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I am a university student with a backround working in online marketing and sales.

20.10.09

Key Online Selling Tips – Nate Lauder – Online Marketing Jungle

Key Online Selling Tips – Nate Lauder – Online Marketing Jungle

In order for your website to be credible as selling platform there are a number of key aspects that your site must abide by in order to ensure an easy and smooth sales operation to ensure your site creates credibility for your business and it’s products. If you want to optimise your sales figures via your website it is important it fulfils particular criteria. This article is designed to give you a head start and create a better understanding as to what exactly triggers purchasing impulses from potential customers and how to capitalise on those who are interested in the products or services that your business offers.

- Once a customer is attracted to your site through whichever marketing approach you have adopted, it is important to capture the impulse of the buyer. It is suggested an impulse lasts around two minutes so it is crucial to make it as simple as possible for the customer to navigate to your buying pages. You must capitalise on the initial interest by ensuring that your unique selling points that separate you from your competitors are distinctively visible on your initial click through page. This helps enforce and build upon the customer’s impulse by providing them with the relevant information that lets them know that your site offers the product or service they were searching for.

- Conducting business online eliminates the face to face element that a lot of business owners or sales people can often rely upon to create a competitive edge by building a rapport with customers and being able to deal with any objections the consumer may have in a roundabout a way. Obviously finding a way to build this rapport online is crucial to your success and there are certain methods that can be employed to adhere to the concept of developing what is known as ‘the online rapport’. The most sophisticated way to achieve this is fundamentally the nature of your site; it’s professional appearance, the ease of navigation, relevancy to the click through links, the speed of your downloads, relevance of your images and the strength of your textual descriptions.

- To consolidate this ‘rapport’ you must provide clear access to your company’s information in order to ease any security fears and build credibility for yourself. Ensure that you offer secure, tested and trusted payment offers to help alleviate any possible problems or concerns. Finally, conduct a professional service and offer the highest standards of customer service throughout all stages of purchasing on your site as possible. Leave room for feedback, if you get it right, its great testimonials. If you get it wrong, you want your customers telling you about it, rather than their friends or other potential buyers. An outlet for this sort of mishap can be turned into a positive thing quite easily if you are the first person aware about it. One thing I’ve heard very often is that if somebody is happy with the service they receive they will tell three people, if somebody has concerns regarding anything to do with your business they are likely to tell in the range of 15 people about it.

- It is important that any text or images on your site makes no prior assumptions regarding the level of the customers knowledge of the product, instead it must cater for all potential viewers of various understanding. There are numerous personality types and each consumer has their own particular triggers that enable them into purchasing a product online. Think about your buying patterns online and consider what makes you purchase from one site in comparison to another? Ask yourself whether your site abides by these concepts, if not what are you going to do to amend this? The information you extract from these customers must be used in a way to help adapt your sales process for each individual, selling to them in the manner they wish to be sold to. This is achieved by offering clear, concise navigation throughout the site and again well constructed textual inserts that offers the relevant information that supports your products and services at the key stages in the selling process.

- A key aspect to converting a potential sale to a completed sale is identifying exactly what your prospect desires from their visit. The easiest way to determine what they are looking for is to encourage a dialogue with the customer through the language of hyperlinks. You must ensure that each link that you provide offers the direct route to the pages that the customer wants and is expecting. This helps alleviate the customers concerns and caters for their wants and needs. The relevant information that you need and want viewers to see will be a lot more obtainable using these methods.

- As much as each individual will have their own particulars and personalities there are three main categories of consumers that you must principally concentrate your sites navigational principles upon and they are as follows:

1. Those who know exactly what they want.
2. Those who have an idea of what they want.
3. Those who are browsing and simply need direction or to build association.

- To optimise the likelihood of consumers purchasing from your site, you must abide by this sort of concept when constructing the navigational avenues in the design of your textual placement and hyperlinks and so forth. The combination of great navigation and great information helps the buyer make the purchase without any pushy aspects of selling and allows the customer to complete the sale on their terms just as much as your own.

