The Click Depot Blog

Determining a website’s Click Through Rate or CTR is one effective way of measuring how effective an online advertising campaign is. CTR is usually obtained by keeping track of the number of users who actually clicked on a particular ad with respect to the number of times that a particular user has clicked on the ad. There are a number of ways on which you can improve your site’s CTR. Below is an outline of five easy steps to improve CTR without doing anything highly technical or magical.

One

Getting the number of clicks you needed to fully advertise your site would need the use of certain keywords. Yes people, online advertising is all about keywords. The effective use of keywords is one way of inviting people to click on your ad links, which increases your website’s CTR and improve your ad position.

Two

The use of website content keywords is one effective way of drawing more traffic to your website. This is because URL links are embedded through the keywords. Aside from getting high quality and relevant content, your web page needs to use the right color palette for its keyword links or hyperlinks. Blending ad content with bright colors was never effective. People are used to the blue hyperlinks, which consequently is one of the most clicked hyperlink color. Most advertisers use shades of black or grey because very light hyperlink colors make the reader look too long on the URL, which gives readers enough time to realize that it is an advertisement and decide not to click on the link.

Three

Think about putting signup pages to your site’s homepage. Not only will it collect e-mail addresses to accommodate your website’s free downloads, this step will also help you in running a split test, which is helpful in determining which types of freebies your visitors respond well to. This will also help you manipulate your system of delivering marketing copies and messages such as sales letters and email newsletters to your avid visitors, which is also helpful in provoking immediate response and continuous patronage from your target audience.

Four

Putting individual product pages is a great way introducing your visitors to the product or service you are selling. Product pages are essential in motivating your visitors to make the decision to buy. Just make sure that your product pages are attention-grabbing to ensure best results. Not only will this step improve your site’s CTR, it will also help you effectively increase your sales.

Five

Aside from setting up product pages, complementing them with seasonal headlines is one way of getting more people to click on your ads. It does not matter if your product is not seasonal, making use of headlines such as “Easter Sale” or “Christmas Sale” is one effective way of targeting local audience, which in turn serves to your site’s CTR advantage.

Hence, to get quality CTR scores for your website you need to do an effective and dynamic keyword insertion and setup a strategic homepage design and information pages. Not only will these ensure advertising success, it will also help you connect better to your target audience.

Image Courtesy : http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2008/05/

Sometimes when you try something new, it’s completely overwhelming. Autoresponders are no exception, and because of the various facets involved you can find yourself struggling for the reasons behind it all. However, it doesn’t take much to figure them out. All you have to do is get a better understanding for the anatomy that revolves around it.
 
The objective goal for using an autoresponder is to keep in contact with your subscribers. This can be through customer support, daily or weekly newsletters, mini-courses, and several other reasons. Whatever the case may be, it allows you to get on a more personal level and give your readers a chance to trust the fact that you are helping them as much as possible.
 
Customer Sign Ups
 
In the beginning stages a potential prospect will be drawn to your sign up area. This could be due to a free report, gift, or contest, but anything that can help them for free is always a good start. Once they have signed up, your autoresponder will automatically send them their free gift (outside of a contest). This is your starting point to the anatomy of autoresponders.
 
The Feedback
 
Once your new subscriber sees the material and “thank you page,” you can set up your autoresponder to send out a feedback email. This asks your prospect to give you feedback about the free information they received. Now, you can have them email you or your can set up a poll, but this will depend on the amount of subscribers you gain. If you are emailing hundreds of people throughout the day regarding feedback, you’ll want to use a poll.
 
It’s important to send this out about 3 days after your initial email. In doing so you will allow your readers to actually go over the material and let you know how they feel about it. What you don’t want to do is bombard them with constant contact because most will feel as though they are being spammed and will eventually unsubscribe. Using this approach will get them back to your site more often.
 
The Special Offer
 
Once you let about a week go by, it’s time to use the autoresponder again. This time you are going to associate a special offer with it. It won’t be a complete sales pitch, but links will be provided to whatever is you are trying to sell. Basically it brings them back to the website, which of course is the main goal. This should only be done once, then all you can do is wait.
 
