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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%

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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:

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:

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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Project Management Tips For PPC

June 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

projectman Project Management Tips For PPC

Whether we work for ourselves, or we work as part of a bigger business, we should always be accountable for what we do. Clients, bosses, and bank managers will always want to see us demonstrate that we are working steadily towards achieving goals.

Project management has become a specialized task in it’s own right. Dedicated project managers delegate tasks, ensure people complete those tasks, and generally keep projects on track. However, project management should permeate all we do. We’re all project managers, especially those of us involved in long and complex tasks, like PPC campaigns.

The principles of project management are simple. A complex task is broken down into a series of manageable, measureable steps leading to a desired outcome, achieved in an acceptable timeframe. If we manage ourselves – or others – well, we free up time, and save ourselves a lot of grief.

Here’s how to manage a PPC project:

Define The Outcome

Whether you’re dealing with a client, or undertaking your own project, you have to know exactly what you’re aiming to achieve.

Write the objective down down, as clearly and succinctly as possible. If a client is vague about outcomes, it’s best to push them to get clarity at this point. Once a project is underway, it becomes difficult – and time consuming – to change course.

Define The Process That Delivers The Outcome

Once you have an outcome – a destination – defined, you should now plot a high-level course showing how you’ll get there. If the project is short i.e. a day or two, then your don’t really need to define a process. However, if the project takes a while – and most PPC campaigns do – then a process becomes important, because the client will want to see you demonstrate that progress is being made.

The benefits of having a clearly-defined process is that it shows the client what is involved, and when things are likely to happen. It reassures the client that things will happen in an orderly, accountable fashion i.e. there is less chance of being surprised, and that the client is in control of the process.

For example, a PPC process might look like this:

  • Establish and define objectives
  • Create written reporting plan, setting out milestones. Client to approve reporting plan and milestones.
  • Report on each milestone. Client to review and provide feedback at each stage.
  • Deliver final milestone. Provide final project report.
  • Sign off

Break The Project Down Into Steps

Climbing a mountain begins with a single step. And then another. And then another. Eventually, we’ve scaled the mountain.

Likewise, a project is made less intimidating if broken down into a series of small steps. The client doesn’t need to know each technical step. However, the steps lead to each milestone.

The benefits are two-fold. One, a complex task becomes a lot more manageable. Two, reporting is built into the process. Clients almost always appreciate progress reports, which also provides you with an opportunity to seek valuable feedback and clarification.

Say What You’ll Do, Do It, And Tell Them You’ve Done It

If you do what you say you’ll do, even if it’s a small thing, you will build trust.

Sometimes, it’s easy to think that because you know what you’re doing, that the client will automatically perceive it. This isn’t necessarily so. Demonstrating competence, at regular intervals, is often required in order to build trust.

Integrate Feedback

No matter how well we plan at the early stages, there will always be tweaks and adjustments that need to be made.

By integrating multiple opportunities for feedback, we can also alter and add steps we may have missed, or didn’t define clearly enough.

Focus On The Next Step

After the first step, comes the next step, and so on. At each stage, we keep the client informed, integrating feedback, redefining and adding tasks as necessary. Each stage leads us closer to our goal, and everyone is clear about what needs to be done, and what the outcome will be.

Repeat

Repeat the steps/reporting/integrating process until the desired outcome is achieved.

Tips:

Consider making the first milestones easy-wins, especially if the client is new. This helps create trust, which may be needed if other milestones become difficult.

Make a note of which tasks require other people, and get buy-in from them as soon as is practicable. In many ways, other workers are like clients in that they benefit from feeling they have an element of control.

The more complex a project – especially projects that require multiple people to hit time targets before others can start – the more useful project management software becomes, however a lot of project management software is simply overkill for PPC.

No surprises – for anyone icon smile Project Management Tips For PPC

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Should You Outsource PPC?

June 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

outsourceppc Should You Outsource PPC?

Should you hire an external PPC consultant? Or can you do the job better and/or cheaper inhouse?

Large companies – companies with over 1,000 people – typically have less need to outsource than smaller companies. Existing in-house teams can often adapt in order to provide extra services, with a little extra training required. Smaller companies typically benefit the most from outsourcing, as the overheads for each added employee can be considerable. However, the decision whether to outsource really comes down to a cost benefit analysis, regardless of size.

Which option would suit your company best? Let’s take a look at the issues.

PPC Outsourcing:

Consider the following:

Data security – PPC data is valuable. If your business is driven by marketing, particularly internet marketing, then how comfortable are you with this data being in the hands of a third-party?

Control – If the internet marketing function brings in a significant chunk of your business, then your choice of partner is critical. For some, the risk cost will simply be too high.

Incentives – ensure that the performance incentives are appropriate. For example, some PPC agencies bill a percentage of spend. The problem with this model is that it encourages high bidding for clicks, which are only ever likely to increase. The incetives should align with your business case. Be sure to implement a means of tracking PPC traffic to measurable business goals.

Low Spend – small campaigns are relatively straightforward to manage in house if you have existing marketing resource i.e. spending in the thousands per month. The function is typically a part time role, and the time cost can be minimized further by using third-party semi-automated campaign management software and tools.

A PPC agency starts to make sense when the monthy spend is in the tens of thousands and higher, as such campaigns can quickly become complex and/or can be regularly optimized to drive down total campaign cost. We’re talking about good PPC agencies, of course. There are plenty of lousy ones. Which brings us onto…

Management Overhead – third party suppliers need to be managed. They need to have objectives set. They need to report on a regular basis. Performance needs to be monitored. This is also true of inhouse PPC management, of course, however the proximity of an inhouse employee, and the fact they’re engrained in the culture and process, often makes this function easier.