Always follow any sale up. That is a given, communicate with your clients subtly and to the extent they are willing to. Make it optional but get their feedback and take into consideration their thoughts as you tweak things, once you get it right in combination with a fair amount of qualified targets the results will be evident to yourself and your business income. Hope this information has helped. Any feedback greatly appreciated, any thoughts or requests for any articles then feel free to contact me. Nate 

15.10.09

Future Market Trends

Marketing Trends 2009/2010 – Nate Lauder – Got Guanxi – Online Marketing Jungle

These are just a few observations I’ve made from a lot of research, reading and taking an objective standpoint regarding issues that will directly affect marketing trends in the future. Enjoy and let me know what you think, Nate.

Originality and creativity will provide the key to success:

- Digital marketing is becoming more prominent within the industry and is becoming more heavily relied on by marketers and web designers to achieve their online objectives and make their campaign strategies successful.
- Creating empathy using the creativity of design and the implementation of this creativity to emphasise with behavioural patterns of consumer will be vital to enable the five impulses that are associated with sales.

Keyword orientated marketing will continue to flourish:

- Providing a clear path to increase the return of investment for customers will be vital, illustrating exactly what you have achieved and the potential benefits to the customers business will be key to separating your services from another. As competition within the market continues to increase so will the demand for the keywords with the highest search volumes. Naturally this rise in demand will have an impact on the cost of each search lead therefore the need for providers to illustrate precisely which links the customers are coming from will be further emphasised.
- Juniper Research www.juniperresearch.com concludes that cost per click inflation will fluctuate to 20% across all markets for 2009. This figure will steadily remain constant throughout 2010 due to the shift in behavioural trends by business owners gradually accepting the need to focus their remaining spending power on online marketing resources.
- The fact that such qualified leads can now be pre determined before you pay for your ad by power advertisers such as Google and Facebook has created a competitive market for business to compete for certain demographics on Facebook and Key Phrases on Google. As long as it suits your product or target market I cannot emphasise enough the necessity to have a clear marketing strategy for both of the providers if you are seriously looking for the best return of investment online.

Optimising conversion figures will be the route to marketer’s success:

- For the online marketer these days the hard parts over. The business owners and clients are starting to knock on our doors as they seek see the massive growth potential from the implementation of strategic campaigns online. However the hard part is reaching an understanding with your provider as to what your actual goal is and setting reasonable objectives in respect to your investment. People are spending online and this is increasing at rapid rates for every industry year in year out and this is one trend that will inevitably continue for the foreseeable future. If you are paying for and receiving traffic from advertising and your figures are not resulting in the sales figures that you forecast, then something is wrong. It could be time for a review of your design, your content, ease of site use or simply concentrating on strengthening your brand credentials. Point being there’s always numerous tactics you could be applying or applying more successfully if you take advice from a skilled online marketer.
- It is vital for you as a customer or even a provider to evaluate, analyse and measure all of your results and document them in way that is easily accessible to your cause. You must then illustrate the value to the consumer of the changes that have been made to solidify your position as a worthwhile spending output for the business in order to encourage repeat purchases or continued use of the services that you provide.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will become more competitively negotiated:

-The biggest companies in the world are focusing in excess of 70% of their entire marketing budgets on CPA Media. This impressive increase has been supported by the constant influx of small businesses focusing their marketing efforts online. The shift in demand has forced the whole CPA model to become more widely negotiated, especially as there are plenty of alternative services to any particular solution chosen by a business online.
- Another aspect of this shift has been encouraged by the worldwide economic slump. This has forced an emphasis on the importance of direct response rather than the development of brand management. This is one of the principal reasons why more and more advertisers are focusing on this model.

Security and Privacy issues will continue to be of vital importance:

- In the UK particularly they have been a number of breaches of security issue recently and online fraud and deception remains a constant issue for marketers online. Therefore the need to focus on offering a secure platform to conduct business is vital. In addition to this maintaining all privacy of data will obviously be of paramount importance.
- Many overlook these issues and simply lose customers who eliminate you from their buying possibilities solely on the payment processor that you use or the method of conducting business that you have chose. Getting this correct in respect to your market is key. Those who get this wrong can witness a negativity aspect on your brand and there are other consequences for those that get this wrong.

