McIntosh Marketing Blog

Now this is a question that I hear over and over from client’s and co-workers alike.  Everyone wants to know if Affiliate Marketing is not only worth it but if it is really beneficial?  Or what the risks are of marketing for a company and then finding out their unethical?  Just like everything else, it really depends on what products your sign up for and how you market them.

One of the most important things you must do before deciding to market for a company is to inspect the website.  Take your time to check and make sure they have accurate contact information by calling them or looking them up in an online phone directory.  You can also take this time to verify their address.  If you notice the address varies with other listings online then this may be a flag that the business is not legitimate.  This is not always the case as others may be marketing this product as an affiliate as well but the corporate information, address and phone number should all match up regardless.

PAY ATTENTION!!!   You should always make sure their site offers details, images and a full description of the product or service that they are offering.  You are responsible for what you are promoting so it is very important that you educate yourself on the product or service prior to any affiliate marketing promotions.

Always check the sites disclosure on what the charges will be to the users/client’s.  This will show you that there is nothing the company is trying to hide and that it is not a scam.  If there is no disclosure on the site it may be a real good sign to take your business somewhere else.

Next you should search for their company name on Google.  This will show you how well they are ranking currently which can give you some insight on how easy or difficult it may be to market the product.  Like I said, this is just for insight and it may not be accurate for a product that is brand new.  Also at this time you can see what kind of feedback people are giving on the product prior to committing to selling it.  You can see if there are lot’s of customer complaints or satisfaction which can help you make your decision before investing any time or money into it.  You have to be realistic when using this tip to make a decision because many companies will have complaints, regardless of their legitimacy, so you may need to feel them out to see if the complaints are valid.

Allot goes into finding an legitimate affiliate with a good offer besides just how much they pay out.  Always make sure you feel 100% informed about your product so you are totally comfortable prior to selling it.  Confidence and believing in your product truly is the key to increasing your online sales and making your affiliate marketing really worth it!

Now available at TestTube (Youtube’s place to test new features), you can now edit your Youtube videos on their website!

You don’t have to install anything – just go to their site and you can:

• Combine multiple videos into one longer video
• You can trim the beginning or end of it.
• Add soundtracks
• Create new videos and publish them to YouTube without having to upload anything

For example, I have a client right now that created a video where you can hear someone off camera counting down, “3,2,1” at the beginning. With this new utility, that can easily be trimmed off without installing any software. Wow.

This wacky video explains it pretty well:

While BP struggles with the citizens of the Gulf Coast to survive the America’s worst environmental disaster, BP is also attempting to stage a reputation management onslaught with the help of Google and Yahoo, via purchased keywords.

When American’s type in these keywords, “oil spill” on Google or Yahoo, each of their page one results will direct one’s attention to BP’s “Gulf of Mexico response”, their official page spinning BP’s version of their attempts in controlling this epic spill.

Google and Yahoo have become an immediate and easily accessible resource for American consumers to search for related information in any crisis situation.

While a host of companies resort to this strategy in crisis situation, BP and its CEO, Tony Hayward,  have received harsh criticism from many outsiders, as well as President Obama, who have openly condemned BP’s reputation management move as questionable.

Reputation management has become a vital and integral part of any company’s online marketing strategy, with the rapid transparency that can expose one’s weak spots or outright blunders. In their book, Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, authors Andy Beal & Judy Strauss point out that social media has radically changed how companies need to engage in PR.

And BP is not the only major oil company that appreciates the need for reputation management and PR. This video from Chevron shows how important their spin is and this video shows clearly why.

Although I have had the pleasure to read many helpful books on marketing, this is my first book review on our company blog. And I am quite happy to announce that I had a great time reading Halligan & Shah’s newest book entitled, Inbound Marketing: Get Found using Google, Social Media and Blogs. The foreward was written by internet marketing author David Meerman Scott, so I knew that I was in for a treat.

Both authors are top executives at Hubspot, a true industry leader in internet marketing and social media. For the last few months I have been following Hubspots’s blog postings via Facebook.

Not only was this book an easy read, it was highly educational in that it provided contemporary examples and several analogies that made their point come across with little effort on my part to discern any aspect of what they were describing. I purchased this 215 page book last week and had  it read, cover to cover, in 5 evenings of part-time study. Yet this book was full of many applicable ideas and technologies.

What I really loved about this book were the checklists at the end of each chapter. This added a simple “To Do” list that I feel inspires others to act within the pragmatic aspects of internet marketing tools that they clearly lay out in their book.