Business Knowledge – any marketing function needs to be closely aligned with business goals. Tyically, PPC managers work on multiple accounts and have a tendancy to focus on numbers, as opposed to wider company objectives. This remoteness can make external consultants less effective than someone who lives and breathes your business and culture each day.

PPC Inhouse

Expertise – PPC management is specialized and ever changing. This requires on-going training and adaptable employees who can wear hats of both marketing and technical expertise simultaneously. PPC agencies are specifically geared for this task.

Lack Of Resource – PPC takes time, and your existing employess may not have it. PPC invariably grows more and more complex, especially if the return on investment grows. Whilst it’s easy to manage basic campaigns – low budget/low numbers of keyword terms – it can become time consuming to manage large campaigns. PPC agencies use economies of scale and specialized tools that may not be readily available elsewhere.

Poor Results – If you’re new to PPC, then you may not have adequate benchmarks to quantify performance. An external agency may have years of experience in your market sector, and be able to provide a wealth of market data.

High Costs – not only is there the cost of hiring extra staff, there is the opportunity cost of having that staff not focus on something else. Obviously each businesses cost structure is unique, but generally the bigger the PPC spend, the more value you’ll get from outsourcing to a good agency.

Summary

Consider inhouse PPC if:

  • You require high levels marketing/business integration.
  • The function can readily be absorbed using available staff and management resources
  • The level of complexity is manageable. Typically, campaigns in the tens of thousands per month featuring thousands of keywords are best managed by a dedicated specialist.

Consider Outsourcing PPC if:

  • You have a high level of spend i.e. in the tens of thousands per month and above
  • You don’t have readily available resources
  • The PPC function is not a mission critical part of your marketing mix.
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How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

June 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Open Source Marketer recently had the wonderful opportunity to interview Eric Nash, Director of Online Marketing for Stamps.com. This was a great interview that allowed us to discover all the benefits of their service and get a good idea of who would best be served by printing their own online postage.

We recorded and transcribed the whole interview, so you can watch, listen, or read all of the good information.

Enjoy!

Charles & Toff
OpenSourceMarketer.com

How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

Interview Transcript

Charles: Like I said, tonight our special guest is Eric Nash. Eric is the Director of Online Marketing for Stamps.com. He’s been with them since 2006 and he’s been involved in online marketing for the past 11 years. He is a veteran in the online marketing space.

At Stamps.com his attention is focused primarily on customer acquisition and he’s responsibilities include paid search, SEO, affiliate marketing, display advertising and social media.

So he’s going to have a good bit that he can share with us tonight about the stamps.com program and about how as an affiliate you can promote some of the offers they have.

So, Eric thank you for being on the call with us tonight.

Please visit website to view premium content

Eric: Hey thank you for having us Charles.

Charles: I really appreciate you taking time out to spend with us.

Eric and I met at EBay on Location Dallas last month and I was very interested in what he had to say and how Stamps.com was going the extra mile to make things easier for people who are shipping products online.

I like to say that they are manufacturing time. We can’t get lost time back. It’s one of those things that we can spend, but can’t earn.

So Eric, we really appreciate you being on the call with us.

Eric: Yeah, we’re looking forward to it. I can’t agree with you more about small businesses who spend a lot of time and wear different hats. Hopefully our software is a great option to them to save time and hopefully save money.

Charles: So you talk about Stamps.com being software. I’ve been to the Stamps.com website, tell us a little about how Stamps.com is different compared to the post office.

Eric: Absolutely, so Stamps.com is online postage software. It brings all the services that the post office has right on to your PC.

You can print all the different types of mail classes. You can print them using your existing printer. You can print them on to an envelope, on to a regular sheet of paper, such as a shipping label and attach it to the package or even onto an adhesive label that you can attach to the package.

Anything from postcards, to packages, to newsletters where you can print it out from your own PC, it’s a huge time saver.

Once you print it, we have features in the software that allow you to set up a carrier pick up so you can have a postal service employee come and pick up a package if you’re sending a bunch of them out.

Or, once you print it you can drop it in a regular mailbox or give it to your letter carrier.

One huge benefit the USPS has compared to everyone else is that they are usually dropping mail off usually to every business every day. So as you print your postage you can give it right to the letter carrier and let them take it back with them.

Really what it does is eliminate the need to go to the post office and wait in those lengthy lines.

Certainly everyone’s aware of USPS’s financial problems over the last year or so and they’re talking about closing post offices and closing more of them in the next few year. So, those lines will probably only be getting longer.

So, our service really helps you eliminate the time consumption that happens when you’re driving to a post office as well as standing in line or waiting in line there.

Charles: Okay, so really your printing official postage then?

Eric: Absolutely, we operate under a license from the USPS. We aren’t the actual postal service. We are a public company that was started way back in 1996 when the Internet boom started.

We were actually the first PC postage provider that was approved by the USPS. They often will call online postage “PC postage”.

We currently have 400,000 paid subscribers. Many of them have been with us for many years and that covers both regular small offices who are just using our service to print letters and print certified mail or special services like that.

About forty thousand of our customers are ecommerce shippers that are actually shipping packages and using priority mail, express mail, or even media mail or parcel post some of all the different mail classes that are there.

Charles: Okay, that is a lot of people using PC postage as you said. What would be the target consumers for Stamps.com? Are they just in for the business class or what are they looking at?