There will be more emphasis on Qualative Analytics:

- Having the knowledge of understanding what users are doing on your site is a luxury but actually understanding and analysing the behavioural patterns of your traffic will become crucial to moving the business forward, thus helping ensure better decision making based on the findings of your results. Have a look at Facebooks analytic tools and another great example is Google analytics www.google.com/analytics which offers a number of options to help you understand the basics to the nature of this theory. Once you’re familiar with those give me a shout if you want to really take this to the next level.
- A few more basic platforms to provide you with some initial respect with this concept will be including:

..User surveys, email questionnaire, internal search analysis, user compatibility, customers service forums, FAQ’s, feedback options. A to B multivariate testing, eye tracking and click density analysis.

- All this and more will become essential tasks however seemingly menial as they will establish the information needed to understand your qualative data that will optimise your ROI. It’s all about reviewing your strategy and making informed decisions based on your analytical findings; this is what will ensure you maintain consistent growth in results.

Mobile Advertising will flourish:

- Mobile companies have been concentrating greatly on their efforts to create a more sustainable advertising platform from their handheld devices as a way to extract more cash from their customers. As mobile technology continues to improve the advertising capabilities will get better and their place in the advertising world will become clearer and more apparent to business owners and consumers.
- We will also see a rise in the phenomenon that is Bluetooth marketing and again we will have to see what direction the mobile companies choose to orientate themselves towards regarding this. However early signs are indicating great potential for this services especially for small business with low spending power.
- Google and Facebook and other browsers are working hard to ensure they are fully compatible for this in the future. If the fact that they are taking the venture so seriously doesn’t convict you to start taking this into consideration for the future of your company, then I don’t know what will.

Localised search services importance will explode:

- The main reason why this will happen is due to the fact that search engine and browsers will need this conceptual process to improve. This is due to three main reasons: 1) Improves the relevance of results 2) Advertising can be more accurately targeted 3) It allows search engines to focus on local businesses as well as maintaining their stranglehold on national businesses.
- Browsers like Mozilla, Yahoo and Google are continuing to offer searches based on demographic analytics and searches focusing on IP locators. This is simply to offer searches to help gear advertising in terms of the specifics of the consumer demand.
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RSS newsfeeds will continue to gain importance through the mainstream:

- Really Simple Syndication or better known as the acronym RSS is simply good for communications involved with online marketing. It provides marketers with 100% deliverability and ensures a qualified audience from the results. All RSS capabilities will compatible for the changes that will emerge from the launch of the Internet Explorer 8 browser so it’s interest and growth is likely to continue.

- Advantages of RSS: 1) Users will only receive contact from those that they personally subscribe to, so it decreases the prospect of receiving any spam, if spam does occur then simply relieve your subscription. 2) Users can develop specific segmentations of newsfeeds so that you will only obtain information on the topics chosen that relate to your objectives. 3) There are many platforms you can obtain newsfeeds from: mobile, email, your browsers, desktop. This puts the user into pole position so the user is in control and therefore a more qualified prospect than email.

The Google Algorithm will continue to apply user behaviour metrics:

- Search results are affected directly by click through rates and bounce rates are also relevant. In the process of time websites that perform badly in respect to Google’s algorithm will be downgraded in the search results whilst well performing websites will be pushed up in the results. With a billion search results everyday coming from Google, there is no comparison in terms for importance for everyone. However niches can be found for certain markets in relevantly targeted markets

Notebooks will impact Net Design:

- The fact is that notebooks are increasing in sales and prominence within the laptop market. In 2009 they are looking to account for over 10% of the laptop market. This trend looks set to continue throughout 2010/11, so designers will be compelled to accommodate for the capacity of the screens. A more accomplished designed will de demanded and the ‘screen estate’ must be used more economically in order to alleviate this issue.