The Upcoming Months
 
After you have given out your special offer, the autoresponder should start to dwindle off the progressive emailing. Once you’ve put the sales email out there, you should wait to weeks before sending out another call of action. Then it will be once a month. Eventually you will stop sending out your series, and begin working on something new.
 
During this time you will be able to keep in touch with your prospects and help them along the way. The anatomy of an autoresponder is important to maintain in order to get the best results. In the end you will find yourself with better conversion rates and more subscribers then you ever dreamed. However, it’s the ability to gain their trust that will be the most important achievement for later down the road.

Image Courtesy: http://www.squidoo.com/ultimateautoresponderpro

Marketing for small business often means working with a print company to print some coupons, fliers, postcards, brochures and sending it out to a million people. Of course, you have a website that does nothing for you other than help people find directions to your shop front once in a while. You think most people want to call you anyway so you are OK with that. Well, things have changed.

Small business is not really that easy anymore. Especially in recessions, there are large number of startups from people that have lost their jobs. You need to get creative with your marketing ideas to be able to survive and thrive. And the best part, it’s a LOT of fun. It’s like playing a game of Age of Empires - you plan and implement strategies and gauge results - which means more money! OK, I got a little carried away there - Age of Empires is not as much fun as creative marketing is

So what is creative marketing? Well, it’s trying to stay ahead of the curve. Ten years ago, having a website that was used effectively was creative marketing. Today, that’s a necessity. Creative marketing today is finding ways to reach your clients that few people in your market are doing. Here are some examples:

1. Search Engine Optimization is one such way, which is actually fast becoming  necessity. You optimize your websites for certain key phrases. Create specific content on your site that is targeted at new key phrases that are emerging in your market space. This helps you create new market share on an active ongoing basis.

2. Dynamic businesses thrive in today’s market. Frequent change is liked by customers and they think of you more often that way. You also reach a broader audience since different offers may fly with different people. A new coupon or offer every week on your website or print newsletter.

3. Give stuff away that’s useful in your target market. Easiest way to make inroads in a market that has many players already. Make it fun too. For instance, if you have website, use your developer’s help to create a sweepstakes giveaway that includes  a slot machine. Visitors click on the slots and if they win, they get something from your products or services free. To play, they enter their email - now you can market to them after they leave. Email marketing is not creative marketing anymore - it’s a must. But finding creative ways to get your leads’ email in a safe, non-intrusive manner is where the creativity comes in.

If this sounds like too much work for you, talk to us. We can work out a creative marketing package for you and help you stand out!

As we explained in our previous post, autoresponders are indeed any online or offline business;s best friend. OK, but how do you go about getting started in your Email marketing journey? I have bad and good news. The bad new first - it’s not that easy actually and there are some key decisions you will need to make to make sure you do this right. The good news will come at the end of the article.

Autoreponders come in three flavors depending on who sends out the email.

Desktop Based: You buy a software that installs on your desktop, just like your Office softwre. This inclues Mailoop and PrimaSoft. With these, the email is sent out via your chosen ISP - usually your high speed internet provider such as Cox or Comcast. These are good if your email list is small - few hundreds at the most. If your email list is in the thousands, then you are asking for trouble if you adopt this type of software, unless you are super careful. The problem starts with some subscribers of your mailing list using the “This is Spam” buttons on their emails instead of cleanly unsubscribing from your email list using the unsubscribe link. Once your ISP sees a lot of these spam complaints, they just stop sending your emails or notify you that you need to stop sending your emails and you are pretty much stuck at that point.Most ISP’s limit the number of email that you can send out at once. This is usually limited to a few hundred emails. ISP’s also do not offer much of a service guarantee for your email delivery like some of the hosted solutions do.

Server-based: These are basically software or scripts that you install on your website space. Now the email goes out from your hosting provider’s servers, not your ISP. Leading providers are AutoResponse Plus and phpList (Free). In this case as well, you run into similar issues. Hosting providers have a limit of the number of emails you can send out. This is either a per day or per hour limit. Site5.com for instance has a 500 emails per hour limit and SiteGround.Com has a 400 emails per hour limit. There are some others that are more generous. Third Sphere Hosting, for example, allows 20,000 emails per day, but that’s unusual. Now 500 per hour might sound like a lot to you. But really, over time, it’s easy to get into lists that are in the thousands. Just offer a freebie on your website worth a couple of hundred dollars and you could have a few hundred subscribers overnight. That can be good and bad though. On one hand , you have a list of potential buyers now but on the other hand, a lot of those people will never really buy from you but are there just for the freebies. You really can’t do anything about that problem though. Everyone involved with Email faces that issue. You will have to send email to all your list subscribers at least initially before you can segment them into ones that are VIP’s for you and the regualar masses. Coming back to limits on email delivery, once you exceed these limits, and sometimes, even before that, your hosting provider will ask you to move to dedicated hosting, which is usually hundreds of dollars per month. At that point, most will want to consider using a hosted solution.

