Archive for December, 2008

One of the most popular questions that I get from people that are interested in doing SEO or PPC today is: “Which search engine is the most popular one?” This is a very logical question.  Ten years ago, most business owners knew that if they wanted more customers all they had to do was call the local Yellow Pages representative or a newspaper, choose which ad size they wanted and that was it!

Now that people have dumped their newspapers and phone books in the garbage and simply go to search engines to find what they are looking for, business owners definitely need to know which search engines are the most popular ones so that they can ensure that their business is front and center when their potential customer does the search.  Of course, internet marketing companies are always willing to help as well!

So what kind of changes happened in 2008? Here is the information you have been waiting for. Well, we can definitely call it the year of Google, again. Although it wasn’t news to anyone that Google was the most popular search engine, by the end of 2008 Google broken through the 80% market share ceiling! In fact it is estimated that close to 82% of searches worldwide are now done through Google.

While market share of most other search engines remained mostly unchanged the recent gains of Google seem to have come at the cost of Yahoo!, which has been in a steep decline of late and now stands at around 10% in second place after Google.

Now what does this mean to your business? Well it’s certainly good news and bad news. We’re again in the market were you can only deal with one or two organizations like it used to be before with yellow pages and one or two newspapers. Because Google and Yahoo have close to 92% of the market why bother with the other 8%? The problem of course is that Google has a monopoly on the search market and it’s only increasing. This means that if you were thinking of starting a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or PPC campaign it is better to start it sooner rather than later as more and more of your competitors are focusing their sights on Google and SEO and PPC will only get more expensive. In fact PPC costs have been steadily rising at a pace of close to 30% each year over the past 10 years due to consolidation of search engines market and shift of advertising spending to online channels.

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, ppc, promoting your business, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search engines, seo, site promotion, website promotion, website traffic

One of the easiest ways for businesses to save money is automating some of their existing business processes. It allows to free up existing staff to do other work or eliminate the need for additional staff. A lot of businesses do the same work multiple times like:

• Entering information in one form and then doing the same thing in 3 other forms
• Spending time on creating reports and looking up information.
• Organizing and sorting documents or files

All this work can be automated and save many businesses the need to keep staff that does this kind of repetitive work or allow you to direct them do more valuable work. It usually saves hundreds of thousands per year for a company of small size. It really is a no brainer if you have at least one person doing this repetitive work. Usually for the cost of a year’s salary you can create a system that will do most of the work for you.

Technorati Tags: custom software development, Software and Web Development

   As long as there was web design there were clients asking for a fancy intro page (sometimes called a splash page). An intro page is a specially designed welcome page, meant to be the first page a person sees before entering a website. They often have fancy graphics, sound or flash animation that welcomes the visitor. They usually include a link that say “Skip Intro” or “Click here to enter site.” Although most people agree they are beautiful to look at, professional web designers and search engine optimization specialists universally agree that splash / intro pages are a BAD IDEA. Here’s why:

1. They Annoy Visitors. Visitors to your website want to get to the information on your website as quickly as possible. Intro pages waste your visitor’s time by forcing the visitor to take unnecessary steps to get to the content of your website. The main goal of a website is to provide easily accessible information to visitors and splash pages stand in their way.
2. Lower Search Engine Ranking. Two of the most important things Search Engines look for are text-based content and text-based hyperlinks, neither of which is available on a splash intro page usually. The other goal of a website is to be found by Search Engines, and intro pages make this difficult.
3. 80% of Consumers Hate Intros! Here’s a market research report done by Marketing Sherpa https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=23442
4. Newfangled did some digging into their access logs and had this to say about their findings: “The number one reason for getting rid of our splash page was that it turned away at least 25% of our site visitors, sometimes more. This percentage has actually been researched and it turns out that at least 25% of site visitors will immediately leave a site as soon as they see a  message for a Flash splash screen (even if there’s a ’skip intro’ link). Our access logs confirmed this for us and this over all the other reasons caused us to get rid of it. The opportunity to improve our creativity was not worth the loss of such a high percentage of visitors. “
5. “Click to Enter” is redundant. By visiting your site your visitor already agreed to enter it, why do they have to do it again?  It’d be like opening the door to a store only to find another door that says, “Ha-ha, just kidding.  Open this door to enter for real this time.”
6. Minimizing steps. You want to minimize the number of steps involved in reaching your offerings. Having an extra click from an intro page does not align with this idea.
7. You need to have uniform navigation. Most splash pages don’t have the same primary navigation as the rest of the site. Some even drastically change the design when you go from the intro page to the real site. This is confusing to users who respond best to navigation that is persistent. Splash pages also enforce the idea that they are visiting two separate sites.

Technorati Tags: brick and mortar business, usability, Website Design

   A lot of E-Commerce website owners blindly offer free shipping in the hopes that it will increase their sales. It usually does, but they lose more money on paying for shipping than they make on extra sales.

   As with any other type of promotion in the E-Commerce industry, you should NEVER offer it to just anybody. If you offer it to everyone, free shipping, and other promotions will eat into your margins and the promotion itself will rarely make up the lost profit in additional sales. Offer free shipping on qualified orders to encourage customers to spend more or to buy your higher margin products. Alternatively you can use it as a tracking tool for your marketing efforts. Next time you’re planning on trying out a new way to advertise put this free shipping coupon in that advertisement to track the results you get from the advertisement. Here are some pros and cons of free shipping.

Pros:

• Allows you to track results from new marketing efforts that otherwise would be hard or impossible to track (e.g. offline ads like magazine, radio or TV ads that advertise your e-commerce website).
• Encourages higher spending or purchase of higher margin products if used right.

Cons:

• Eats into your margins.

Technorati Tags: double my sales, E-Commerce, selling products online