Eric: You know, for the most part we target small businesses, really anybody who has 20 employees or less. But we do have a lot of consumer cross over. Sometimes people who are living in rural areas where the post offices are quite a ways away, they use the service quite a bit. Obviously people who are tech savvy and are sending lots of mail out and they’re sick of waiting in line, they use our service.

We also have a chunk of people, who are elderly people who are sending lots packages to grand kids or family members and have to go to the post office a lot, but they aren’t necessarily a business, they’ll use our service too.

But the bulk of our customers are a small business that are looking for a better way to print postage. They don’t want to get a postage meter and pay the high cost of leasing a postage meter and they’re sick of driving to the post office to drop off their packages or their mail or even buying stamps at any retailer and then playing stamp lotto saying, “Well this feels like two or three stamps”.

Charles: So okay, as a business owner do I still have to have a scale? Is that what I hear?

Eric: You know, you definitely would need to use a scale especially if you are shipping a lot of different weight envelopes or packages. The cool thing is we actually give you a scale when you sign up for our service.

There is a small handling charge, but we give you a 5lb. digital postage scale. It’s connected to the computer via USB cord. So as you weigh your envelope or package in that scale, the weight is automatically imported into our software.

So for package shippers who are eBay sellers or something like that who are having to manually input lots of different information, whether it be the weight or the size, this is one extra step that is eliminated.

Of course there is always an opportunity to mistype something or mistype the weight. So this USB connected scale would eliminate that need. You don’t need to do it manually, the scale will automatically imports that data right into our software.

To people who may need a higher or bigger scale that can handle more weight, when you do sign up, there is an option to take the credit of a 5lb. scale that we will give you and apply that credit to either a 10lb. scale or a 25lb. scale. So we give you that options too to increase it and apply the credit we are giving you for free.

Charles: That is a good deal. Back in the day when I shipped products as an eBay seller, I had to go out and get a scale. It just seemed like a no-brainer. It was always a guessing game and I didn’t want to do that. It seems like those scales were $50 dollars a piece or something like that? 

Eric: Yes, there are a bunch of different types and bunch of different ratings for each scale. Ours is pretty much the standard. If they’re looking for heavy duty shipping scales and needed it down to the nitty gritty weight, ours is probably not going to do that but it certainly will get you past the basic stuff.

It will certainly be applicable for 99% of small businesses out there who are shipping, so it’s a good deal and it’s free. Shipping and handling charges for it are right around $8 depending where you live in the US.

It’s a free scale and it’s yours to keep afterwards, even if you don’t like our service, you can keep the scale and continue to use it.

Charles: Okay, so tell me about the package you mentioned that includes the scale and the service. Tell me how that works? How do I sign up for the program and what will I get?

Eric: If you sign up the program, we offer a 4 week, no risk, trial. So this means you can try our software, the full version of it for 4 weeks and if you don’t like it and all you have to do is cancel the service and you won’t be charged a thing.

We give you $5 in free postage to use during that trial so you can basically sign up this afternoon, go in there and print a couple of stamps if you want, print postage right onto an envelope, print it right onto a shipping label. We are giving you $5 in free postage to use it and try it.

Our software will let you import your address book from Outlook, ACT, or content manage software like Lotus or Corel, or any kind of software that you are storing your address in. You can import that all in and you can literally start printing postage within a few minutes of signing up with the service.

We will also send you out a welcome kit that will contain a bunch of different types of shipping labels. We also send you some free postage vouchers, so if you like our service and feel you want to continue with it, you can become a paid subscriber.

By the way, the cost per month for the subscription services is $15.99/month and when you become a paid subscriber you can redeem a $10 postage coupon the first month you pay the bill, as well as the second month. So really the first month and second month come with free postage, which technically brings the cost to $6.99 a month.

Basically we are giving you $5 free postage upon signing up to use in the trial and you can get an options to get 2 additional $10 postage vouchers to use. Of course we are giving you that free scale upon sign up as well.

We are trying to make it easy and hopefully people will see the benefits of avoiding long lines at the post office. There are all this kind of features that we offer for shippers and those sellers on eBay as well.

We have integration to import your data from eBay right into our software and we offer all the different kinds of mail classes.

One huge thing for eBay sellers is the ability to print international postages. Our first class international, which is in a very low cost form of shipping class. So we offer different features for people to use and hopefully they will continue to redeem and use the free postage.

Charles: There are three points that are really important, one is when you said you can avoid the long lines at the post office. So I can print the postage from my computer, but do I still need to go to a post office?

Eric: No, actually you don’t need to. You print the postage, whether it is on an envelope or a package. If you are using an envelope you can give it to your regular letter carrier as they pass by to drop off the mail. You can give them your letter and they will take it back with them.

For packages, you can schedule a carrier pickup to come to your office or home and actually pick up a package. That services is free as long as you are shipping with either priority mail or express mail.

All you need to do is ship one package via priority mail or express mail and they’ll come and pick up. Let’s say you had one package that was priority mail and twenty others that were parcel post, or media mail, which are both cheaper classes. They will come to pick up the 20 parcel post with that one priority mail package for free as long as you are sending a priority mail or express mail package.

So it’s really eliminates the need of even go to the post office and wait in those long line. If you need to add special services such as certified mail or delivery confirmation, all that stuffs can be done straight through our software, including package insurance and all kind of different options.

Some other cool features that our software provides is we offer the ability to hide the postage value on a package or on a shipping label.