Hosted Solution: There are way too many to even list here. The leading providers are Aweber, GetResponse, Mailchimp and iContact. These provides own dozens, and some even hundreds of servers that they use to send out their emails. If one of the servers gets in trouble for spam complaints (which are often not valid), then they can still use others to send out their email. Your email has a much higher deliverability chances when you go with these providers. The downsite, well you get to pay a hefty fee for the reliability promise. The cost can be between $15/month to several hundred dollars per month depending on the size or your list and the frequency of your emails. Cost is not the only issue though. Most of these providers require that each of your subscribers double opt in to your list. In other words, if you bring in a list from either of the above options to a hosted provider, your subscriber base will have to confirm that they want to remain part of your list. For many, including good subscribers, they may just decide not to renew their subscription out of laziness. And that could cost you dearly in the long run.

Our recommendation - go with a hosted provider FROM THE BEGINNING. It can cost a bit higher, but you will have your bases covered and potentially save a lot of time and trouble in the long run.

Autoresponders are that little piece of software that most online businesses cannot live without. They help automate, and in fact, envigorate your communications with your customers and leads. If this is not sounding familiar to you already, then you really should be worried right now, and here’s why:

1. Most online businesses make at least 50% of their sales through their Email list. That means that regardless of how many visitors you have to your website, unless you have a email list of potential leads, you are probably missing out on at least 50% of your sales opportunity. We work for a client that actually does 100% of their sales through Email Marketing and direct mail and almost none via their regular website visitors that come in from search results and Adwords. That’s because in their niche, people don’t often buy on their first visit, and need to be reminded multiple times before a sale is made. Another one of our clients has a website that gets almost 50K visitors per month, many of which are paid clicks from Adwords. He promotes several products on his site and gets paid each time a product that he promotes is sold (typical affiliate marketing). Sounds like a business model, right? You pay for clicks and sell product. Not quite. If that is all he did, he’d actually be losing money. instead, he makes aorund $20K per month. How? He builds an email list via this website and promtes a related coaching service to them via Email marketing. Now, that’s smart and that’s precisely how important autoresponders are to you as well.

2. Autoresponders and Email is immediate. Almost no other form of marketing can boast of that. Direct mail, TV, Radio, Cold calls, all have a lag. Email on the other hand is almost immediate. For some of our clients, we see sales within seconds of sending out an email blast. That’s how responsive the list if you build it carefully.

3. Email marketing is a great way to get feedback. In most businesses, entrepreneurs do not have the luxury of trying out their product and getting feedback before putting the product out. With a loyal email list, you can put out early prototypes or just get a survey or poll result to know whether the product is likely to fly with that crowd. What a useful thing!
Now that you know how useful Email marketing can be, the next step is to pick your Email Marketing Software. Unfortualtely, that can be a pretty time consuming complicated decision to make. And for reasons explained here, it’s one of the most imporatant ones you will make for your business.

OK, you have a hundred bucks and want to get the biggest online marketing bang. What should you do? Unfortunately, here goes the answer that you did not want to hear - it depends. And here’s why.

Depending on what site you have and who your target audience is, this answer is going to be different. So let’s say you are Joe The Plumber in Raleigh, North Carolina. And say you have a website that does not get any sales for you at present. Then, fortunately, you don’t even need $100, you just need your own time to get started.

Go to maps.google.com, maps.live.com and claim your business. Fill out as much information as possible on your profile and then send your business’s link in Google Maps to each customer that you interact with, requesting a review. You might even want to include it in your email signature. Soon, you’ll find people that search the internet for plumbers calling you. $100 can buy you this as well. Just call any good small-medium online marketing company and they can do this for you. Or just hire a college student and most of them will know how to get that done. Once you are done with that, seriously, consider revamping your website and getting a nice-looking, fast-loading, effective, simple website. That’s easier said than done, but is guaranteed to take your business to the next level. Once you have that website, call the marketing company and ask them to optimize your website for Google. You are on your way to online fame.