User Generated Content is vital for future consideration:

Studies imply that people are more likely to trust recommendations in comparison to trusting a website or an advertisement. That is why www.trustatrader.com and www.ratedpeople.com and other similar alternatives are gaining more momentum in terms of marketing for businesses. It is suggested that up to 80% trust recommendations rather than adverts so it’s time to seriously consider getting some testimonials and feedback forums implemented into your site. What’s more, don’t just put them there, you need to promote them and encourage people to generate their own user content, with incentives and other ventures.

30.9.09

What a Facebook Fan page can really do for your business:

I know you might have a fan page already but it you don’t have over 200 fans in your target demographic, then you need to get on the grind. Here’s a few of the reasons why, look out in the nearby future for the how’s, but for the meantime here some theory to hopefully help you understand the need to establish your facebook brand. enjoy:

- Facebook, Twitter particularly and other social networking sites continue to post massive growth by offering a platform that is free and provides you with an audiences of over 200 million and counting. Facebook for example according to www.mashable.com post’s growth figures of roughly 20% monthly, totalling a 200% in size annually.
- People are spending more and more of their time online. This is solely because of the behavioural shifts and trends for people to spend their free time on social networks. Creating exposure and a name for your company is a lot easier when it’s associated with a networking site that people trust and enjoy on a daily basis.
- With your fan page being a permanent fixture, not only will you be marketing yourself to the existing users but also the millions who will inevitably join in the future. Without doubt, establishing yourself a strong fan base during these initial stages of Facebooks growth and more importantly the development stages of Facebooks attempt to monetise their efforts, will provide you with a solid standpoint to operate from in the years to come.
- You can easily invite your target audience to your page. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to distinguish who exactly is in your target demographic. You can view peoples age, where they live, gender – you can even see if people are married or have children, what school they go to, their interests, what movies they like etc. An advertisers dream and a marketers paradise, not only does Facebook help you determine exactly who you are inviting to join your fan page, with the click of a button it allows you to publish information, links, videos, or statements to the Facebook mini feed, that appears on the main page of every single user.
- The best feature on the Fan Page is the insight option. This lets you see exactly where your fans are coming from, their age, there language and so on. You can monitor the growth of your site and see exactly how many page hits your page is getting It’s safe to be said this is still really in the beta stages of production and in the nearby future there will be many more options that will help your develop your marketing strategies and advertising campaigns.
- Another thing to note is that you can send personal private messages to your member’s inbox. The Fan Page allows you to target particular demographics i.e.: members in Manchester, those who speak Spanish, those who live in USA. You can then send messages to your particular target audience, easy, simply, and most importantly FREE.
- Establishing your brand, updating your page regularly and encouraging growth of your page WILL result in enquires for your business, sales of your products and many more opportunities for yourself and your interests. Connecting with your consumers in the correct manner and finding the right balance for your facebook fan page can really boost your profits and help grow your brand name and ultimately your business.
- Get a Facebook fanpage now. Can’t do it? No time? Not getting the results from the venture that you wanted? Contact me for evident fan page success. Hope you enjoyed the article, hope this content helps and puts a few things into perspective. Nate

29.9.09

Running Adword campaigns and other similar programs

This article was written with google adwords in mind, but the song remains the same for any program when it comes down to the ad writing guide as it is universal. Let me know what you think, this article can really help your business.

Keyword Lists
Simply running a campaign will never suffice as your competitors are spending more and more time focusing on tricks and methods to ensure a higher return of investment. There are many aspects that can be tweaked, many tricks that can be applied in order to utilise your ad spend and guarantee a better ROI.

First things first, you must generate a keyword list that is relevant to your business market. This could consist of 5-10 keywords, but realistically the more avenues covered the better. Once you have a compiled an extensive list, using the Google adword tool begin to research which keywords can provide you with the best ROI and most hits per click, more so which keywords will provide you with the most concrete qualified lead for the price of your ad click.

- For example if we wanted to search for a laptop, there are numerous ways a consumer may look for this product online eg. Sony Laptop, Vaio, Sony Vaio,
- Obviously if you specialise in the Sony Vaoi model, then your keywords should focus upon this line of key phrase in order to maximise the quality of each lead/click that you pay for. Thus resulting in more sales.