So for eBay sellers or really any ecommerce seller who is shipping via the USPS, you may charge a shipping and handling charge because you have a box, tape, storage cost, and all kinds of handling fees. Sometimes a buyer may get a little upset if they are paying $5 or $6 handling and they notice the postage cost is only $2 or $3 dollars.

The ability to hide the postage value eliminates that problem. They basically see the exact same shipping label and they get the package just as they normally would, it’s just the actual postage value is not printed on the shipping label.

Charles: That’s a really good point. If you can get the product to somebody and fulfill your end of the obligation, then there’s no real value in having a conversation about the postage.

Eric: Yeah, unfortunately the buyers forget that there are handling charges and costs and fees. You have to buy a box, tape, and bubble wrap. They seem to think that’s all just the cost of doing business and forget about it.

So, that hidden postage can really eliminate some headaches. In terms of eBay, your seller ratings are really your bread and butter, so it’s important to keep those positive and in good standing. The ability to hide the shipping value on the postage is one less headache you have to deal with.

Charles: Yeah, and talking about headaches. Going down to the post office is not a fun thing.

From my experience with selling on eBay, you never knew what the day was going to be like. You never knew how many orders you were going to get and you wanted to ship out order as quickly as possible. But, then you tried to minimize your exposure to the post office because it is such long lines and there isn’t any value there.

I could see how I would lead off every day’s shipping with at least one package that would afford me to schedule local pickup. That way I would be assured that I could schedule something. That would be great, especially with just the time spent.

Eric: Oh yeah, let’s say you have an employee who drives packages to the post office every day or even a few times a week. That’s time is spend driving to the post office, money spent on gas, waiting in line, and that gives the employee time to stop off at the 7/11 to grab a coke.

That’s a lot of time lost and loss of efficiency that you’re losing as a small business owner. Time is huge, so by eliminating that issue and that hassle of having to drive and drop off and wait in long lines at the post office is just tons of cost savings as well as being more effective.

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur who is wearing ten different hats in a one man operation, Stamps.com offers the ability to be much more effective. You can focus less on standing in line and more on tasks that require your focus to make your business a better run business.

On top of that we offer a lot of different things that you can’t get at the post office. We have postage discounts on priority mail and express mail. Up to 14% on priority mail and 5% on express mail. You can’t get that at the post office. The USPS provides those discounts only to the PC postage providers.

We also have address verification, if you happen to mistype an address in the delivery address, like adding an extra number or you enter the wrong zip code in, our software will verify that address in real time with the USPS main database.

It will come back to you and say we notices a problem with this address, it’s not a valid address, can we change it to x y or z. It will give you some different option for you to choose. That just helps you to be more efficient.

If you’re a package shipper you don’t want your package sent back to you, which can hurt your seller rating and make it take more time to get the package to the buyer. So, it’s just one extra benefit that we offer we feel is a huge benefit.

Charles: Yeah, I’d say the only thing that’s worse than standing in line to mail a package, is standing in line to mail a package twice.

Eric: Yeah, and usually that second time you’re going to have to send it a little faster mail class. So, you’re going to spend even more money and that’s eating right in to your margin as a small business owner or entrepreneur. So that’s never any fun.

Charles: One of the things you mentioned earlier was international shipping. I’m really interested in this because I know that I shipped to Australia and that was incredible. The shipping on that was more expensive than the products themselves. Is that the same with Stamps.com or is there something different there as far a international shipping?

Eric: Yeah, you can ship international. We make it very easy.

The international market on eBay is growing 3 or 4 times faster than the domestic markets. So, a lot of the eBay sellers are interested in shipping international, but they’re a little hesitant because there are a lot of things involved. You have the customs forms and the price and all that.

So, we offer the ability to ship any type of mail class, whether it be priority mail international, express mail international.

More importantly we offer the ability to ship first class mail international and that’s a huge thing because if you’re shipping a small priced item, whether it be eBay, Amazon, or your own shopping cart and let’s say it’s only $15 dollars. To ship that via priority mail, even the cheaper priority mail flat rate, you’re going to pay possibly upwards of $26 on regular priority mail international or even on the flat rate small box it would $12.78. That same product would be $10.76 on first class mail international.

So, if you’re selling a small item, you don’t want to be paying double or triple the amount to ship that item. Having lower shipping cost just makes you more competitive certainly in the eBay space or even a regular shopping carts.

So first class mail international is the most cost effective means of shipping via all shipping carriers include UPS and FedEx.

If you’re a seller and you’re able to send your product via first class mail international, you’re going to see a ton of cost savings. That’s really cool and very important.

Along with that our software includes customs forms, built into the software. It’s integrated right in, so as you input your delivery address, that delivery address is going to be imported right into the customs forms.

You’ll still be required to state what the product is and declare the country of origin. That’s something you will have to do no matter what. The fact that we import the delivery address just saves more time and reduces the possibility of error.

Additionally, we also include the country restrictions on products that can be shipped to a country. Every country has it’s own list of restrictions in terms of what can be shipping in to it. They are very unique items.

Sometimes it’s no gold or silver can be shipped or any precious metal or stones such as diamonds. Other times, it’s animal bi-product that can’t be shipped in, for one reason or another. So our software is hooked up to the USPS mailing database.

Those restrictions are changing all the time, so our system is able to import any changes and show you what the existing restrictions are. So, that’s a huge benefit that’s another time saver.

Saving time is obviously a huge message that we are trying to relay here along with lots of discounts and the ability to save money as well. Hopefully we can provide that to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Charles: You said something about Amazon. Are there hooks or pieces that are Amazon specific?

