in a PPC advertisement is important. It’s a confirmation that the searcher is in the right place. This is why traditional attention grabbing headlines, like “Headless Body In Topless Bar” don’t work so well in search.

They aren’t specific enough.

Be Specific

Google sees PPC links as being information. Google reasons that advertisements are information in the same way an organic search results are information in that their function is to answer queries. This is especially true when searches have a commercial imperative.

Google rewards you for being specific.

A PPC headline isn’t a place to get clever. “Headless Body In Topless Bar” would not work in PPC. Whilst it might grab attention because it’s different, people would not see it is as being relevant to them, because it’s not specific to their search. It would also fall foul of Google’s relevancy algorithms, and is unlikely to be shown at all.

A Headline Must Lead Somewhere Even More Interesting

The ad text needs to hint at something deeper. Just like the purpose of the headline is to lead people to the first line of copy, our PPC ads need to hint at something unseen, yet valuable, beyond the link. When the visitor lands on the landing page, the landing page headline must confirm what was hinted at in the PPC ad.

Uniqueness Is Rewarded

If you’ve read this far, my headline probably worked. It got your attention, and led you to the second line, and you kept reading.

But you and I both know that shock tactic isn’t going to work in PPC. It probably worked in the context of a feed reader, because it stood out in that context. Typically, the titles for PPCBlog articles don’t involve headless corpses in topless bars! But it’s not a great headline. It’s over-played. And it is unlikely to work again. Any shock/curiosity value has now gone.

However, I want to make a point about context. In a crowded environment, like a feed reader or search results page, uniqueness is often rewarded.

As a species, we’re conditioned to notice what changes in our environment. The new. The different. Likewise, our text ads must be more compelling than any other link on the page. That includes the organic results. Look thought the search results, not just the PPC ads, to see what is, and more importantly, what isn’t there.

Your ad should be unique in this context. Uniquely relevant. This comes from understanding your audience, and specifically addressing their needs.

Filed Under: News Tagged With:

Headless Body In Topless Bar

June 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

bar Headless Body In Topless Bar

That was a New York Post headline.

It was a great headline for the New York Post. I think it’s fair to say they understand their readers.

Is it a good headline for a post on PPC Blog?

Maybe icon smile Headless Body In Topless Bar

You tell me.

In a minute.

But first….

A Post About Headlines

Today we’ll look at the headline in the context of PPC. This topic is probably nothing new to PPC veterans, but if you have a background in traditional media and copy writing, hopefully it will give you a way to approach PPC, and search marketing in general.

We can think of text ads as being headlines. They serve a similar purpose to headlines in traditional media. Their purpose is to grab attention. Unlike traditional media, text ads lead to a second headline, and copy, on a separate landing page. So the two need to work in tandem in order to be most effective.

In traditional media, the headline writer simply wants to grab attention from a reader who may not have been interested in the topic a second ago. They want you to read and, at best, recall a message, but there’s not a great deal of jeopardy involved if you don’t. The PPC headline leads the reader to take a specific action, and that action typically involves handing over cash.

In this respect, the stakes are higher for the PPC copywriter.

The Role Of Headlines In Our Culture

All our media has been reduced to the headline.

The sound bite. The lead story. Digg. Reddit. Social media. Our inbox. Our feed readers. Everything is being aggregated and reduced to headlines. Our culture has infinite messages, yet there are still only 24 hours in the day. What media you consume, and what you buy, is typically “directed” by the few words that make up a headline.

No wonder marketers place such importance on headlines. Those few words lead to everything else.

Brevity

Our media has been reduced to headlines because time is short. Headlines summarize. Headlines must be both brief, and loaded with meaning. They must hint at something deeper.

Relevant

Ad text and the landing page headline must resonate with your audience. The key to writing a good headline is to first know your audience.

PPC is a great test bed for getting to know your audience. Tim Ferris, the author of the book “The Four Day Workweek” used PPC to test a range of title ideas for his as-yet unnamed book. The ad text that generated the most clicks became the title of his book. The audience “told” him the name they deemed most interesting by clicking.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions.

Search is a hunt and find medium. Unlike the newspaper or magazine, PPC is not about grabbing disinterested, passing attention. It is about being directly relevant to the searcher who knows, of thinks she knows, what she wants. It’s about reflecting the searchers own perception of what is good and relevant.

Any headline (link) not directly relevant to the search phrase will likely be ignored. This is why repeating the keyword term in a PPC advertisement is important. It’s a confirmation that the searcher is in the right place. This is why traditional attention grabbing headlines, like “Headless Body In Topless Bar” don’t work so well in search.

They aren’t specific enough.

Be Specific

Google sees PPC links as being information. Google reasons that advertisements are information in the same way an organic search results are information in that their function is to answer queries. This is especially true when searches have a commercial imperative.

Google rewards you for being specific.

A PPC headline isn’t a place to get clever. “Headless Body In Topless Bar” would not work in PPC. Whilst it might grab attention because it’s different, people would not see it is as being relevant to them, because it’s not specific to their search. It would also fall foul of Google’s relevancy algorithms, and is unlikely to be shown at all.

A Headline Must Lead Somewhere Even More Interesting

The ad text needs to hint at something deeper. Just like the purpose of the headline is to lead people to the first line of copy, our PPC ads need to hint at something unseen, yet valuable, beyond the link. When the visitor lands on the landing page, the landing page headline must confirm what was hinted at in the PPC ad.