The book is simply about the basics and how to get them implemented to achieve results, namely being found. I learned a tremendous amount regarding:

• How Barack Obama really won, using social media successfully.
• How The Grateful Dead served as an excellent prelude on how to succeed as an internet marketer.
• How to build a “content factory”.
• How to do a blog correctly and how to get found, as well as knowing the #1 reason why they fail.
• How social media can fit within the B2B sales model to increase customers and sales.
• How to pick keywords and using PPC as a beta-testing method to narrow the right terms.
• What affects link value and what not to do so as not to become banned by Google.
• Basic usage tips with social media giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, YouTube and StumbleUpon.
• How to covert visitors into leads, and leads into sales.
• What one should look for in a PR agency.

And lastly, I was highly appreciated the last chapter entitled, Tips from the Trenches for Startups, that gives 26 steps on how to implement all that was detailed about in their book. I consider this book more than just a great read, but an important resource in helping any trying to increase their B2B results with internet marketing.

As reported at the Official Google Blog, Google has revamped the way they store and process their search results.  Although the change has been in testing since late last year, it is now live for everyone.

When you search Google, you really weren’t searching in real-time.  Meaning, the results you would get could be weeks old.  In many cases this is ok, but in news, sports, and the age of twitter, it certainly is not.

Caffeine is Google’s handling for that.  Caffeine both expands Google’s ability for storage and allows them to show results extremely fast.

What this means for those of us that produce content (like this article) is that it will show up in Google’s search results much faster.  This gives searches the best results possible, and us content owners the ability to get traffic much faster on the content we are writing.

Who would of thought that one of the people I would be helping would have a home based business, literally.

Pattie McDonald and her husband, a retired postmaster, rent their beautiful home for vacations nestled in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. http://www.lakeozarksvacationrental.com/. Per Pattie, the vast majority of her new business comes from those who find her vacation rental in various online vacation directories, many of which come from those who live in neighboring Illinois. Directories are just one of many internet marketing tools that can be utilized as an inexpensive marketing tool for a home based business.

In discussing what Pattie needed, I could see that a lot of terminology was being thrown out at her, but no one really took the time to educate her on how to use additional internet marketing tools that are simple, and most often free. For instance, I told Pattie that she could geo-target her online marketing and advertising by doing something very similar with Craigslist.org. By posting her ad and link on the “vacation rentals” line in the HOUSING section of the Craigslist home page. http://www.craigslist.org.

I found out that Pattie had a new web site, but did not have a blog imbedded within it. Not only is a blog a great way to continue to build original content, so key for SEO purposes, but it is a great avenue to share news and your passion for something as beautiful as a vacation home in the Ozarks. Her blog now becomes a funnel for information about fishing, local activities, special prices, amenities and much more. To build your ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, it is important to continue to build a continuing stream of relevant and consistent original content. And without question, blogging is one’s best bet to grow organically in search engines.

Pattie’s success will come about by simply doing the following:

• Continue to submit to vacation type directories.
• Geo-target her marketing by submitting ads with free online classifieds, such as Craigslist, Kijiji.com and Backpage.com.
• Get a blog installed within the web site. We recommend this is done on a WordPress format.
• Blog often; at least once a week. Ensure that your blogs contain original content.
• Ensure that your blogs on registered with top blog directories. http://blog.sponsoredreviews.com/?p=47
• Install your web site with more popular social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Make sure your blog submits to these automatically.

Any home based business can use simple internet marketing tools, such as blogs, free online classifieds and social media to generate a huge amount of traffic and thus long-term profitability.

AdWords is deceptive.  Where as programming a website appears complicated and a subject most people would never attempt, AdWords seems approachable.  But in programming, you learn from your mistakes and never lose a penny.  AdWords mistakes, on the other hand, can cost thousands of dollars and can incur penalties that can never be overcome.

I find myself asking the same AdWords questions to every potential client.  In the hopes of improving everyone’s campaigns, I will list my general questions here, along with the typical answers I receive.

1.  Are you happy with your results?  Is your campaign profitable?

Normal Answer:  “Not really – no.” I haven’t spoken to a person yet that was happy with their results, although I have seen profitable yet wasteful ones. I have seen one client throwing away thousands of dollars a week.  That account had so many things wrong that I just told them to turn their account off.

2.  Who set up your AdWords account?

Normal Answer:  “I/We did.  Why?”

If the client set it up themselves, that tells me that there are most likely penalties or mistakes that need to be fixed.  It also gives me an idea of their skill level and what the rest of the answers to my questionnaire would be.