Eric: Actually that’s a great new feature that we’ve just added. We’ve added a lot of new shipping features over the last twelve to eighteen months.

Really the main feature has been the ability to import data from the main ecommerce market places. So eBay being one huge ecommerce market place, Amazon also.

Now the one catch with Amazon is it has to be an Amazon Pro Merchant account. Amazon has two types of accounts when you’re a seller. Amazon Pro Merchant allows third party API access. So that’s how we are able to access into that.

Basically ecommerce sellers are selling on eBay, or they have their own shopping carts, and they could be using Amazon as well or even some of the newer market places such as Etsy or Bonanzle. What we want to provide is a one stop shipping solution for all of you USPS shipping.

You basically connect your Stamps.com account with an Amazon account or an eBay account, or on Etsy or Bonanzle you can can connect right to PayPal and you can basically import your sales order data right into your Stamps.com software.

That gives you the ability to batch print. Let’s say you have 100 orders in a day, you can print all the label right there. Or you can choose with labels you want to print.

Some people sell and package everything on Tuesday or Thursdays and drop everything in the mail on Wednesday or Fridays. Other people prepare their packages for the East Coast or the West Coast at different times of the day. We give you the ability to print all your label, some of them, only by store, or you can print just your Amazon sales in the morning, print all your eBay sales in the afternoon, and print all your own shopping cart sales at night.

Depending how you want to prepare your package shipping, we give you full flexibility to print and more importantly get the data into the Stamps.com software to make it easy to print.

Additionally we also post back tracking details back into eBay and Amazon. The fact that the customer is going to see the tracking details posted back into the account is a huge benefit. They know the package is on the way. They see the tracking information. They can click on it and get all the relevant info that they need to see when their package is going to be delivered.

Charles: So you’re saying that when I’m in the software and I print the software, I put the label on the box, it shows up on Amazon as being shipped.

Eric: Correct. Once you print that label, it’s going to produce that tracking number for the delivery confirmation and then post that back to your Amazon account as the package is being shipped.

Charles: That’s very handy. I can see the value in that because, let’s say you have ten orders that you’re shipping out. Now they are all automatically updated.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely.

Depending on what service you were using prior, you would have had to go back and do that manually. That would give you more opportunity to make an error.

Some people are shipping 20, 30, or 40 packages as day. They are going back in and entering 40 different tracking numbers in the account, it is easy to make a mistake.

So this is one less item you have to do on your long list of items that you have to do as a small business or entrepreneur.

Charles: Yeah, and you definitely have to do that. You can’t just leave that person in the dark by not communicating back that their package has shipped. Certainly you can do it, but it doesn’t create a good user experience.

Eric: If you look at eBay, shipping is two out of the four items that are on a sellers DSR. So one is communication and speed of shipping and the other is cost of shipping and handling. So having the ability to see the shipping should help you get better seller ratings overall.

Charles: I believe a customer’s perceived speed of shipping has to do a lot with how fast they get that notice. If they get that notification within 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the situation, then it’s shipped and in their mind it’s done.

Eric: Yeah

Charles: That’s a great thing compared to saying a few days later that your package shipped.

Eric: Yeah, whenever you buy something you always want it right then and there. Having to wait is the one aspect of buying things online is that you have that shipping time. So, the sooner you can get that product in the buyer’s hands the better the buyer feels and the better ratings you will get and hopefully the buyer will be more likely to buy from you again. It just helps everyone out when shipping is very speedy and the communication of the shipping is right there.

Charles: Good deal. I hope that everyone on the call can see the value of this and understand that Stamps.com is going the extra mile to give people the opportunity to try out the service. And they’re putting different pieces of the puzzle together like the free scale and free postage which makes it effortless. Plus all the pieces that we’ve talked about like being able to avoid the post office and getting discounts on postage and things like that. All I hear is value, over and over again.

So I think the next part that I’d like you to give us some insight into is the affiliate program that Stamps.com offers.

I know we have affiliates in our community who are either looking for new offers to promote or we have people who have blogs or business sites and they’re always looking for additional things to offer their audience that will add value to the conversation and will provide them will compensation as well.

How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

So tell us a bit, if you will, about the affiliate program.

Eric: Absolutely, our affiliate program has a great CPA. The program itself is managed through the Commission Junction network. The CPA is a $50 CPA from Stamps.com.

Basically we are paying you $50 just for someone to sign up to our service.

When someone signs up they do have to put in their credit card, but the person won’t be charged if they cancel within the four week trial.

We’ve been pretty much a four bar program and had a period where we were a five bar program within the Commission Junction system. For the most part we’ve been a pretty rock solid four bar. Our earnings per click (EPC), a common metric in Commission Junction for three months has been 66.50. So it’s been a pretty good CPA. It’s had pretty good performance for us.

People who have blogs about entrepreneurship, or small office and home office, or home based businesses, or even network marketing could use the program. People who are trying approach Avon sellers or Mary Kay sellers, anybody who’s going to be shipping lots of products out, we are a great alternative for.

Also sites that are focused around those topics of small business, or B2B, or home office / small office, or home based business, we work great as just a banner or a button on the side.

We’ve seen a lot of growth in the coupon sites in the last year or year and a half since the economy kind of tanked. There has been huge growth in coupon sites and deal sites. So, those have worked very well.

A good chunk of our volume comes from people who are doing paid search. We don’t allow you to go direct to page, but if you build out your own page, we certainly allow you to bid aggressively.