Uniqueness Is Rewarded

If you’ve read this far, my headline probably worked. It got your attention, and led you to the second line, and you kept reading.

But you and I both know that shock tactic isn’t going to work in PPC. It probably worked in the context of a feed reader, because it stood out in that context. Typically, the titles for PPCBlog articles don’t involve headless corpses in topless bars! But it’s not a great headline. It’s over-played. And it is unlikely to work again. Any shock/curiosity value has now gone.

However, I want to make a point about context. In a crowded environment, like a feed reader or search results page, uniqueness is often rewarded.

As a species, we’re conditioned to notice what changes in our environment. The new. The different. Likewise, our text ads must be more compelling than any other link on the page. That includes the organic results. Look thought the search results, not just the PPC ads, to see what is, and more importantly, what isn’t there.

Your ad should be unique in this context. Uniquely relevant. This comes from understanding your audience, and specifically addressing their needs.

Filed Under: News Tagged With:

What Else Can I Test….To Increase Email Click-through?

June 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Email testing produces some of the most interesting results I see here at MarketingExperiments. The cause for this is a combination of constantly changing variables.

For one, content within email tends to change more often than your typical landing page. This makes optimizing for content more challenging as different topics are likely to garner different levels of interest from the segments within your email list. So results will change each month based on the content alone – making A/B testing the only reliable method for measuring progress.

In addition, email lists themselves prove to be a challenge, as what works for one list may not work for another list. Even within lists, especially aggregated lists, you will see different results based on the value proposition, content, layout, and calls-to-action (CTAs) used in your email.

And to further complicate matters, you are still dealing with a funnel process in which your email must first reach a user (avoiding spam filters, personal filters, etc.), your subject line must interest the user enough to open the email, your email must display properly (with images on and off) and be compelling enough to achieve a click-through to your landing page where the battle for a conversion wages on.

In today’s world of overloaded email boxes, people declaring email bankruptcy, spam filters and everything else, this game is only getting more difficult – for marketers and users alike.

With that said, I’d like to offer up my own favorite email testing tricks and tips. It’s important to understand that what works for one segment, list, or industry will not necessarily work for another. In fact what works one month for a list may not work next month. It’s an ever-evolving process in which you must always challenge your own best practices to maximize your results.

1. Text-only email

This is my silver bullet of email optimization. In a world where everyone wants their logo, business cards, websites, and emails to be as shiny and pretty as possible, it’s easy to forget that email is a text-based medium.

Out of all the emails you actually read each day, how many are HTML vs. text-only? The important emails you receive each day – the ones from your family, friends, and co-workers – are all likely text-based. This means the HTML emails you receive are most likely not from one these aforementioned groups and thus likely less important to you on a personal level.

Obviously there are caveats to this – such as an email from your bank or a Facebook friend request – but the truth is, when you send an HTML email you are already fighting a certain level of banner blindness. If you currently only send out an HTML email, I’d challenge you to A/B split test against a text-only version of your email and measure the results.

2. Story format

Emails are a form of value exchange. In exchange for someone’s time and interest, you must first provide something of value.

One of the easiest, most interesting ways to provide value in an email is to tell a relevant story. Not only can telling a story create interest in your topic, but it also can provide you with a natural sounding CTA of “Continue Reading” or “Read More” that requires less commitment from the user before clicking through to your landing page.

The downside to the story format is it requires you to have an interesting story to tell as well as an audience willing to read through the text.

3. Big button

Sometimes if your offer is compelling enough, all you need to do is give people a place to click. It helps if your email list is already familiar with your brand, is interested and familiar with what you’re offering and needs little explanation before clicking through.

For example, our Marketing Director is drawn to J. Crew’s buttons like a moth to a lightbulb…

jcrew What Else Can I Test….To Increase Email Click through?

The focus should be on the value proposition and the CTA copy as this will determine the commitment level required to achieve a click-through. A “Learn More” CTA will bring more clicks, but less qualified traffic than a “Buy Now” CTA. Experiment with this CTA copy to see what works best for your particular audience and dial in the right amount of click-through vs. conversion.

4. Multiple CTAs

I’ve found that when dealing with large, aggregated email lists, including multiple, different CTAs can help increase click-through on the basis that different people will be interested in different aspects of a topic.

For instance, if you are offering a free PDF download on a topic that you hope will encourage people to provide their email address, and you also have a webinar that does the same thing, go ahead and include a link to “View the PDF” and another CTA to “Sign-up for the Webinar.”

What you’ll find is that offering multiple contrasting calls to action will result in a higher click-through rate as some people will be interested in downloading the PDF, while others will prefer the webinar – two different mediums that attract two different groups of people but achieve the same objective.

5. Digest

If you currently send out a longer email newsletter, I’d encourage you to try a digest format. In the digest format you offer several links at the top of the email that either direct users to a particular article on your website or anchor down to an excerpt within the email itself, followed by a CTA to “read more.”

I’ve found digest emails work well when you have a lot of content to offer and you are able to effectively arrange this content so as to attract a wide variety of clicks. It’s a combination of the story format and multiple CTA emails mentioned previously.

Related Resources

The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response: How to craft effective email messages that drive customers to action

Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list

Order your custom Email Response Optimization Package

Photo Attribution: psd

What Else Can I Test….To Increase Email Click through?

