This is a short post, but I had to get it out there. I received my weekly Best Buy email newsletter yesterday and was very intrigued by the advertisement. It advertised $800 off for a Sony Flat Panel TV. I am in the market to purchase one, so I clicked on the link.The email itself was very well done:

So, I clicked the most logical choice, “Shop Now” as I wanted to see what kind of great deal I was about to get. This is the body of the landing page that I landed on:

Do you see what the major problem here is? No where on this advertisement does it get me to start shopping for my TV. Great, you sold me on the offer in the newsletter, I click on the offer, and you simply list the boring details of the offer, and gave me no link to the TV’s or packages that fall under this offer? Really?

This could have been a HUGE success with a simple “Shop for this Offer Now” Button and then display the packages, with easy links to purchase. Instead, they have made it too diffcult to understand what you are getting and where you are getting it at.

Moral of the story is this. Email newsletters convert at a very low rate. You have too many filters:

Filter 1: Get them through the Spam Filter. If it gets through their spam filter -

Filter 2: Get them to open the damn thing. If they do this….

Filter 3: How do you get them to click on an offer? If you get them to get past step 3, then you are looking good on conversion. Unless you did what Best Buy did above.

Filter 4: If you get them to click on the offer and hit your landing page….THEN YOU BETTER SELL THEM!!! Make it easy for them to locate the offer they obviously liked. Get them to purchase it.  If purchasing is too complicated and requires assistance, then make it easy for them to fill out a lead form, contact button, etc.

Follow those rules and your email marketing newsletter will convert!!

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One of the big changes in advertising for Small Businesses is that they are dumping the yellow pages and going online. When I talk to small businesses, they think this means dumping the yellow pages and going to search, or the internet version of the yellow pages. It is not that easy…and small businesses need to get prepared for a more complicated online local advertising landscape.

Before the Internet…
Before the internet, consumers had one choice to find a business. Go into their cupboard and pull out the yellow book and search. It was a pretty simple formula for the small business, the bigger the ad, the more calls and businesses they would get.

After the Internet Explosion..
The internet has changed everything, especially the accessibility of information which has had an enormous impact on consumer behavior. Consumers have learned that they can get information from different sources. They might buy shoes based off of what someone said in facebook but then turn around and buy their shirt from looking on a search engine. Many still get their information from Search Engines and Internet Yellow Pages, some from their piers in Facebook. Others rely on review sites like Yelp and Citysearch. Micro blogging like Twitter will change the ways people go to events, view promotions, etc.

So What is a small business to do?
So given all of this, I am commonly asked by small business owners what they should do. The answer is pretty simple….you have to do it all. No longer can you going to place a single ad in a single source and expect to be successful unless you can pay an agency 6 figures a year to do so. Search Engines are great, and a great first start, but you have to follow that up with all of the other components.

The issue here is how does a small business owner do this? They were used to buying an ad in a single yellow page book that would span all of the communities within a city. To do this online, it would more than bankrupt a small company. For a small business to get strong search engine exposure in all of the communities in San Diego (there are roughly 50 communities) it would cost well over $40,000 a year. And the real problem is that they are not going to get the same call volume and customers they would have received 10 years ago from a similar spend in the Yellow pages. Consumers are too spread out in their searching, and they have too many choices. The internet has really leveled the playing field.

Small Businesses…Do this!
The best advice I could give you is to do what you can on your own, and hire a professional to do the rest. As a general rule of thumb, go by this plan:

1. Search Engine Optimization – Hire a professional firm or SEO consultant to take care of this for you. This is one of the more important forms of online advertising you are going to do and one of the more complex as well. Hire a professional!
2. Review Websites – Manage this yourself. Tap into your customers and offer them coupons if you see their name on a positive review in Yelp, Mojo Pages, etc.
3. Twitter, Facebook – this is all you. I would recommend you hire a social media consultant for a couple of hours to explain how to use this as a platform. Once you learn it, you should use this daily.
4. Paid Search – hire someone to set your campaign up and show you how to run it. A small local paid search campaign is not rocket science, but it does need to be setup correctly.