3.  What is your quality score?

Normal Answer:  “What is ‘quality score’?”

(This is a number from 1 to 10 that measures the “quality” of a given ad)

Most clients don’t know where this information is since Google hides this information from view.

If the quality score is below 7/10,  you are incurring penalties and don’t even realize it (see chart)

4.  Where are you sending people that click on your ads?

Normal Answer:  “Our home page”. The correct answer, of course, is a dedicated landing page for the specific keyword group.

If you sell computer supplies, you may have a keyword group called “keyboards”.  You would then want to send someone to the web page:  http://www.mydomain/keyboard which shows them all your keyboards, NOT to your home which makes them take an additional step to find what they need.

5.  What is your CTR (Click-Through-Rate)?

Normal Answer: “Not good – less than 1%”. By itself, this statistic doesn’t mean much.  Usually, the higher the CTR, or the higher the number of users click your ad vs. just look at it, the better your Quality Score, the cheaper your ad cost, and more profitable your campaign.

6. What is your conversion rate?

Normal Answer: “What is conversion rate?” (This is the ratio that measures the number of people that complete a purchase or signup to a newsletter vs. the amount of people that just click your ad and do nothing.)  Since understanding conversion rate is paramount to having a successful keyword campaign, this is a bad sign.

Once you have enough conversions, you can start to weed out keywords that under-perform, and find more that do.

7.  What are you setting as your “goal” to base your conversion on?

Normal Answer:  “When they buy our product.” This is a legitimate solution, however, we additionally always try to capture the “lead” goal so that we can capture the users identity so that we can email them later if they don’t complete the purchase.

8.  How many ads do you have running for each ad group?

Normal Answer:  “One.” You should always be running at least 3 ads for a given ad group.  At any given time, you can throw out the worst performing one and replace it with one you hope will beat the other two.

9.  What is your budget?

There is no correct answer to this question.  This is just to flesh out whether they are turning their account on or off repeatably (a big no-no), or hitting their maximum limit for the day at 2 AM.

10.  Are you using negative keywords?

Normal Answer: “Huh?”  Negative keywords allow you to NOT bid on certain words that show up in a phrase.  A common problem are song or band names.  You may want to bid on the keyword “cocaine” as in “cocaine abuse”, but you don’t want “cocaine clapton mp3”.

A major part of optimizing a campaign is finding and using negative keywords to limit any wasted funds.

Google just announced several changes to their search engine results page.  Many of the new features were already available, but they were not showing by default.  You had to manually turn them on to see them.

When doing search engine optimization analysis for clients we often used some of Google’s optional features to research keywords and topics important to our customers and readers.  Now tools like the “Wonder Wheel” and “Related Searches” are available to everyone with one click just to the left of Google’s regular search results.

Here’s a video from Google showing these changes and where the tools we use for search engine optimization analysis:

Here’s a quick link to Google’s official blog post explaining all about it:

Google’s Blog Post About Changing Search Engine Results

You must follow certain rules in writing a good Google Ad. Many people have made the mistake of stuffing keywords to find out that this strategy can be costly by attracting the wrong types of public who are not inclined to buy or take action.

From our experience with Google AdWords, SEO and SEM, these are key points to follow:

1. Your grammar, spelling and punctuation must be perfect. Capitalize the first word in each sentence.
2. Provide four lines of text with no pictures.
3. Your first line must be limited to 25 characters.
4. Be as specific and precise as possible.
5. Lines two and three must be 35 characters each.
6. Use keywords twice more when possible.
7. Tell users why they MUST have your product. Have a “call to action”.
8. Cite statistical information and facts.
9. When you are selling something, include the price.
10. Use your third line for a “call to action”.
11. Line four is for your destination URL. You must place your URL within the ad itself.
12. Sell your benefits with power words and hot buttons.
13. Write in simple, everyday words.
14. You must utilize keywords within the ad itself.
15. Test, Test and Test. Place many ads simultaneously and test which is best.

Google Ads can be a powerful and profitable means to driving people to your website and to generate a lot of sales and profits. Use them right and you will find that your Google Ads strategy could be your biggest edge against your competition.

The Big Three has meant for decades, “GM, Ford and Chrysler”. But with their problems comes the next evolution of that term, particularly when talking about web marketing, SEO and SEM.

The Big Three in the internet marketing world is Facebook, Google and YouTube. Make it big with these three media giants and you will make it big in business. Let’s be real. Facebook is social media, Google is how you find almost anything and YouTube is the new TV. Hopefully you are gearing your mind-set, your marketing budget and how you interface with the world’s newest Big Three.