Filed Under: Email Marketing, Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , , ,

WordPress 3.0 Makes Building Business Websites Even Easier

June 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

webinar 062820101 WordPress 3.0 Makes Building Business Websites Even Easier

Building business websites with WordPress just keeps getting easier and easier. What I mean by that is that having an awesome website that looks great and has lots of useful features is available to anyone. I mean anyone.

If you’re a business owner who’s looking to provide information to your existing customers, or you want to use your website to attract new business, then setting up a website using WordPress is your ticket. We like to say that if you can run a word processor, you can run your own website using WordPress.

Back in the old days (you know, 10+ Internet dog years ago) you had to create a design, build your webpage template in html, copy and paste the template to create enough pages for your website, stitch those pages together with navigation links, upload them to a web server, and then pray that something didn’t break in the process.

Updates were painful, time consuming, required special tools and knowledge, and took a while to untangle when something went wrong with one of your pages. That meant that most website owners couldn’t or wouldn’t update their sites very often.

But by using WordPress, all the parts and pieces of the puzzle are built in. If you can run a word processor, you can run your own website. All you have to do is log into the admin area of your website, and click “Add Page” to add a new page. All your website images can be uploaded directly using point and click options. Your website theme holds all your navigational menu items, defines where your website information shows up, and makes it extremely simple to manage.

At Open Source Marketer we believe that WordPress is the simplest, most flexible solution, that offers you long term possibilities for growth at a lower cost than anything else. That’s why this Monday we’ll be hosting a webinar on building business websites using WordPress.

During the one hour webinar we’ll be sharing the process we use to create sites for ourselves and clients. We’ll be sharing some examples of sites that we’ve built for clients, including informational sites, membership sites, and micro-sites.

You are invited to join us and ask questions about the process we use or even WordPress in general. We enjoy discussing the merits of the platform and we’d love to help you understand what it takes to build a business website using WordPress.

So register now to join us and bring your questions.

WordPress has over nine thousands plugins and a huge open source support community where you can find the information you want to do anything you need. There’s nothing else out there that let’s you build a business using a system that you own and burn to a CD and actually hand to someone if they bought your business.

Building business websites with WordPress just keeps getting easier and easier.

Join us Monday to find out how easy.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Learn how to build and market your business online using WordPress.

WordPress 3.0 Makes Building Business Websites Even Easier

Filed Under: Website Development Tagged With: , ,

What Is That Smell?

June 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

domain extensions stink What Is That Smell?

If a rose by any other name smells as sweet, then why doesn’t everyone grab the .biz or .info domain names? After all, its the content that matters, not the name…..right?

Uh, sort of.

People like familiar paths. Anyone remember a book called “the road less traveled”? Its less traveled for a reason. If your rose isn’t on the main path, then it won’t get noticed nearly as easily as a rose which is front and center. Conferences charge more for the booth in the front. Ever buy seats on the 50 yard line? I bet they didn’t cost the same as the nose-bleed section.

Having that front and center domain name has a similar effect. If it is something that is typed a lot (like .com), then Shirley is required to remember less. The less that Shirley needs to store in her brain, the more likely it is that she will be able to type that into her computer later that night.

I’m not all that keen on the .mobi addresses either, since your website can distinguish between the devices that are looking at it and switch the CSS dynamically to match.

The biggest exception to .com addresses are ones that are still unique. The .tv, .ws, and .ly can attract the attention because they are not as widely used yet. If you are displaying video and you use .tv, then you are not only making sense to the surfer, but also using a name that isn’t all that common yet (yet… being the big kicker today).

Dot Com (.com) is still the most traveled path and therefore takes center stage. Either go for the center path or create a side path that is so memorable, that you can draw traffic away from the path and down to you.

If your rose can’t be found, then does it really matter how sweet it smells?

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

What Is That Smell?

Filed Under: Getting Started Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Marketing Optimization: How your peers overcome leaks in their sales and lead generation funnels

June 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

511644410 898c1d29f9 300x300 Marketing Optimization: How your peers overcome leaks in their sales and lead generation funnelsIt’s easy to focus on one aspect of your marketing and lose sight of the big picture. So in Wednesday’s free web clinic – Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold – Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS Group, will help you find the leaks in your sales or lead generation funnel and share three key steps for holistic marketing optimization.

In the meantime, here is our latest community-written blog post to help you understand how your peers deal with optimizing their entire conversion funnel during the customer/client acquisition period…

There’s no simple answer

In a former life I worked in computerized irrigation – a lot of plants, a lot of pipes and a lot of leaks.

The only way to find the leaks was to manually walk up and down each row looking for pooled water on the ground.

The same applies to leaks in the funnel. The only way is to use something like Urchin or Analytics and find the “black-hole pages” – pages traffic goes into never to be seen again. Concentrate on the pages with good volumes of traffic and plug those leaks!

– Dave Collins, Founder & Managing Director of SoftwarePromotions

If your oil funnel had a leak, you’d be sure to replace it

The sales cycle certainly calls for a consistent, quality funnel which has just the right amount of viscosity and throughput.

I believe that it really goes back to the age old question of “How do we integrate marketing and sales?”.

When this question comes up within a company, red flags fly through the roof. It’s a shame because we’re not territorial animals. We’re civilized human beings who should solely be focused on what’s best for our company – because this attitude will ultimately help you achieve more.

