X Files of Online Marketing

X Files of Online Marketing

Erkan Meydanlioglu,Mr http://www.OnlineMarketingManager.org

A traditional profile of online marketers as:

1)Young people with old appearance and body because of working hard or tracking their competitives.

2)Always busy minded to think new and creative campaign ideas to increase sales and revenues.

3)Always wears black sun glasses, this is not because of spying just to hide the black lines under eyes.

4)They drive luxury cars slowly because their mind is still busy about if his campaign needs some optimization or modification.

5)Always live in good houses but they don't have time to spend much time with their families.

6)Their conversations do not pleasant their friends if both are not colleges.Whether they believe they have sense of humor, not much people laugh to their jokes.

7)Most of them have sleeping problem(insomnia) Until their campaigns achieve the campaign target.

Raise in ecommerce behavior makes powerful online marketing more important day by day in web business.Many companies are searching to employ best online marketing managers on job sites with attractive packages but what do they do? How they make marketing online?

Internet marketing contains some different skills and an online marketing manager has to have ability of commanding on statistics and data, tracking the market trends,analysing consumer behavior,traditional marketing education and emotional intelligence addition to IT knowledge.As every of you know about required IT knowledge , I will talk about "do 's and don't 's" of affiliate relations, lead and traffic generating,email marketing or search engine placement tasks because you have to perform these tasks in best way and you are supposed to bring good results to your employer.

If you want to make effective online marketing, you need to analyse very carefully about your visitors or clients. Analysing starts with detailed data provided so search a data monitoring company first and subscribe it. As they sent you statistics of your web site, analyse and find out about your user behaviors, when your site gets most hits, where they come from, what is their geographical area, how much money they pay or ready to pay to buy your goods and services, which product or service mostly sold according to their age group. Work on all data carefully and create a general profile of your web clients then make more spectacular profiles like creating regional,age range ,religional or community profiles to find about regional preferences. Probably you will not reach your campaign target if you start without deep analyses.

Market trends are always very important, if you are trying to sell some goods that is not preferred with community anymore, this means you are loosing money because of your opportunity cost. Try to find most sold or possible to sell products in your market, give your clients what they prefers most from the right price level.To do this you need to watch market or community trends.Don't try to sell baseball gloves in Brazil!

Watch your Competitors.If you havent still realised that your Competitors never sleeps, learn now! No, they can be really awake for beating your company. What will you in this case? Do you know their discounted price level and models before demonstrating your latest model? Always watch their prices and campaigns before action.

Analyse your user's beviour and learn about their reactions in different cases if they are only daily visiting without buying anything or waiting best price levels to buy your products? What is the reason of non purchasing? Which is the best expected price level for a particular product? Do you need a discount campaign? As you got, these points are more related with management or cost analyses so try to find out balance level of price for most sold products at your estore.

Keep your analyse at hand and start planning your campaign definitions like campaign target, budget, duration KPIs(key performance indicator).Your work is generally assumed as campaign drafts Until your employer's approve your campaign. In large corporations, there is possibly conflictsbetween Marketing Manager and Online Marketing Managers. Your campaign policy and details must match with your corporate marketing policy, so clear this point and get approval where is authorized whether he is marketing manager or CEO.

If you cleared these points , time to start on traditional online marketing with known tools to increase your sales. Make an affiliate marketing campaign on combi basis (combi=pay per click+pay per sale or lead)with an attractive banner(Use most used banner sizes like 468x60, 120x600) or better one Text ads.We lived that quality and well designer banners took more interest from web users whatever you sell. Banners with subject on your product and price can benefit your campaign target. Of course you prefer to make your campaign on pay per lead or pay per sale alone but believe me that you will not get much interest from publishers so make it combi basis.Publishers always like to make money with clicks instead of per sale or lead. Don't worry, this will not cost you higher on final cost. Which affiliate network is best to select? This really depends on your geographical consumer target. If you are targeting pan- European consumers like UK,France,Ireland,Nederlands or Spain, try Zanox, Tradedoubler, DoubleClick Europe, CJ Europe are main networks.If we are talking about German market, try Tradedoubler,Zanox,Affili.net, Adbutler.de or Superclix. Do you really need to work by an affiliate network? Can't you success with your own affiliate tracking software? As you don't want to pay %30 agency fee, you can try to reach publishers by yourself but believe me that this is really long and difficult way because you need to submit your campaign manually into more than 50 affiliate directories and it takes 4 months to approve your submission if you don't pay for express approval on affiliate directories. Besides, publishers always will doubt about your independent commission tracking system and wont show much interest about your new campaign.On the other side, affiliate networks have strong filters to track the referral ID and activity of visitor. These filters are complex algorithms built on different methods to track the activity like IP tracking,cookie tracking or pixel tracking which can vary on your payment method and approval requirement option is a plus on a doubtful commission cases.Advertiser has option to approve or reject a commission if there is a trick during earning the commission.And finally networks able you to get detailed reports and thus will help your analysing and rewarding some of your affiliates with extra commission.These are Win and Win principles and does not have risks for advertisers! During these campaigns you will learn how much online poker or gambling sites are paying to publishers as commission and you will see that your campaign budget can not afford those commission rate if an independent affiliate campaigns outside a network.You will have longer and better relations by publishers in a network. General recommended campaign startup on a network is startup combi and soon PPS or PPL basis commission payment.So, always prefer an affiliate network.