Most importantly, you cannot settle and get comfortable with what you are doing. The Yellow Page industry was dictated and formed by executives and business people. The internet will continue to change by way of the mass audience…so change will continue to occur at this rapid pace. For you to have a competitive advantage over your competitors, you need to be more aggressive and stay up on change better than him.

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More often than not, we see clients that have given the entire keys to their online business to an online marketing company, web development company, consultant, etc. What I mean by keys is that their vendors, in many cases, control their hosting accounts, analytics accounts, paid search accounts, and in some cases, acting as their domain registrar.

This is a huge problem in the industry. The service companies that I mention above refers these things as “hooks”. Meaning, if you ever wanted to leave them, not pay them, bad mouth them, etc. You would be less reluctant to do so because they can literally shut down your entire business if they want.

Here are the primary accounts you need to have control over. Not just access, but control:

1. Hosting – Hosting is the biggest and most disastrous hook I see. Usually your web development firm will provide a cheap or free hosting. They make this look like a favor, however, unless you have a site with more than 50,000 unique visits a month, hosting is dirt cheap. Go out and get your own hosting at Godaddy.com, HostDepot.com or one of a thousand hosting companies out there and pay for it yourself. NEVER LET SOMEONE ELSE CONTROL YOUR HOSTING PLATFORM. You will soon regret it. If you ever wanted to leave them, they could hold your website files hostage and you would have to pay another company to redevelop it.

2. Domain Registrar – this is a huge mistake. If you do not control your registrar account, then you don’t control your company. It is $7.00 a year for a domain. Pay it yourself, make sure you control it.

3. Analytics – In most cases, I am referring to Google Analytics. When your Google Analytics account is setup, make sure it it under your Google ID. Development and Marketing companies will usually set this up under their account and grant you access. HUGE mistake as if you ever dump them, kiss your valuable analytics data good-bye!

4. Paid Search Accounts – If Paid Search (Adwords, Yahoo Search, Microsoft Ad Centers) is a valuable part of your business (and it should be), then you need to make sure your online marketing company is managing YOUR account versus using their own account. The history of your account is going to give you a lot more leverage when buying traffic, and if you left your marketing company, all that history would be sent down the tubes and you would be starting over. This could costs you tens of thousands of dollars.

5. Local Accounts – Most local search engines (Google Local, Bing) have you setup an account to list your business in their local maps. This is a huge source of free traffic and is growing in importance. The issue is that if you use an outside marketing company to do this, they are probably going to list you under their account. If you walk, they can simply delete your listing and you will be deleted from the search engines. Make sure that your online marketing company is submitting and listing your business in an account that you control.

When you confront your online marketing company with any of the above issues, they are going to start using words like “Proprietary technology” “Secret Sauce” “Verified Accounts”, etc. then you have an issue. If they say anything other than “No problem, we are happy to do that for you” then I would go get a good attorney and start the legal process. As if they don’t want to give you the keys to your own car, there is some mal-intent on their side.

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Google continues to widen their reach when it comes to offering its own services to visitors. Google used to simply be a search engine that would organize and serve information from across the web to its audience. Times are changing, quicker than I have ever seen, and Google wants to be in control of more transactions online. Many of their efforts have not come into fruition…yet, but they could very easily. They now serve up movie times (sorry Fandango and Hollywood.com). They started to offer up MLS listings (sorry real estate search sites) It was recently announced that they are going to compete with Lending Tree by offering up loan quotes to their audience. They are one of the main reasons why the Yellow Page books are glorified doormats with the efficiency of their local search platform. The list goes on.

In many ways, what they have done is good, as it puts the competition on its toes. But I am starting to lose sleep (and I am sure many other are) in the fact that they could turn a switch and be the only business, in business, for many industries. How, you ask?

80% of people find business, ideas, movies, restaurants, plumbers, through the search engines. Google owns almost 70% of the search space. So in essence, they control which sites people go to 55% of the time. They decide where people will go, what companies they will do business with. That is some really crazy power.