Sales and Marketing should align their policies so that quality information is passed from the point of initial contact – inbound or outbound – through the sales cycle. Nurturing is the key fluid in keeping the motor up and running. Having the tools to manage the data is great but it’s human intelligence that ultimately drives nurturing and sales.

People buy from people, not from software or companies. Optimizing the quality of your staff and providing them with tools to better manage and view their data is what companies need to improve lead generation and sales.

For example, landing pages should have some form of unique ID or should be interconnected to CRM so that when related information is recognized, it’s automatically tracked as a touch point. Capture forms should be simple and brief for initial contacts and get more detailed as prospects choose to dig deeper.

– Jason Croyle, Lead Generation Specialist and Social Media Evangelist at InTouch

Connect PPC ads to landing pages to capture forms to lead generation and sales

I deal mainly with Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and AdWords, so my example will be within that frame.

  1. First, connect Google Analytics and AdWords (To track ROI on a variety of ads and keywords.)
  2. All buttons on landing page are tracked using the _trackEvent method. (This will help you determine what buttons/ call-to-actions on your landing pages are receiving the most awareness.)
    1. Buttons on landing page are also tracked using Google Website Optimizer so that we can provide multiple variations of buttons, content, and call-to-actions on landing page.
  3. Combining steps 1 and 2 will allow us to determine what steps, content, ads and call-to-actions work best not only on a micro level, but on a “holistic” level – all together.

– Omar Ead, Director at Digitus Marketing

One at a time

Short answer: fix one phase/step at a time. You truly will not know where your fallout point is until you’ve fixed the phases above it. It’s quite easy and inexpensive to test various elements; see what works best to set a baseline. Then move on to the next step in the process and repeat.

I tend to spend a good amount of time building the optimization roadmap before I start tweaking and testing.

– Nick Rice, Regional Manager of Field Marketing at McCann Erickson

Related Resources

Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold

Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?

The Compounding Effect of Micro-Gains: How small performance increases in PPC, landing page conversions, completed sales, and more combine to deliver big improvements in revenue.

Photo Attribution: vrogy

Marketing Optimization: How your peers overcome leaks in their sales and lead generation funnels

Filed Under: Marketing, Marketing Insights, Social Media Tagged With:

Eight Questions To Ask Before You Start A Business

June 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

start Eight Questions To Ask Before You Start A Business

Are you thinking of starting a web business? Starting a PPC Management agency? Setting up your own site and selling things, or building a web publishing empire?

Before you start, ask yourself the following eight questions. The advantage of this Q&A is that you can quickly see if the idea you’re going to throw your money and soul into is likely to work.

1 . What Do You Do?

Define what service the business provides. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. They may well have a wide range of skills, but resources spread too thinly often leads to failure.

Try to focus.

McDonalds could, no doubt, provide up-market meals, but they focus on selling quick, cheap food.

That is what they do.

2. Who Do You Do It For?

Who are your customers?

Create a mental image of your typical customer. Make a note of their income levels, and particularly their “itch” i.e. that problem they really need solving, and will gladly pay money for you to solve.

3. What Makes You Different?

What is your unique selling proposition?

If your customers can buy the same services for less elsewhere, or more easily, they will. Your customers will compare you against others. What is that one thing you can do, that offers considerable value, that no-one else can do? What makes you special? What makes you remarkable?

There is a tendency to model yourself on others. To copy existing models. Try to avoid doing so. The people who come up with these models are probably already onto the next stage i.e. refining their service, changing direction, heading somewhere else. You’ll always be the person in their rear-view mirror, one step behind. Why be Bing when you can be Google? icon smile Eight Questions To Ask Before You Start A Business

This is not to say doing something wildly new or different is any guarantee of success. One winning strategy is to take a successful business model, and twist it a little. You have the ready-acceptance of a proven model (safe), and the opportunity to talk about something a little new (interesting). For example, Steve Jobs did not invent the PDA, but he put a new twist on it in the form of the iPhone. He took something that most people were already familiar with (safe) and made it more approachable (interesting).

4. Do You Know What Cashflow Is?

This point is so important, it really should be number one. Cashflow is the movement of cash into or out of a business. It sounds like the dullest thing in the world, and many budding entrepreneurs overlook it, but it is the one thing most likely to kill your business.

Businesses may have great ideas. They have customers signed up. They execute well. They’ve even sent the bills out. Growth is happening, and all is well with the world.

Then the bank manager calls.

The overdraft has hit its limit and you can’t meet payroll this week. You can’t make rent. At this point, you’ve out of runway.

Running out of cash stops you dead and makes you utterly vulnerable. Address cashflow from the start. How much capital will you need? How much overdraft will you need? How long will it be before client money appears – cleared – into your bank account? How much do you need to operate each week?

There is no fooling cashflow. The score of any business is the bank account balance.

5. What Employees Do You Need?

Will you be doing all the work yourself? If you’re doing the work yourself, when will you have time to sell new work? Should you be wasting time doing menial clerical tasks?

Consider outsourcing all non-core tasks. Whilst you may be able to do everything, often it doesn’t make sense to do anything other than the things that bring you the most money.

6. How Will You Manage Customers?

Keeping existing customers is a lot cheaper than finding new ones. How will you manage your customer relationships? How will you structure your activities to ensure repeat business? Do you have a process whereby you can find out customers wants and needs?

Create a process that allows you to adapt to your customers.