Next database all your key searches in a excel spreadsheet, using the method devised and incorporate all of the suggestion tools data in order to provide yourself with a thorough system that is easy to understand. Review these tools and update your spreadsheets regularly making sure that you include any information on any new or emerging markets or other less obvious keywords that your competitors may be taking advantage of.

- use a thesaurus to help make these lists extensive as possible
- use modifying words to expand list in front of the best key phrases, such as Cheap/low cost/free/premium/authentic etc. (check suggestions tool)

Obviously you want as many combos and options as humanly possible, you only pay when somebody clicks on your particular ad, so as long as they are qualified to a level you are comfortable with then it’s all good. The more obscure, tricky the better for example the spelling of daimond ring yields over 1000 search enquiries each month, but due to the spelling mistake the advertisers competition does not represent the volume of searches. Finally once you have completed these databases, strategically use them to your advantage, this sort of data and hard work is worth money.

There are plenty of other tricks, so get innovative and really delve into the ad words tool. It’s all free so make the most of it and get the results that you deserve. If you don’t have time to manage your marketing campaigns, please contact me as it is my bread and butter, if you would like a key list drew up for your business please contact me.

28.9.09

Why market my website?

It’s hard for a business owner to get to grips with the thousands of options and opportunities that are available in terms of marketing and branding possibilities. Business owners are reluctant to spend, especially when methods tried in the past have ended up losing your business money rather than hitting the dizzy profit margins promised before your credit card details changed hand. Obviously a business must spend to maintain a presence online, but how do they obtain a tangible return on investment? How and what will get me the best return for my hard earned pound, dollar, euro or rupee? Well, stick with me and let’s find out. Objective opinions and thoughts appreciated, here are some facts, figures and information that emphasises the importance of strategic marketing using the vast array of online resources. I hope to answer a few question’s but many have emerged of my own, so again I would appreciate any input.

• In the last ten years the world has witnessed an unprecedented growth in online spending by consumers that has seen the emergence on new markets and new possibilities for those companies operating online. This has obviously had an impact on Ad spending across the globe that has witnessed constant growth in all corners of the globe regardless of a world wide recession. Spending has increased 8.9% in 2009 with Ad spending 25.7$ billion in US alone. Further increases are forecasted for 2010 of a similar margin.

• We have witnessed a transition where now the principle tool to source information about products and service is now the internet. Yellow pages, yell.com, online directories are falling prey to search engine dominance and they are losing there share and prominence in the market. With competition principally coming from Google, as the world’s number one search engine with over 1 billion searches a day, all elements of online strategy and budgeting must be devised with Google in mind from the outset.

• Online spending by the average Joe has increased due to better security, comfort and ease. The EBay phenomenon literally got the world accustomed to buying anything and everything online before online fraud flourished and hindered opportunity and spam and scam became the most common association with any online options. Nowadays transactions from your bank to Tesco to EBay to bingo to anything are an everyday occurrence. Often occurring numerous times a day, hundreds of times for many. The security issues were ironed out and the exponential growth continued regardless of any recession. We are now left with the biggest advertising and marketing medium in the universe.


• Constant and consistent growth in online marketing spending, advertising and results, results speak for the expenditure growth.

• We have also seen a strange underestimated change regards whole and future generation’s social trends. This change in human behaviour has resulted in the emergence of social networks such as Myspace and Facebook, but not only this forums, online communities and virtual worlds consumes the majority of spare time. This is the reason why Facebook was recently valued at over $12 billion dollars, the potential success of it’s advertising and marketing credentials are undoubted within the industry for the right consumers. http://www.webtrafficagents.com/WebSiteValue/www.facebook.com

• In the past ten years the majority of advertising mediums, selling platforms and so forth have seen a drastic decline in growth and sales. Businesses all around the world have been forced into administration and even many familiar PLC and household names have fell victim to the times. However businesses with a powerful online presence or those that rely on online spending or usage have flourished during volatile conditions, illustrating how online business spending isn’t just a luxury to those with money to burn but a necessity. The key is getting it right.

