Kaizen Internet Marketing Santa Barbara

More and more, popular icons for the top social media sites are showing up under such standards as the search site box. And Facebook widgets are ever more common that allow you to become a fan of a brand or business directly from your website. Suddenly, everyone is talking about social marketing. Is it a fad? Is it hype? Is it worth the trouble? I’m going to tell you right now why it IS important and why your business may depend on getting it right. See also: Fantastic Fan Pages

Why is social media important?

With nearly 400 Million active users, Facebook is now the size of the country of Germany, and adding over 1/2 Million new users per day! Twitter is not as big but is also growing fast.  The phenomenal growth of these online giants ultimately reflects our compelling desire  to connect with each other around common interests. AND it presents a whole new paradigm for communicating and selling online.

The old distinctions of B to B and B to Consumers are not as meaningful anymore as everyone from the janitor on up to the CEO is on Facebook, swapping news and stories with friends. Ultimately, people do not buy from companies, they buy from people and social media can put a more informal, hip and personal face on an otherwise impersonal company.

As successful online marketers such as Frank Kern and Jeff Walker have discovered and proven with testing, folks hate to be sold to, but they love to buy from a trusted friend or advisor. I would add that they especially hate to be sold to by a huge, faceless, impersonal corporation, who doesn’t understand them or give a hoot about them. But give them true value for free via social media and other forms of  direct communication, building both trust AND desire, and they will LOVE to buy from you.

The True Value of Social Media

This is the true value of social media for your online presence. In an era of greater transparency and authenticity, social media is rapidly delivering a new standard of interacting more person to person, even if it’s just one person in your company who is chosen to be the active “face” in that realm. If you update a blog regularly, you can auto update both Facebook and Twitter from your blog posts, so it doen’t have to take a bunch of time. Don Crowther, social media guru, says a highly effective social media strategy can take just 20 minutes a day. NOTE: And you cannot, must not sell directly or blatantly spam your follows, or they will unfollow you quickly.

Getting started and doing it right does take some work, especially to standardize your brand across the big 3 social media sites – your face or brand needs to be consistent on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube and each site requires a bit of customization to achieve this.

Also, Facebook especially can do all sorts of cool tricks with their version of HTML called FBML, including a custom landing page for non-fans with your email opt-in form embedded.

See also Fantastic Facebook Pages for more on our Facebook Page design services.

WE CAN HELP! Kaizen Marketing social media services start at just $500 for a fully customized social media presence. Contact us to get started right away. Social media is important partly because it can help you present a human face to human buyers of your product or service to help you sell MORE of your product or service.

See also Facebook Ads – the new kid on the block is a serious competitor to Google adwords and can target demographics in ways Google cannot touch. Wanna show ads only to middle aged men in California whose favorite book is “Think and Grow Rich”? For just 50 cents per click? You can now do it. Within a few hours.

Call for a free consultation at 805-403-1128

Of course, I just also added this post to my Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin streams with one click using a handy service called Yoono – I recommend it. Use it to quickly send shortened URL sites with your comments to your friends.

In this example, Twitter and Facebook links hold an honored spot next to Authorize.Net.

Tags: adwords, communicate, criticism of facebook, customization, Facebook, facebook features, media services, online social networking, paradigm, sell online, social information processing, true value, web 2.0, why social media

Bob Serling explains well why most online traffic sources are unreliable at best: you have no way of knowing whether they are tire kickers (most of them) or buyers. Another mistake many businesses make it treating everyone on their list the same. A buyer is exponentially more valuable than a looker and Bob offers an easy way to tell them apart and segment your list to devote energy to the right group. Makes perfect sense.

So here it is: the reason why these methods (and so many other lead generation and traffic generation methods) fall flat on thier faces is that… drumroll please… there’s no way to tell if the prospects you attract are buyers or tire kickers.

But here’s the important part: if you can’t clearly identify people who have an actual history of buying a product similar to yours, you’re wasting the majority of the time, effort and money you invest in lead and traffic generation.

Continue reading…

Tags: segmenting list, traffic sources, Web Traffic

What is the dynamic landing page?

The SpeedPPC methodology is developed by Jay Stockwell who is a qualified AdWords Professional.

Dynamic landing pages are a practical way to insert and change content automatically, in response to a search query, so that you can offer the most relevant content to the searcher.