7. What Are Your Goals?

Set company goals. Set personal goals. How much do you need to earn, and in what time frame? How will you exit your business? Who will you sell to?

Use the SMART system when setting goals. Using the smart system, goals must be:

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Realistic
T = Timely

For example, a goal might be “to gain 20 new customers in one year”. The specific, measurable nature of the goal means your planning will be more effective. Specific goals beg questions i.e. “Where will I find 20 new customers”? and lead to specific actions.

Failure to be specific results in vague goals such as “to operate a successful business” or “to be happy”. It’s difficult to decide on actions that will lead to such goals.

8. Do You Really Want To Run Your Own Business?

Having gone through these questions, you’re may be a) raring to go or b) feeling a little overwhelmed.

Ask yourself why you want to be in business for yourself? It’s more work than being a staffer, there is more risk involved, the money is non-existent to start with, you swap one boss for many bosses, and each new contract becomes a job interview.

On the plus side, it is enormously satisfying, you are responsible for your own destiny, and all benefits return to you.

Taking one hour to consider these questions can save you a lot of time, money and grief if you jump in unprepared.

Jump in. With due consideration icon smile Eight Questions To Ask Before You Start A Business

Those who have made it through your first year of business, what things do you wished you’d considered before you took the plunge?

Filed Under: News Tagged With:

AT&T DataPro Plan Now Allows iPhone Tethering Using iOS4

June 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

ios4 datapro data plan AT&T DataPro Plan Now Allows iPhone Tethering Using iOS4

You’re at the big conference in Las Vegas. The hotel wants your first born to access the Internet and you want to use your laptop to make an update to your business website. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could connect your laptop to the Internet using your iPhone?

Well, with the iPhone iOS4 release, Apple officially included tethering as part of the core features for the iPhone. Now you can connect your iPhone to your laptop and use it as a modem to connect to the Internet. There’s only one catch though. You have to give up your iPhone unlimited data plan and for the AT&T DataPro Plan.

Watch this video for more details on the iOS4 DataPro plan requirement for iPhone tethering

The DataPro plan gives you 2GB of data transfer per month, which equates to a good amount of usage. It’s definitely enough for online entrepreneurs to stay connected and get business done while away from WiFi. If you go over your 2GB limit during the month, AT&T will automatically charge you $10 for each additional GB of transfer that you use.

For a lot of unlimited plan owners, switching to a 2GB data plan might feel like you are giving up a lot, but the reality is that carriers are pulling back on the unlimited access as more and more smartphone users join the network. So even if you don’t make the switch today, there is a good chance that your grandfathered data plan will go away when you renew your contract or make some other type of change that reboots the terms of your contract.

Since I office from my laptop and I use the Internet on my iPhone a lot, I wanted to know how much data do I use monthly. I found that I could run a historical data usage report inside my AT&T wireless account. What I discovered was that for the last eight months, I’ve only hit 480 mb once and the rest of the time data usage was between 100 to 300 mb.

So, you could say that I’m only using about a quarter of a 2GB plan to access email, download apps, research websites, communicate using social media, watch video, and access other bits of data. So, I wouldn’t be giving up a whole lot by switching to the DataPro plan.

To give you an idea of what 2GB of data transfer will give you in a month, AT&T has provided a data plan calculator that shows how many emails, web pages, apps, videos, and audios you can access using the DataPro plan. If their preset values don’t match your usage, you can adjust the sliders to match your monthly needs and see where you might come out on the scale.

Overall, if you use your laptop for business and you need an Internet connection on the road, then this is an option that will get you connected without having to find a WiFi hotspot.

What about you? Would you give up an unlimited data plan for a 2GB plan just so you could use the iPhone iOS4 for tethering? Leave me a comment below and tell me what you think about the situation.

Always connected,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

AT&T DataPro Plan Now Allows iPhone Tethering Using iOS4

Filed Under: Getting Started Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Share Visitor Traffic By Creating A Related Content Community

June 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

nrelate oliver wellington interview Share Visitor Traffic By Creating A Related Content Community

Oliver Wellington from nRelate recently contacted us about a new WordPress plugin that nRelate is developing to help bloggers add value to their existing content and potentially make some money in the process.

Oliver also wanted to know if we would help spread the word about their beta testing program. So we decided to set up and record a conference call with him so he could tell us all about the new related content plugin and give more detail about their beta testing program.

The video and transcript of the call are provided below for you. If you have any questions about the program, be sure to visit the nRelate website for more details.

Can’t see the video? Watch it here.

Charles:
Alright, well welcome back to another Open Source Marketer interview. Open Source Marketer, of course, is your source for information about how to build and market your business online using open source tools.

I’m Charles McKeever and here to help me grill our guest is Toff, aka Christopher Ward. So, today we’re going to be talking with Oliver Wellington from NRelate.com about their beta test program for a new WordPress plugin that suppose to increase the value of your content and potentially help you make some money.

But, before we get in to that I need to give you a little bit of background information about nRelate and Oliver. Basically nRelate is a related content company and their software enables web publishers, including both bloggers and large media sites, to enrich their site content and to increase their relevance to their audience.

Basically they build tools and plugins that let publishers integrate content from their content archives, content of their partners, and even the entire blogosphere which provides better context to their online content. So, overall nRelate’s goal is to help publishers and bloggers get the most out of the articles they are already publishing, which comes back to increasing their content, page views, and the length of visits on the site.