Now, if you are a small business that already has a useful good useful website, then the best use of $100/month is to buy a listing with YellowPages.com or even better, a few niche directory in your domain that get a lot of hits. Some other generic sites are superpages.com, infousa.com, Etc. A good way to find how many visitors these sites get is by going ot compete.com and comparing such sites. Listings in good directories are useful in 3 ways. First, people visit these sites directly to search for businesses. Secondly, these sites often have print publications and you can buy space on that as part of the overall contract. Finally, the category pages on these sites often rank well on Google and other search engines. That’s possibly the maximum that you can get from $100 in this situation.

Finally, if you are a small business that’s already popular and on Yellow pages and directories, then the best use of $100 is possibly to get a good online marketing company to optimize your website for keywords that your potential visitors are searching for. This is more like a $100-$500 per month kind of expense, but if they build a sufficient number of quality links pointing to your website, your site will rank well on Google driving targeted traffic to the site. This is an ongoing cost, but also guarantees a good healthy supply of NEW ongoing leads. If you’ve been in business you know that there is always a cost for acquiring a new customer. Doing is this way is possibly the most cost efficient if done correctly.

Hope these tips will help you take your small business to the next level.

Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing are established businesses these days and there are dozens of such firms in every major city in the US. Well, there are many many more online that don’t even have an office or a registered company. These so called Internet Marketers operate from home and some don’t even have a website. Nothing wrong with any of that, except that many of them also end up scamming you. Long story short, they don’t know what they are doing, claim things that aren’t true, make promises that they can’t deliver and overall, end you up in a mess. Unfortunately, many SEO firms are the same way too.

So, how do you know if your Internet Marketer or SEO firm is scamming you?

5. Do they have a website? Is their website optimized for Search Engines?

You will be surprised how many Internet Marketers operate without a website. A company’s website says a lot about how much time and effort they’ve invested into a business. Especially for an Internet business, their website will reflect what they know about the business too. For instance, if their own website is optimized for search engines and is ranking well for their key search term, then that says that the company couldn’t have been formed yesterday and probably has a good track record. That doesn’t guarantee that they will do a good job for you, but at least gives you one more reason to believe that they are real and professional. An easy way to tell if their website is optimized for search engines is to look for the basics - Are their page URL’s full of giggerish or do they have user-friendly words in them? Do their pages load quickly or do they take forever? Take the first few words from the page title on their home page and search using those terms on google. Do you see their website?

4. Is the firm registered with BBB?

BBB - Better Business Bureau is a good place to look for compaints against a company. If your SEO firm has a whole bunch of complaints, they are obviously not a good choice.

3. Do they have “too many” good reviews?

Back in the day, to review any service, all you had to do was go to Google and type <Service name> review. Not anymore. These days, there are tons or sites that write paid reviews. So, chances are that your SEO firm used some of those paid sites to get good reviews. In fact, if you see too many “too good to be true” reviews or testimonials, I would actually take that as a negative.

2. Do they use good SEO and Internet Marketing practises?

Do they use black-hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, Etc.? Do they buy email lists and spam them? Important - where do they stand on SEO ethics? Do they think that it’s OK to get to the top of the search engine by hook or by crook or do they stand by their morals. The reason why this is important is that most long-lasting SEO companies understand the importance of ethics to thier business. There will always be a gray area, but the ‘whiter’ you are, the better your chances of success. The good SEO companies know that. A good way to find out is to suggest to the company that you WANT them to use black hat techniques. If they agree, you’d know.

1. What does their Internal setup look like?

There are way too many “SEO firms” out there that actually have ZERO employees. The one person shops outsource everything. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, it could be a smart business move. Do they have any sales people? How many dedicated resources do they have internally? Do they offer a timeliness guarantee? These questions will help you determine whether the company can meet your SEO and Internet Marketing expectations.

Do not hestitate to ask these questions to your prospective SEO company. Better safe than sorry, right?