We have a few restrictions on paid search, but not too much. We’re pretty aggressive in general about letting you do kind of what you want to do. We don’t allow any type of incentivized marketing, so you’re not allowed to give away prices or anything to get people to sign up.

We do like social media marketing. Some people are using Twitter, Facebook, and all the new types of marketing out there. We still allow you to do that.

We have all different types of banner sizes. More importantly if you see something you need that we don’t have, we can make it on the fly. We have a creative team internal and they can make any type of banner you need very very quickly. Usually within a few hours, we can get that out to you or we can upload it to the Commission Junction system.

We don’t allow email unfortunately for affiliates, but that’s something I’m always fighting and pushing for with our legal department. So far we haven’t been able to get that approved. I’m hoping some day we will.

Really if you have a site that’s targeting small business or even just business software or tech software, I’d like to invite anyone to give us a shot and give us a try.

We have a pretty good program, lots of different creatives, lots of different sizes, and a pretty aggressive offer for the customer to sign up. It just equates to money in the affiliate marketers pocket.

Charles: I just like the fact that you mentioned that someone can cancel within that first four weeks and the affiliate still gets paid. Is that correct? Am I right?

Eric: That is correct, so long as they are a real person. Keep in mind that some affiliates can get pretty aggressive in what they’re doing. So you can’t just grab a telephone book and start entering names.

As long as it’s real quality traffic, absolutely. We’re just looking for people to try our software and see how it works. We’ll give you a $50 bounty basically if that person signs up and is a new customer. They can cancel and they never have to pay a cent to us and we’ll be paying you. But, the person does have to be a real live person.

Charles: Yeah, that’s one situation where you want everyone to win. Even though the affiliates still get paid, they still need to attract the right traffic so that they’re getting the right conversions. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.

If you’re an affiliate and you’re looking at this offer and your thinking this is pretty good, don’t just see the dollar figure. If you’re audience is interested in this and it’s related to your topic, it’s something that you already talk about, and it’s a close match then that’s going to be a win for everybody.

The customer’s going to get the value they’re looking for, your going to get the affiliate commission and then of course, Stamps.com will be encouraged to continue with the program or at least have similar offers. When something works for most companies they rarely change it.

Eric: Yeah, we’re right there with you. We are looking for good affiliates to produce good solid leads.

We have lots of affiliate contests. We have all kinds of promotions. If you’re an affiliate and you have been in the past and you’ve become dormant for what ever reason, we do all kinds of promotions and contests to kind of get you back interested and put our offer back live.

We’re constantly trying to help motivate affiliates and get them to get our offer live and hopefully get them to generate signups for us and in turn revenue for them. I’m an affiliate marketer myself so I certainly know of trials and tribulations of affiliate marketers and what they have to go through and how hard it is.

So, we are looking for good affiliate marketers to join our program and hopefully promote us and get some good solid traffic.

Charles: Affiliate marketing is a dynamic field and to have something like this where the offer is out there, the product is solid, the payoff is good, and if done properly then everybody wins. That’s definitely the way to go.

You mentioned that your creative team can do banners for you and things like that. Once your signed up to the program through the program using Commission Junction, is that something you’d go through the affiliate manager to request or how does that work?

Eric: Yeah, so we have probably over 70 banners in various sizes.

Charles: Yes, it’s really impressive. You have lot of selection out there.

Eric: Yeah, but everyone has different needs and requirements, so in the event that someone needs a different sized banner or even a custom banner that might have a certain message on it, we can certainly make that for them.

Sometime affiliates want to have it color coded to their site, or a special headline. Anything like that we can create and either send it to them direct and then they can just use a regular link off of another banner or if it’s something that other affiliates need, then we can post it into the CJ system and let them grab it from there.

We have coupon codes that are active in the Commission Junction system. Unfortunately our Stamps.com platform isn’t very flexible for coupon codes for affiliates so we are not really able to make unique custom codes for a coupon site. But we are able to make coupons that are more generic and you can grab those and use those.

Like I say, any type of banner that you need or any size, or any specific message that you’re looking for we can definitely create.

As an example, we’ve had a service that was focused on sending military mail or developing care packages for people who are serving in the military and they wanted our banners to focus on sending mail to APO/FPO (Army Post Offices and Fleet Post Offices for the Navy).

Since our software does allow you to do that, we created a banner for that affiliate and sent it out to them and it just focused on sending mail to APO/FPO. They posted it on their site and they have done really really well with it. It has been a great opportunity for us because we’re getting great leads for people who could really use our service. We gave them the ability to not just put a standard banner on there were people might not understand what it is or it might not communicate the right message. They had the option and ability to put a custom targeted message to their audience and like I said it’s worked really really well for us. So, we’re very happy and interested in doing that for other sites as well.

Charles: That’s a really good point. It’s the exact same product, but by having that APO/FPO on there it eliminates that fine grain friction that may make someone wonder whether or not it’s going to work for them. It just greases the slick to help them to make that decision. That’s a great tip. Nobody understand military shipping by default. Having been in the Marines, the first time I ever saw APO/FPO, I know I didn’t know what that was.

Eric: Yeah, and the USPS is the only authorized carrier to ship an APO or FPO. They are starting to open up some options for FedEx and UPS, but really it’s the USPS the only option currently. It gives you the ability to easily send mail to those who are serving in the military. It’s a great option.

I think on that particular site, they had been part of our affiliate program and they they really didn’t do very well because people didn’t know Stamps.com and they weren’t looking for it. But, then boom they changed the creative, which wasn’t under our suggestion. They came to us and we think we have this great idea and this is what we are trying to show.