Oliver Wellington, who’s waiting in the wings here to share a good bit of information with us, he started his online career in music. He used social networking sites to promote his band in the early days of MySpace and Pure Volume.

Then, like most struggling artists, he worked for a music management company and produced music videos for a New York film startup. He has his MBA from Babson College. His program focused primarily on entrepreneurship. He joined nRelate last September and he’s been working with the founder to help grow the company.

These days his time is focused on building the blogger community for nRelate along with business development for the company. Today, Oliver’s going to tell us about a new WordPress plugin that nRelate’s developing to help blogger’s provide more value to their readers and hopefully make some money along the way.

So, Oliver I want to thank you for taking out some time to spend with us today.

Oliver:
Yeah, thanks for having me guys.

Charles:
No problem. Now as another piece of background information, Oliver contacted me through our Meetup group and he was looking for a way to get the word our about these plugins that they have and what they’re trying to do with their beta test program. So rather than trying to put together some kind of announcement, I said why don’t we just put you on a call and let you explain it.

So you said nRelate is a “related content” company. So, what exactly does nRelate do?

Oliver:
Basically what we do is index a large portion of the relevant new web, or about 6 million sites. Once we get them in to our index, we basically created a bunch of different products that will allow content to related to other pieces of content on the web. The main thing we are working on right now is a related content widget. So, say a large New York publisher wants to display links to older content, or even if they are publishing a lot next to related articles, it will show up 5 to 10 links to other pieces of content that they’re written from their own site on a given article. If they have partner sites they want to link out to, we can also provide related articles from that. So, the basic thing we do is display related links that allows readers to stay on their site longer, maybe kind of browse through content around a particular topic or story a little more freely than having to search through Google or using the internal site search and that kind of stuff.

Charles:
So when you say related content, does it actually put links in the content, or is just links that are below the article maybe.

Oliver:
Well, actually what we are talking about now is there will be a small box at the bottom of the article or sometimes in the middle of the content. It will say something like “related articles” or “you may also like” or “similar articles”. Then we’ll populate that box with a list of closely related articles. And then we do do some internal linking stuff with customers, which we’ll link relevant keywords to a site search or related articles, or topics pages and that sort of thing. But, generally speaking, for what we are talking about now, it’s located in a separate box and now inside the content itself.

Toff:
So, let’s break it down to a concrete example. For instance, if I’m running a blog for smart energy ideas where I talk about energy efficiency, ways to save, or conserve energy and let’s say I’m talking about solar panels and I write an article on a brand new solar panel. How would nRelate add to, change, or augment something I did on that blog.

Oliver:
So basically, if you want to link to articles that you have written previously. So say you write about alternative energy in general and you write about solar panel and say you also write about wind energy. We need to ingest your entire post, all your content basically, into our engine and then we show you links. Say you are writing, as you said, about solar energy. We show you links that are from another articles you choose. People usually choose between 5 and 10 at the most. So say you had five other articles that you’ve written in your archive, then we could surface those up and you would see links to those alongside in a small box beneath your post.

Toff:
Would you be linking to anybody else’s content, or just my own?

Oliver:
It depends. We started out telling publishers you can link to anyone you want and you can link to the entire blogosphere. But, we’ve found that most people want their visitors to stay on their own site and they are hesitant to link out as much. But, we can set up whitelist lists for people. If they have five or six partners who are also writing about solar energy, we can display content from there. We also go for the full range of available new sources and just link out to any number of sites.

Charles:
Okay.

Toff:
Very nice.

Charles:
Yeah. Okay, there is a revenue element to this, so how exactly does that work?

Oliver:
With the plugin?

Charles:
Yeah.

Oliver:
The one aspect is basically what I’ve been mentioning. Basically, just having the related links gets the reader reading about a particular topic and if they want to learn more, they will probably go straight to Google, but if you show them another related article that you’ve written then you will increase your pageviews and that will help to increase your rates that you get from your own advertising, if you have impression ads on your site.

And then another way is, we are also working with some ad partners who are allowing people to display advertising in the plugin underneath the related links. That’s something we are working on to improve and help bloggers to make some extra money from the space on their site by showing related content. Only if they choose to, of course.

Charles:
Was there an option for the plugin to allow you to add your own advertising. Was that something that I saw?

Oliver:
That is something we are working on. We just released this last week and that’s actually a question a blogger asked. What if I have my own ad code, can I put it in. Our attitude is, yeah it’s your blog, so we are going to work to release that in one of the next releases in the next couple of weeks. Because, we want people to try our plugin and use it. We also want them to be able to use the advertising we are providing, but if they want to use their own, we want them to be able to do that as well.

Charles:
Okay, so basically, to recap we have the related article plugin. Obviously there are some of those out there, but what yours does in addition to that is not only pull related articles from your own site, but it can also pull articles from partner site and it can pull from the blogosphere at large. You can pull from news source, you can pull from other blogs, you can pull from what ever, but you’re basically linking out to related content on these other sites. And, if you wanted to, you will be able to put in your own ads or you can choose to participate in your ad network that you guys are running at nRelate.

Oliver:
Yeah, right now I’d have to say on the bare bones version we have right now, specifying a network of sites to link out to, we don’t have in yet. But that should be in the next week or two. But, yeah you nailed all the features that we’ll be adding in the next couple of weeks. That pretty much sums it up.