The dynamic landing page is one template, so rather than having thousands of pages that you need to upload and host – it’s simply one page. First, you need to start with a base landing page template that follows Google’s landing page guidelines. By making this template dynamic, you’re simply automating the relevancy required in Google’s guidelines, making what would be unfeasible manually, easily and quickly achievable.

For example, if you sell widgets and a searcher is looking for “blue widgets”, then they would see blue widgets in the ad shown and when they click through, they also see that the page is about “Blue Widgets” – in the page title, meta tags and content. Same for “Green widgets” – in either case, a single dynamic landing page delivers a highly relevant page, improving both Googles quality score AND conversions of visitors to buyers, as the visitors will see EXACTLY what they were looking for. (This assumes your company actually sells both blue and green widgets and if you’re in the widget business, you really should)

A great starting point is if you already have a web site with an existing format that you want to use. Once you’ve got the base template, then you can tweak it to target the actual content of the page dynamically.

Where the dynamic landing page fits with your website

If you’re using your existing web site format for the base template, the dynamic landing page may look like part of your web site.

It may share the same domain name and link back to your main site from the template, riding on the same page rank. Using the same format, it may also have some of the same links, such as About Us or Privacy Policy.

However you won’t be directing any organic or direct traffic to this page. It’s a completely dedicated landing page for pay per click campaigns solely. For example, your main site might be: www.yourwebsite.com an your PPC landing page may be: www.yourwebsite.com/index.php

Direct and organic traffic go to your main website, whereas the dynamic landing page URL is only used in your PPC campaign URLs. Often the dynamic landing page template will be index.php, while the main web site remains .html as it requires a .php page to pass the dynamic content through to the page.

How it synchronizes with your PPC campaign

We use a program called SpeedPPC to automatically synchronize your PPC campaigns with your dynamic landing page template. It works by passing the dynamic content values through the URL, using something called tokens.

For example, if your PPC landing page URL is: www.yoursite.com/index.php, you can pass the values through to customize the page like so:

www.yoursite.com/index.php?seed=widgets

Multiple “tokens” can be added like so:

www.yoursite.com/index.php?seed=widgets&expansion=blue&final=blue widgets

In this example, we have the flexibility of using different values to use both separately and together to make your landing page content keyword-rich and natural to read as well.  (“Thanks for your interest in [widgets], the [blue widget] is most popular with users who favor the color [blue]” – you get the idea)

The ultimate effect of lining up your keywords with tightly focused adgroups, coupled with relevant landing pages for each adgroup, is that your quality score goes up, your click through rate (CTR) goes up, your cost per click goes down and your conversions of visitors to buyers goes up. And the beauty of it is, it doesn’t matter if you have 10 keywords or 1000, the dynamic landing page, once set up, will serve up the appropriate page, for both the benefit of the search engines AND your site visitor.

Our PPC services include a very reasonably priced option to set up your campaign using SpeedPPC to take full advantage of the cost saving benefits of the dynamic landing page. We also help you make sure your page follows the Google guidelines to include unique and original content that is relevant to what you are selling.

Contact us for a free consultation to get started.

Looking forward to working with you soon!

BTW, this optimized page on an optmized blog took no effort to rank #1 for this term. See for yourself here.

Wayne Marshall

Tags: adwords, dynamic landing pages, PPC, quality score, relevancy

As a small business owner, you may spend a lot of time and resources attracting new customers and this is important to do. However, there may be a rich vein of gold neglected in your own backyard, while you are busy prospecting elsewhere. It’s a strategy called past customer reactivation. The larger companies are catching on but most smaller companies have not yet done this.

If your business is 2 years old or older, chances are you have customers that did business with you in the past, but have not purchased from you for a while. Usually, this is not because they were unhappy with your product or service but simply because they forgot about you.

A friendly reminder, in the right format and using the right kind of language, has been shown to generate sales and instant profits, sometimes providing a huge boost in revenue.

The Customer Reactivation Method

1) Pull from your database all customers that have been inactive for 6 months or more, but not over 24 months old. These will be recent enough to remember you but inactive for long enough to respond to your letter.

2) Develop a white paper or report offering helpful advise to your target market on a subject of interest to them. This will be a free downloadable PDF that they can get just by going to your website.

3) Select an appropriate product or service to offer at a discount to your inactive customers as a token of your appreciation and to generate instant sales.