So we said that sounds great, let’s make it. I think within 6 hours we had the banner back to them and they were able to post it. I don’t recall how fast it was, but it was pretty quick there after that we started seeing a huge increase in activity. So that made me a believer in making custom banner content and being a lot more agile for our affiliates. So, that worked our for us.

Charles: Yeah, that’s a great story. Well I think we are coming close to the hour mark, so I want to make sure that we have the opportunity to open up the floor to question and see what kind of feedback we get. Christopher are you still on the line with us?

Christopher: Absolutely, I’m happily chatting about bacon moon pies.

Charles: Chatting about bacon moon pies. I knew I could count on you.

Christopher: Absolutely!

Charles: So, do we have anything that we need to address at the moment.

Christopher: Looks like I’ve answered just about everything. We are good to go, but I actually had a question. How does your software work with Quickbooks or something along those lines.

Eric: That’s a great great question because we just released a Quickbooks integration about three or four months ago. Quickbooks is obviously the biggest accounting software out there.

Now for people who are using Quickbooks and have all their data stored in there and want to print invoices. They can now download an add-on or a plugin. They go to our site, click the link, and it loads the add-in into their Quickbooks software. Basically what that does is adds Stamps.com to their file menu to print US postage.

Then they can start printing postage with all their data inside their Quickbooks application without ever leaving Quickbooks. So, it’s a really exciting new feature that we added here recently and I think it’s going to work our really really well for businesses who are using Quickbooks. It’s one more time elimination.

Previous to the integration you had to toggle between Quickbooks and the Stamps.com software. That gave more of an opportunity to make errors and it’s time consuming to have to toggle back and forth.

But, now you’re able to print postage or shipping labels, or even buy postage. Really if you have a Stamps.com account, which you are required to do to print postage with Quickbooks, you never even need to leave Quickbooks or even sign in to Stamps.com, other than the first time you connect your Stamps.com account to the Quickbooks software. Once you do that you never have to log back in to Stamps.com ever again.

Charles: That’s great!

Christopher: Also I had another question that I was curious about. I’ve got tons of regular office supply that I’ve already purchased. I heard you say something about printing off the labels. Are there special labels that I have to buy? Is there anything, I mean, can I go down the street to Staples or Office Depot? Can I get all my stuff there?

Eric: Yeah, for the most part. There are a couple different options. If you’re printing shipping labels, you can pretty much use a huge number of adhesive labels by any of the main brands, such as Avery labels. They are probably one of the biggest ones out there. We support 50 to 100 different shipping labels. You can always just print them on plain paper and tape the label right on to the package.

Also, we support thermal printers. So people how have a thermal printer, we support those as well. In terms or postage, you can print postage right on to an envelope, including window envelopes. A certain type of window envelope we know about, you can put in your printer and print right on them.

If you’re going to print stamps, we have a proprietary stamp called a net stamp. It has some USPS hidden watermarks on that and that’s what allows the USPS to know that it is a valid stamp. You can’t print a postage stamp onto a regular label. It has to be on this unique stamp. But, I do believe they do sell those as well in Office Depot, Staples, and Office Max. I believe Avery sales a generic brand for that.

Of course we also sell it too. But, you can always print postage right on to any envelope, on regular paper, and pretty much almost any shipping label. There are some exceptions, but for the most part any adhesive label.

Charles: Eric, for those special situations, do I have to go to the website to order those or can I order those through the software? How does that work?

Eric: Yeah, that’s one of the things that we give you in your welcome kit when you signup. But we also have a store that is right inside the software, or you can use the web based version of it. You can go there and buy net stamps.

We also offer what’s called a photo net stamp, which gives you the ability to include either a logo or a photo of a product or an item right onto the side of these net stamps.

So, that’s really cool for people. Realtors seems to use them a lot. They put their head on there so that everyone can see their head. Or they will do the house of the month or hot sale, just listed type item.

Some restaurant will do a picture of the month and feature a desert or something like that. Out here in LA where we are based, the movie studios have been using a lot of the photo net stamps to promote a movie coming out. Say Shrek coming out October 10th. They’ll put the date the movie is being released or the stars photo or something like that.

It’s an additional benefit you can do to customize your envelopes or mailing going out. It gives you the ability to kind of stand out in the mail.

Charles: Yeah, anything that helps you to stand out is a good thing.

Eric: Absolutely! No only that, our software allows you to print a message on a shipping label. So you could put something simple like a thank you, or it could include a promotional message like an end of season sale, or back to school sale coming soon.

Most people put in their website or have a special offer address. It gives you all kinds of cool customization of the label.

Also, if you’re printing on a regular shipping label, you can import your company label on that too. So, your logo would be on the shipping label. And that’s either on a regular piece of paper or on an adhesive label.

Charles: So what I hear is that not only does this thing save you time, save you money, and makes life easier, but it also opens up some opportunities that might not have been there before as far as being able to do additional promotions or customize and make yourself stand out from everybody else. That’s fantastic because we all need a little bit of edge, whatever edge we can get.

Eric: Absolutely. It gives you an extra communication means, basically. If you’re shipping lots of packages everyday, why not put some type of message on there alerting your customers to more opportunities.

Charles: Well good deal. Man, I feel like this has been an hour packed full of good information. I appreciate you Eric, spending the time with us educating us on this whole thing. I know I’ve certainly learned a lot and I hope that everyone who’s on the call has learned at least on thing new that they didn’t know before.