Charles:
Okay, so tell me, what type of publishers use your existing products right now.

Oliver:
Right now we basically work with a financial blog that does pretty decent traffic in New York. We are working with them to deliver related content and we are working on a few new products that should be coming out in the next couple of weeks. We’re also being demo’d live on a pretty large newspaper in New York, The New York Daily News. So, in terms of scale you can see a financial blog with a solid following up to a large media site. And then we also we also do some other products for some other sites. We do data aggregation products as well for a couple of other sites that have profile on companies. Basically they have between 20 to 30K profiles for companies, so for each company we provide a news feed.

Charles:
Okay, so would you characterize these as larger media outfits?

Oliver:
Yeah. Well, technically the financial site is a blog. It’s only a handful of people working on it, but it’s not like an individual blogger going out. They are doing it as their full time job. We have been trying to work with bloggers and being that we are a start up, we’ve taken the last couple of months to get to the point where we are ready to start releasing some of our software to bloggers in an easily digestible form.

Charles:
So, is that kind of why now you are approaching the blogger space, is that it?

Oliver:
Yeah basically.

Charles:
I know you have had mentioned specifically building your blogger community.

Oliver:
Yeah, we got in to this space in general because we think the relevancy of the content results we produce is better than the other offerings and we see what other companies are offering to bloggers for related post plugins and we noticed a lot them will put ads on them, but they don’t necessarily share money back with bloggers. So that’s a space we want to get in and give bloggers the best related post software they can and also help us to get our name out a bit more as well.

Charles:
So you mentioned the revenue sharing piece of that, so is that something that is collected by nRelate and then paid back to the bloggers. Is it like an ad network. How does that work?

Oliver:
Basically, right now we are working with a few different ad networks and some affiliate programs, so we are setting that up so it will be through us. We will give each blogger who is of legal age and all that a code allowing them to join the ad community we are building and then we share back revenues to them based on what they choose to put on their site and what the payments are.

Charles:
So someone could join the beta program, install the WordPress plugin, and then not have to do anything else part from their regular operations as far as producing content and things like that.

Oliver:
Yes.

Charles:
Great. They wouldn’t have to fuss with any kind of going out and sourcing ads or starting up affiliate accounts, or managing creatives or stuff like that?

Oliver:
Yeah, basically the way it’s set up it’s just checking a few boxes and then an ad shows up and then if you don’t like it you can just uncheck the boxes and then the ads don’t show up.

Charles:
Okay, as far as set up and things like that, what kind of setup are we talking? Most plugins are just uploaded and activated. Are there settings that have to go into it, you talked about having to have a code?

Oliver:
It’s pretty simple to upload. I’m not actually one of the coders on the team. I pretty good with technical stuff. I’m not by any means at the level that you guys are or most of the other team are, but I can set up this plugin in less than three minutes. It’s as simple as downloading the plugin file and then using the WordPress plugin upload process. It’s pretty quick, and then it’s also quick to delete it if you don’t like it. Just in terms of trying it out, it’s a pretty simple thing.

Charles:
We’re all about open source around here, so is it open source, or closed source, or how does that work?

Oliver:
Basically, the way it works now, the code we have for the widget itself, we are fine with it being open source. The code that actually is going to figure our the results to put in the box is still proprietary. But, as things change, I talked with the founders in charge of tech and he’s going to start releasing some of that as well. But, I don’t know exactly when.

Charles:
Okay, but from the blogger’s perspective, they can get in and tweak the widget if they want and style it to look like their site and things like that?

Oliver:
Oh yeah, definitely. All that stuff is acceptable and encouraged.

Charles:
For most bloggers, it’s less of a property rights issue. It’s more of, my site is blue and that’s orange, I don’t like it. Ha ha.

Toff:
It’s a, “I want to do what I want to do”.

Charles:
Yeah, so I don’t think anybody’s looking to take over somebody else’s stuff. It’s just a matter of if I’m going to integrate it, how does it work and how can I get to it.

Toff:
Along those same lines, can you tell us a little bit about your beta test program?

Oliver:
Right now, basically we’ve got the first iteration of our widget ready. So what we are doing for the first group of people who are going to be beta testing, what they need to do is email me, or go to the website and fill out a form. Basically, I’ll send them back a code and then they install the widget and test it. For the first group of people, we are going to let them keep 100% of revenue that the widget generates for as long as they use it.

Toff:
Very nice.

Oliver:
You know beta testing involves a little bit, we want feedback. People don’t have to give feedback, but we would like to thank the people who do and even the people don’t by just sharing everything.

Charles:
Okay, so you’re truly beta testing. Your not Google beta testing for like 10 years. Your really going to be making improvements and taking feedback.

Oliver:
Yeah, for example, the version we have right now is pretty bare bones, but I’d say in the next week or week and a half. Being in software development, maybe I should just go ahead and say two full weeks. We’ll be including, people will be able to have thumbnails in their results. They’ll be able to specify, as I said before, other sites they want to display related content from. So, I mean we are going to be adding things. So the goal on this is to…we want to beta test as long as we have to until we get to the point where we are comfortable listing the plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. That will signify us being out of the beta testing period.

Toff:
Now, along those same lines again. For the beta program, is this for WordPress users only, or any blogger, or what do you have going?