• In a survey conducted by www.shop.org 80% of business owning respondents look to invest in search engine marketing, 65% will look to utilise email marketing, 60% will begin or further there embrace of social network marketing and 90% of the 5000 sample have said they will look to increase their budget for online marketing next year. Get involved.

Thanks for reading, any comments and ideas on how I can improve article writing would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Nate.

25.9.09

Google, Yahoo and Bing - and a little about me

Google, Yahoo or Bing? - Nate Lauder – Online Marketing Jungle

First things first this is me blogging about what’s going on online at the moment. Changes or things that are happening around the world that are of interest to myself and relevant to my objectives and goals. I hope you enjoy reading my opinions and sharing your thoughts and ideas everybody associated with the Online Marketing Jungle 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Online-Marketing-Jungle/145067269244?ref=mf

Please take the time to visit and join the fan page and follow the blog if you enjoy the content. If you require any further help or want to ask any questions then please mail gotguanxi@googlemail.com

Other than that, enjoy this free article and let me know what your opinions about the subject. How have you planned for this? How will affect your online strategy? What will you look to change next year?

So here’s a little piece I wrote about Google, Yahoo and Bing, the worlds three largest search engines in case you didn’t know. If your thinking, wait a minute Nate you idiot. There’s 1000’s of search engines out there what are you playing at? Yes, you’re right, but let’s be honest with the big three comprising over 90% of the 10.8 Billion monthly, I’d be wasting our time talking about any of the others. In terms of marketing, advertising, presence and importance, these are the big boys and if you if concentrating on other engines (yes I can appreciate a small argument for AOL) then I’d be interested to know which ones and how come 

As we all know, Google is still the main player in terms of dominance within the search engines, commanding an impressive figure of close to 65% of the market share with over unique searches every single day. In August 2009 there were just shy of 7 Billion unique page searches in the US. The main ways of generating revenue from Google is using Ad Sense and the best way to market your business online in my opinion is using Google Ad Words. It takes a brave business owner to focus their marketing efforts solely on Yahoo or Bing but I have known a few to concentrate their efforts on Yahoo alone and get good results, however – they are braver friends than I and I would not recommend not focusing on Google prominently unless it is detrimental to your market. Even with a new name emerging it’s worth noticing that Google gained another 2.6% growth throughout the duration of the month.

Yahoo had 16% of the market by the end of last month with 1.7 Billion searches but August saw a decline of over 4% in their overall share in a month that saw a 2.9% increase in market size as a whole. At the end of the day for the time being it’s still important in my opinion to bestow at least one chapter of your strategy to both Yahoo and especially Bing. To monetise your interests consider the use of www.publisher.yahoo.com. Yahoo may be a flailing engine but it still has an important place in the market and even considering optimisation could be beneficial to those hunting in the right markets. For example I have witnessed first hand a lot of success within the Horoscope Reading / Hypnotherapist markets on both Yahoo and the old school Msn engine. Don’t underestimate the value of Yahoo, but likewise, ensure you don’t concentrate to much of your efforts marketing there either. Find a balance that suits you and is profitable, if you don’t know how to do this, you know who to ask 

Bing launched only in June 2009 although it is essentially a progressive version of Windows Live it has witnessed excellent results. In August as illustrated by the graph below we can see there was a huge growth of over 20% and they received over 1.1 Billion unique search results. What’s particularly interesting about this is Microsoft’s marketing campaign which has seen massive growth since the launch in June, if they continue at this rate, Yahoo will undoubtedly be forced into third place and Google could finally have a legitimate competitor in the market and their will be a shift in change from a monopoly to duopoly, potentially in the matter of months.

What more, Bing has features that Google currently can simply not compete with and many a boffin has been drooling over some of the applications that Bing provides. Here is a great article that gives a great indication of what you could be missing out on..

http://mashable.com/2009/09/19/bing-extras/

Great blog by the way, one of the best. It takes a foolish marketer to admit when they can’t compete with somebody else, but these guys really know what their talking about. If you don’t follow the Mashable blog I sincerely suggest you start. (I’m not affiliated in anyway before you ask.)