I’m not sure if you noticed before but I have a link on the screen to the offer you mentioned before where people will get the free scale and free postage. You can check out everything Eric’s been talking about and get a sense of how the service can work for you and help improve your business.

Eric, I want to thank you again for spending the time with us and I want to let everyone know that if they have questions about this after the webinar, they can always hit us up on Twitter.

They can also join the Facebook fan page to continue the conversation over there.

As always, you can post questions in the Member’s forums. Everyone gets the benefit of seeing the question and then maybe someone can jump in and provide the answer if they know it and then everyone gets the benefit of the final answer. It’s a great resource. If you haven’t used it yet, be sure to log into Open Source Marketer and post your questions in the Member’s forums.

Thank you Eric. I just want to remind everyone that Eric is the Director of Online Marketing for Stamps.com and he has spent the last hour with us just filling our heads full of information and letting us know how we can improve our businesses so we can do a better job of making money.

So, Eric thank you very much.

Eric: Sounds good Charles. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed talking about the affiliate marketing. It’s always fun to talk about marketing, internet marketing. Thanks for having us.

Charles: Yes, there are lots of great opportunities out there and I definitely think that Stamps.com is one of them, so thanks for sharing that with us.

Eric: Alright, thanks so much Charles.

Thanks for reading the transcript from this interview. More interviews and videos can be found inside the Open Source Marketer Member’s area.

Leave your questions below about anything we covered.

Charles & Toff
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Learn how to build and market your business online using open source tools.

How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

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Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

June 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this week, Google formally announced the completion of its new web indexing system cleverly named Caffeine. According to Google, Caffeine provides 50% fresher results for web searches than its last index and is the largest collection of web content the search giant has ever offered.

caffeine Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

– Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer, Google

This is great for those of us who use Google to search and find relevant results to our most common inquiries. Results will become timelier, more social and rely more heavily on keyword strings, ultimately providing more useful results as newer content can be indexed much quicker and from a much larger base of sites.

Is your SERP spot threatened?

When Google says “fresher” results, what they’re saying is that ranking principles have not changed, but rather rankings are (and will become) more dynamic, shifting to display the latest and greatest (and, therefore, hopefully best) information as a result of being able to reach deeper and more frequently into the Web.

But what about website owners who have come to rely on the steady ebb and flow of organic traffic that a high Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position provides?

Many website owners who have long enjoyed a top spot, or even a high spot, have suddenly found their sites displaced, resulting in a massive dip in organic traffic. And to make matters even more vexing, the position your site is in this month will likely be different from where you find yourself next month.

Which is not entirely new, right? Anyone well-versed in search engine optimization (SEO) knows that it is a never-ending battle. The difference is, ranking improvements and demotions may happen even quicker than before because content that you and your competitors are creating will have a more immediate impact within the results. So if you thought SEO was a wild ride before, hang on.

Of course, your main goal should be to deliver value to your customers and audience. After all, ranking is only a means to an end. And since Caffeine should do a better job of measuring that value, it might start putting some distance between those who do provide quality content and those who are merely gaming the system.

Caffeine makes it more difficult, although not impossible, for sites using black hat SEO tactics to reach and/or maintain a position at the top of the rankings for long periods of time. And while I believe SEOs will always find new ways to game the system, I think Google has made a step forward in terms of providing better-quality results.

How to get a boost from Caffeine

So if you can’t rule Google SERPs by just throwing up an automated page with repurposed content, what should you do? Here’s my advice to website owners who rely heavily on organic traffic:

  • Continually look for opportunities to expand or update the content on your site for improved keyword targeting
  • Re-evaluate your current keywords and always look for opportunities to expand and capture more long-tail keywords
  • Build a site that contains clean code and  a clear site structure
  • Look for opportunities to capitalize on social media as real-time results become more integrated with search results
  • Monitoring your competitors will be paramount as new content brought in by them will be indexed quicker than ever.

So fresh and so clean

I think this transition to providing “fresher” results was inevitable as competition from Bing and the massive growth of “real-time” information from social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have created a need for better, faster, (stronger), search engine results. And from a conversion standpoint, I’d argue that this move could ultimately prove to be more beneficial to ecommerce sites that provide high-quality content, because “fresher,” more relevant results also means more qualified traffic.

Of course, cleaner, less manipulated results will have huge benefits to searchers and real, quality sites alike. Remember that both you and Google are on the same mission: provide the right page to the right user. Oh, and don’t be evil.

Related Resources

Search Marketing: Tips on mastering the latest innovations in this mature category

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

Optimizing PPC campaigns to boost conversions, ROI

Photo attribution: The Official Google Blog

Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

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Get Better Search Ranking Using A WordPress Blog

June 8, 2010 By 1 Comment

wordpress seo Get Better Search Ranking Using A WordPress Blog

I recently gave a presentation on SEO at the Dallas Infomart for the Dallas SEO/SEM Meetup group. The point of the discussion was to highlight how blogs can be used to acquire search engine listings to attract organic search traffic to your business website.

To illustrate the point, I used my wife’s recipe blog as an example since she attracts 50K unique visitors to her blog every month and roughly 75% of that traffic comes from organic searches.

Here’s a full video recording of the presentation

Want to attract 50K customers a month to your website?

Learning how is simple. You can either request a private coaching session or become an Open Source Marketer Member and choose from over 320+ videos we offer on blogging, SEO, traffic building, social media, and more.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Special thanks to Jill McKeever for letting me share the SimpleDailyRecipes.com success story with the Open Source Marketer community.

Learn how to build and market your business online using open source tools.

Get Better Search Ranking Using A WordPress Blog

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