Oliver:
Well, right now basically we’re focusing on WordPress and we’ve been working with a guy who organizes the New York WordPress Meetup and also has a development company called SlipFire, a great guy named Steve Bruner. He’s been working on this with us and he’s all about WordPress. I personally like WordPress and the more hard coding guys our team likes WordPress. So, we are kind of focusing on WordPress so we don’t do everything at once. But, if there is interest in other platforms then it doesn’t take us to long to customize for those as well.

Toff:
I’m definitely a WordPress person, so that’s not an issue for me.

Oliver:
Yeah, I love WordPress.

Charles:
That’s a great choice really. There are so many of them out there.

Oliver:
Yeah, I mean for me when I first went through setting up a website, I went through cPanel and stuff like that, but it was the only thing out there that was that simple and you could still customize pretty descent amount by just reading some forums. So, I think it’s a great platform.

Charles:
So basically what I hear is that you have a beta test program that people can use to put related listings on their site and you have a revenue model right now that shares back 100% of whatever comes in the door, as far as advertising revenue, and you’re actually actively asking for people’s feedback. So if some were to actually give a suggestion, there’s a pretty good chance that it would be implemented.

Oliver:
Yeah, as long as you all agree that it’s something reasonable. The suggestion for bloggers to include their own ad code, we presented at a meetup and someone got up and said they would want to include their own ad code. That’s a good idea. It’s not like we are trying to shut out everything, we just didn’t think of it.

Charles:
Yeah, obviously not every suggestion can be implemented. But, I’ve seen some beta programs where you feel like you’re on the outside where you feel like you don’t get a voice, but I’ve seen others where the program is very responsive and you can see the progress unfold. It sounds like that’s what you guys are after, being able to have an active conversation with the blogging community.

Oliver:
Yeah definitely. People who write in and email will get a response in a timely fashion and I think a lot of people will actually see their suggestions come to fuition.

Charles:
According to the nRelate website, you said you’re “developing an entire suite of blogger widgets”, I’m quoting here. “That will help you increase your revenues on your blog as well a unique visit and allowing you to define your own content sharing communities.” Tell me about that. What’s up with that?

Oliver:
Okay, in terms of having the revenue it’s basically around the different types of advertising that can be placed in the plugin. Sharing back is one way to help people to increase their revenue. Also, in terms of the content sharing communities, if you can imagine for example, that right now people have their blogrolls. That’s pretty cool I guess, but what we can do with out software is wouldn’t it be cool if you could display content from authors on your blogroll. Instead of just sharing links you’re actually sharing links to timely articles that are related to things your also writing about. So we help people band together in that way. So that’s what we mean about the content sharing stuff. So in terms of the next thing that we will be tackling after we get this thing down, we will be doing a very good internal site search. But that’s probably for a different discussion.

Charles:
Well you know, now the content sharing communities begins to make sense, because there are lots of bloggers who keep in touch with each other behind the scenes. They kinda keep in touch with each other and when they tweet something and say hey I just posted this article, will you retweet it and things like that. It makes sense that these are informal partnerships, where there’s an unwritten rule when you build up credibility so that people will tweet something about you later. So why not tie your content together loosely in a way that allows you to share those visitors. We can’t be all things to all people but we can join together to provide as much value as possible and keep people in our network as much as possible.

Oliver:
Yeah, that’s the thinking behind that aspect.

Charles:
That being said, will the plugins help with getting unique visitors? You had mentioned something about bringing in unique visitors, so can you talk a little about that.

Oliver:
Yeah, for this first version, I can say right now if it’s only internal, it’s not going to help you with your unique visits. It’s only going to help you with your pageviews. But once you allow people to link out and share content across blogs, I think of it as an evolution of link sharing. That just done in many ways to help drive traffic between sites and creates uniques across a network of sites.

Charles:
Gottcha. Again, it’s a traffic sharing mechanism.

I know this isn’t necessarily the plugin your releasing under the beta program, but I noticed under your other products that you had on the nRelate site, you had a popup search box, popup related content, and things like that. Are you going to roll out those plugins as well?

Oliver:
If there is enough demand for those types of things we would be happy to make a WordPress version of them. It’s not that much work. It’s just being a small company, we only have so much bandwidth. That’s basically a place where we could draw ideas from for future things.

I really want to try and creatively figure out with bloggers if there is anything based on the things you just mentioned, if there are things we can put together for them.

Charles:
Okay, that’s definitely interesting. Toff, did you have any questions that you wanted to ask.

Toff:
No, I’m ready to go sign up.

Charles:
Yeah, I’m very interested in the community aspect of things. Being able to hook related sites together. You could just as easily pull in links from other news sources and things like that but what if you had three related sites and you wanted to share traffic across those three sites. Maybe one of your sites is killing it with the keywords, but the other two are just feeder sites. As long as the content is unique across each site, there’s not reason to loose that traffic to something else.

Is there anything Oliver that you want to leave us with.

Oliver:
Basically, I just want to say thanks for having me. If people want to sign up the can email me at blogger @ nrelate.com or visit the website, nRelate.com/blog.php and also I set up a small forum at nRelate.com/forum. So those basically the three ways to get in touch and I want to say thanks again for having me.

Charles:
Well hey thanks for taking the time out to share the program with us. I appreciate you reaching out and contacting us.

That’s it for the interview. Now, go check out the nRelate plugin and then tell us what you think about the plugin and the experience of beta testing a new product.

Beta testing everything,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

Share Visitor Traffic By Creating A Related Content Community

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