What if Google decided that CitySearch was too close of a competitor to Google Local? If they removed them from their index, Citysearch would be impacted to the point that the probably wouldn’t be around in 2 years. Citysearch is not, and never will be a destination website, they are only used when someone needs to find something in a particular city. I would venture to guess that a lions share of their traffic comes from the organic and sponsored results from Google. If Google removed them, Citysearch dies.

Google could do this same thing to many huge online companies. Wikipedia, gone without Google. Local.com, gone without Google. Lending Tree, gone (or at least severely impacted) without Google. I could create a list of thousands of companies, big ones, that would die if Google decided so.

What about retail? I don’t know how you can quantify it in terms of actual dollars, but Google decides where billions of dollars are spent online. With the exception of Amazon and some big offline brands, Google, for the most part, dictates where someone is going to make a purchase. If they decided to form a true competitor to Amazon, they could and within a year in business would probably have the same revenues as Amazon.

This is a monopoly. Quite possibly the biggest monopoly the world has ever seen. A monopoly way beyond a search engine. It is a monopoly on business in general. The government must see it, investors must see it. Google could very easily be a threat to business more than it is an asset.

What would your business do if Google simply did not let you or your competitors compete? I get sick just thinking about that.

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The new big word thrown out in the internet marketing world is performance-based marketing. This is when a client pays only for the performance of the company. Many interactive firms are moving to this model because it is an easier sell to the client. While in some instances performance-based contracts can be win-win, often they are not.  It is not always better to hire a performance-based marketing company for your service or product. It all depends on how the contract is setup. Here are a couple of things to look out for:

1. Are they obligated to do the same work they would if you were paying them? Most of the time, the answer is NO. Most performance based contracts side to the vendor and simply state IF they get you XX performance, then you owe them money. If they don’t, you don’t owe them money. This sounds fine and dandy, but its not. Your company needs services performed on a daily basis, regardless of profitability to your agency. I will draw an analogy from the network marketing world. Just because someone signs up for to sell products on a contract basis, doesn’t mean they are going to. They will make a few calls, mostly the easy ones to people they know, and if they sell something, great. If they don’t sell to this small group, 99% of the time they wont sell anything. PERFORMANCE BASED MARKETING COMPANIES ARE TYPICALLY THE SAME. If your campaign is complicated and requires more effort than normal, chances are you wont get that extra effort and therefore, nothing ends up happening on your campaign. So great, you have a CPA deal with a vendor, but nothing happens and your business goes no where. The opportunity loss in this case is enormous.

2. Performance-based SEO campaigns - this is where I often see bad deals happen. Nothing is more crucial to an online company’s success than SEO. You need to make sure certain things are happening each month in order to gain rankings. Most performance-based SEO campaigns that I see are pathetic to say the least. These companies will bring on as many clients as they can, do the least amount of work possible, and bank on 10% of them achieving results and paying them. The 90% of the remaining companies simply never get ranking and the losses that result far outweigh what it would have cost to hire a legitimate firm to perform a legitimate campaign.

3. Performance-based PPC campaigns - All to often we run into companies that currently have a ppc campaign being ran on a 100% Cost per acquisition basis. While this sounds great on the surface, all too often they are paying their vendor way more than needed. This is especially true with larger clients that have a large offline push. The PPC vendor will normally buy up the low-hanging fruit terms like branded terms and long tail terms that result from their offline advertising. When they are spending their own money they are unlikely to push the envelope to find your true paid search potential. If you are going to go with a performance-based PPC campaign, do the branded search in-house, because that is very easy in most cases. Let the performance-based company go after generic terms and make sure they have to spend a minimum dollar amount per month to make sure you are getting performance out of them.

There are a lot of good companies offering legitimate performance-based deals out there. Simply make sure they are held accountable to a specific set of deliverables, outside of simply pay-per-sale as you will never reach your true online potential if this is the case.

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