Buy some media advertisement from major portals and printed magazines. You can buy Yahoo or MSN ads on PPI basis but main page advertising can be really expensive if you don't have huge campaign budget, better to purchase subpage ads placement related to your client interest group. Not only CTR but ROI rate of subpage ads can be higher than main page either. If you need a printed media ads, select ones that your consumer analyses indicate.Best results come if you find best interest groups. You can not sell much life insurance on a school magazine!

Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture are main in pay per click ads but you need to find out best ads slogans to attract clients with limited characters.How you will attract people to click your text ads? Or what is the maximum price per click per your keyword? I saw some people who wrote books about best adwords texts but this is related with your creativity. I made many PPC campaigns and used impressive slogans ,sometimes people come because your ads are full with wondering feeling , sometimes your text should challenge or includes aggressive slogans.Since a per click price starts at 0.05 on Adwords, it can be even 6€ for some keywords. Yahoo Overture has totally different structure about search engine marketing that your ads display on many website's integrated search results. Per click prices starts 0.15 and raises as 8 as your keyword. Few words about Overture campaigns are more difficult than Adwords because of campaign settings. Your keywords selection and ads slogans are written by Yahoo editors in Dublin. I never had good relations with Yahoo editors! They always write unrelated or wrong slogans for your product which mismatches your campaign target. You will get calls explaining why they have to do that and how much sorry the Overture is! Not only bad support and a mass in Dublin, bidding interface is not user friendly and auto bidding feature can cause high click costs out of your control.Despite some disadvantages, Adwords and Overture are fine tools to reach potential regional clients with local language versions and you can select a display language , thus enables you to make campaigns on different language speaking countries even you can not speak that language.Not need to mention that your estore is supposed to have multi language versions either as you want to attract foreign client.People always prefer to buy something if they can speak same language with your estore , a local support department contact details also help you to sell different regions.

Make organic SEO work! As stats indicates most visitors come from major search engines and your search engine placement depends on many different things like keyword density,number of backlinks and a well designed meta tags including title. Most visitors prefers to find websites by themselves instead of clicking sponsored inclusions.This is a psychologic side, most visitors know that paid advertising company prices are higher on a particular product because of their advertising costs but regular search results may not have this extra cost. Your search engine results can bring brilliant results if you are at the top with your keywords on major engines and this result can not be paid with money to measure.Let me tell you that SEO work is very technical and long process to see results probably 6 months or more.If you are not good at this hire a SEO company or you can improve yourself by a research about SEO. First thing you should know about SEO is determining or selecting the most relevant keywords with your content.Use only best describing your products or services instead of too general statements.People prefers to click only top results on engines so if your selected keywords are too general, your results will not be at top and will not get enough hits.So,specify as much as needed about your keywords.I know this, sucks! Write a good keyword syndicated content to catch highest keyword density if you are good at SEO content rich writing hire a professional SEO writer. Rewrite your meta tags ,keywords and most important your title. Better sometimes to follow top engine results to see how their meta tags are written, this can be a good resource for a beginner SEO. Last years there are many tools used for SEO as RSS feeds for fresh content or Google Images. As general SEO statement content is the king for major engines. On the other hand your search results may have different placement on different engines. You can listed as 10th on Google but 25 in Yahoo on same keyword search. This is because of different listing algorithm on each engine,nothing related with you or your site. As you worked on engines, you will improve yourself about different algorithms to get higher listings.