Apple, Microsoft and Google inevitably end up locking horns with each other. Apple and Microsoft have been rivals for over 25 years now and it can be said that, for the most, part, Microsoft won the battle of the computer titans. Apple re-invented themselves with their i-vision. ipods, itough, iphone, imac, macbook pro, Etc. and before you knew, Apple was hot again - how many Apple devices do you and your family together have (including old versions that you upgraded)? You might be surprised to see that most families now have more Apple devices than any other hardware manufacturer. But is all that about to change with Google Android and G1? Well, we think YES. And here’s why.

Search is important to Google and we all know that. They are a $100 Billion market-cap company and 95% of that is from search-related revenues. The mobile business is taking off, we know that because in Europe and Asia, which is generally behind the curve on innovation compared to the US, but when it comes to the use of mobile phones, they are way ahead. As US catches up, there is a huge market here that Google will want to tap. Internal sources in Google  bloggers reveal that they are taking this mobile thing VERY seriously. It’s obvious, as people switch to using the mobile phone for more and more of their general internet browsing needs, searches will move to that area and that’s where the money will be as well.

The PC operating system market went to Microsoft, Google wasn’t even born then. But here’s their second chance, and possibly bigger than the first one due to the ready availability of a huge market with limited competition, compared to Microsoft’s challenge of creating a market for their products 20 years ago. This time Google’s biggest competitor is not Microsoft though, it’s Apple!! Yes, iPhones are amazing and are arguably the most advanced cell phones for entertainment purposes out there. Google is releasing the Andriod operating system which takes that to the next level. It packs entertainment features alongside with great search and easy emailing features. Things that most people also want in addition to just pictures and music. They now have it all - the #1 search engine in the world, ($$$) a great mobile operating system (OS) and the G1 phone (Hardware). Sounds like a winning combination to me. Iphones are great, but when search the ‘net on them, you really don’t feel like clicking on ads like you do when searching on the PC. G1 is optimized for Google Search more than any other device.

So, as I saw the new G1 phone advertised on the Google home page and on the Tmobile phone upgrades site, I was forced to think - is this it? Is this going to change everything. If Google ends up capturing a few million people that are G1 fans and can’t stop talking about it and actually start clicking on ads, this could change a lot of things in the search and mobilie advertising market. And we think it will.

So, if you are a small or even large business and like to stay ahead of the curve on markteing, here’s your chance. Invest in mobile and search advertising today..

If you have a company with more than 20 customers and you don’t have an email list yet, you are missing out on the most powerful marketing strategy in the planet. Earlier, we wrote about 3 steps to establish your online presence and social marketing ideas for your small business. Building an email list comes even higher than anything we talked about in those articles.

Despite using email and knowing about the benefits of this technique, many business users choose to ignore it, perhaps due to the lack of time. But here’s why you need to jump into this NOW.

1. People hate spam. Everyone I know already gets more email than they can handle. And it’s only going to get worse. However, there are several niches where people still don’t get the info they need easily. You can enter their address books now and slowly and steadly, using quality articles and newsletters that you send them, build their confidence and the results (more sales) will pay off. If you wait, chances are that someone else (your competitor) will start sending them emails and then when you send yours later, yours is spam. Got the idea?

2. Building a reliable email list takes time: I know a person who has a list of 30000+ people. Every time he feels like making some money, he simply sends the list an email and talks about a cool product with an affiliate link. and there you go, a few hundred dollars almost instantly. But it took him several years to get there and he spent a lot of money trying to advertise his site via search engine optimization to get there. But it pays off now. If you start today, within a year, your list could have a couple of hundred people (at least, even if you don’t do it aggressively).

The best way to start building your list is to GIVE SOMETHING AWAY for free on your website. People love free stuff. Give away a free product sample, discount on a product on your website, a free cruise, a free informational newsletter (though that is losing its charm due to spam), even a free wallpaper or a video that you created. Trust me, people will take it. Of course, the more useful and relevant the freebie is to your visitors, the higher the signup rate usually. And in exchange, you sign them up with their Name and Email. People often always sign up thinking they will unsubscribe from your list once they have the freebie but research shows that if your freebie was good and the following emails are useful, a majority actually stay and become a loyal member of your email list.

There are some very good email list management software out there. My favorites are Aweber and Mailchimp