4) Craft a simple one page letter, apologize for being out of touch and offer them the free report and discounted product. If possible, use as a template a letter format proven to produce results in various markets. The letter that we use has been tested backwards and forwards and flat out works. We will write this letter for you to include your own offer using this proven template.

5) Find an inexpensive mailing house for printing and sending a one page letter, to reintroduce yourself and your service. [Note: Email campaigns are also possible and can work but is far less responsive than direct mail. The increase in sales more than makes up for the printing and postage costs - about 80 cents total per using the sources we provide you]

6) Set up a custom landing page that allows tracking of these sales through your website. Your webmaster should be able to handle this easily. In your letter, include this custom URL for easy tracking.

This Method Gets Results

Your results may vary but most companies find that at least 30% of inactive customers respond to this type of offer and sometimes response is much higher.

Here is an example campaign using a lower figure of 20%, just to be on the conservative side and using a list of 10,000 inactive customers for easy math. You can estimate your own potential revenue using this formula below:

10,000 inactive customers x .20 = 2000 sales x $150 (average sale value) = $300,000 in new revenues

Less printing and postage (est $6,400) and your overhead and you can calculate your net profit.

Plus, this does not include the additional repeat sales to these customers once you have them back buying from you, and not your competition.

Kaizen Marketing offers full consulting and management services to help you reactivate as many past customers as possible. We help with all the steps outlined above, including writing the letter for you, based on proven language used successfully in previous campaigns. Our fee structure is a small retainer plus a small % of the gross sales for our services. Such a campaign can be run once per year and may represent a significant increase in sales for that year, depending on your business.

Please contact us to schedule a meeting by phone to get started.

Looking forward to working with you soon!

Wayne Marshall
Founder, Kaizen Marketing Service

Tags: advertising mail, customers, entrepreneurship, generate sales, inactive, letter format, lost customers, past customer reactivation, previous customers, reactivation, small business, target market

I’ve been testing this new TextLinks system and have found it highly effective in getting my terms on the first page of Google.

For example, 7 days ago, the term nutrient absorption was at #15 for my client ALL ONE and as a test, I used TextLinks to place links on related health and nutrition blogs (related are the best kind) and wrote one short article focusing on the keyword. Today the blog post is #5 for that competitive term – out of over 600,000 pages! No other SEO or link building was done during this time.

See search results for “nutrient absorption”

This from their site:

TextLinks.com offers a new way to create quality, relevant backlinks to your web site for a low one time fee of $1 each for sub page links and $3 for home page links. These are one time fees and the links are permanent. The real power of our unique system is the ability to add your link to any of over 10,000 Google indexed blogs. These are quality blogs, each with a separate domain name, hosted on over 120 Class C IP networks. In fact, over 800 of these blogs have a Google PageRank of 1 or higher.

Each of your text links can be managed from a simple user control panel which will allow you to search and browse for the best and most relevant blogs on which to add your text links.

We offer 4 different types of text links to choose from:

• Contextual Links
  Contextual text links allow you to create text links within existing text on blog posts published on our network of over 6000 blogs. Click the “add target page” button to enter the Title (anchor) and URL you want your links to point to (you may add multiple target pages). Once a target page is added, click the “select links” button to do a real time search of available keyword(s) with over 100,000 published blog posts.
• Blog Posts Links
  Blog post links allow you to write articles/posts which can be posted to one or more of over 10,000 blogs. You may include up to 3 text links within each article/post and there is a minimum word count of 100 words. Once you have created the article/post, click “post article” to select which blogs you would like to publish to.
• Sidebar Links
  Sidebar text links will appear on the right column of each blog you select. Click the “add target page” button to enter the Title (anchor) and URL you want your links to point to (you may add multiple target pages). Once a target page is added, click the “select links” button to begin adding text links.
• Footer Links
  Footer text links will appear at the bottom of each blog post you select. Click the “add target page” button to enter the Title (anchor) and URL you want your links to point to (you may add multiple target pages). Once a target page is added, click the “select links” button to begin adding text links.

You can do it yourself or let us do it for you. Ask about our do it for you program.

Get your copy of TextLinks here.

Yes, it’s an affiliate link and if you buy it after the free trial period, I will make a little money – but you get to try it free for 21 days and can keep the links forever, with no credit card to enter. Cool!

I got my 2nd page to 1st page bump just using the free trial – you can do the same. Check it out!