Increase your backlinks on engines by link exchange or oneway link purchases. This exchange will not only bring backlinks on engines but also some traffic either. Generated quality traffic means more sales for you company. What is quality traffic ? There are some visitors that does not purchase anything but some does and for a seller, the purchasers are important and we call these buyers as quality traffic.Best way of exchanging links is having a directory on your site with categories. There are many free or cheap software on market for directory building, most used is PHP link directory. This software comes with options for free link exchange or reciprocal link or paid listings submission. Register to Link exchange directories such as Linkmarket.net but careful about your having a good linking policy. If you swap with Irrelavant content websites, your sales or campaign will not work effectively.So accept only relevant content sites with you for having best external search stings.As you know Google is considering the PR power of a website for placement and PR depends on a specific points and your linking policy is effects your PR. Relevant content exchanges bring higher search engine placement.Second point to consider on link swap is equal or higher PR power links will benefit you. If your web site has PR5 and you swap with PR0 site, this exchange not only bring but also takes from you as engines placement.Another important aspect of leading traffic is directory submission. You definitely must submit your site to different directories. Main directories is a "must" and more specified directories to submit is a "plus". We published an ultimate Directory List on Worldlancer.com Forum. You can do this yourself or request our manual directory submission service for you. When your submission will get approval and listed on a directory, you will have one way links through your site and this will generate free traffic as well as helping higher placement on search engines.

Email marketing works if you have your own newsletter Subscribers about your new products or announcements.But if you don't have your own mailing group and if you buy from a media company list as targeted email marketing, you can get many spam complains even that list is legally accepted to get promotional emails, spam has strong official regulations and penalties in EU but else than a law, serious companies do not buy outside email listings to promote their goods and services. If you have your own listing, you can make good weekly or monthly newsletters ,some tricks in email marketing is the subject title, body and your aim while sending that newsletter. Many email campaigns show that most important point is subject title in a mail. Writing a respectful and true title will bring you more opening(readership) rate , don't write foolish or false things, just keep real and respectful to receiver.Promotional emails always includes some scripts inside to measure if receiver opened the mail or if responded. Of course not need to tell about these mails must be custom mails which titles the name and sirname of receiver inside and written in a kind way. Do you think writing much on body bring more respond rate? Thats a mistake! Short and clear body will ease for higher interest through your announcement. Maybe promoting your just latest models should work better in formatted email campaigns and the last trick is prefer a plain text format instead of HTML. Most receivers are ordinary PC users and they always concern about their PC security. If you send HTML emails, your opening rate will be lower than a text email if you don't have a trusthworhty corporate identity. Simple and pure text link emails are best to achieve highest respond rate on email marketing.

Content Surgery is something necessary about deep analyses of increasing your sales with some simple changes in your estore.User friendly interfaces, simple navigation system or some product recommendations can raise your purchasing rate per client.Your design ,colors or font size can affect this rate either but how you will find the best? Answer is very simple, just make client surveys to understand or request a feedback about your estore to improve.Feedbacks are your personalised messages and you receive back high quality information. Most users will get happy to help you.If you got many unhappy feedback on your navigation system or anything, quickly change it!A clever content surgery can bring you at least 15% more purchases and you can achieve this after listening your clients.

Until here, I tried to mention the methods of successful campaign during the usage of traditional online marketing tools but some other affords also essential such as daily campaign optimization and modification. A guru level online marketers starts the day by analyses of a running campaign ,if you feel a campaign is like your child, you have to feed your kid!

If you are leading an online marketing group and working together, then you need some team management skills either. As a team leader, you are expected to plan the campaign very detailed and make a proper task distribution around your team. On this point, I can recommend you about regional or functional task distribution. You can divide your targets on country basis and give that country marketing task to one of your team member or other option as functional task distribution around the team members like all markets but one function like email marketing, and all affilate marketing to another team member. These kinds of team leading projects is requires Project Management skills and team relations management, risk analyses, reporting,performance analyses.

Finally whatever you try to market ,always respect your clients and company. Never try to cheat your clients and stay away from tricky campaigns, you must always consider that you are managing a Brand name, once you harm your corporate image its not easy to rebuild. As I always tell, your competitors are -one click away on web!