Mr. Gary Lee

So you have your website set up and you’re ready to go. Before giving the greenlight to your webmaster to launch the site, make sure that you go over these Top 10 Things to Remember in Web Marketing:

Ability to Adapt - No matter how great you think your website is, it’s what your customers think about your site that matter the most. So if that great idea you had just doesn’t pan out the way you think it should be or if there’s some new technology that your site can take advantage of, don’t be too stubborn to adapt.

Make Sure your Overall Business Works - For most businesses, the website is another source of traffic to direct to your business. So make sure that your business is running like clockwork when delivering your service or products to your customers.

Establish Team Roles - Make sure your team knows their roles, so that if any part of the site is not working, you know exactly who to turn to in order to get things running smoothly as soon as possible.

Properly SEO the Site - As soon as your site goes live, it will beging to be indexed by all the search engines. You want to make sure that you provide the right title, description and keywords for each page of your site so that when people find your links in the search results, you have made sure to provide the most informative listing possible.

Be able to Update your Site Quickly - If you’re sold out of something, you better be sure to indicate that on your site or you’re going to be left with a lot of customers leaving with a bad taste in their mouth. The same point applies to any part of your site whether it be the correct email address or the right pricing points.

Think through your Customers Eyes - Everyone has been a customer at some point and we all know what we like and what we don’t when we arrive at someone’s business or website. Take time to look at your site as a customer and try your best to address what you don’t like!

Get Ready To Hustle - Traffics not going to come to your door with a box of chocolates and some flowers. You’re going to have to get out there and promote your site like no other. Get your checklist of forums, blogs, web sites and other hot spots ready to start getting traffic on a daily basis.

Important Metrics are being Measured - There’s no more emptier feeling in marketing than getting all the traffic in the world, but not knowing where it’s coming from and how it’s converting. Spending Wisely is the most overlooked aspect of online marketing!

Remember your Mission Statement - Use your Mission Statement as your Guiding Light just in case you lose your way.

Remember to Plan Ahead - Let’s say you’ve followed all my advice and you’re getting loads of traffic to your site, do you have a plan to handle the extra traffic? Are you ready to streamline your product line? Do you know who to contact to upgrade your hosting package bandwidth? Do you have enough products to provide your customers?

Marketing

What should we do?

One of the lessons I learned from 2008 was to focus more on projects that will make the most money from my time invested - my ROI. Especially in these turbulent times where money is scarce, families, companies and entrepreneurs alike will have to reassess where their money is going and what brings in the biggest return from their investment. The biggest problem I see is that most people don’t know where to start or what to consider when they try and prioritize their efforts. I know that everyone’s cases are different, but here are some marketing intitatives that you should invest your time into that can bring you a high ROI this 2009:

PPC Optimization - Hands down, there’s nothing on the internet that has as much control over ROI as Pay Per Click Advertising. If you’re new to this, then check out one of my past articles about Finding your Max CPC so you can make sure you get a positive ROI all the time.

Smart Banner Purchases - People say that banner ads are dead. I disagree. If tested and measured correctly, banner ads can be a great source of traffic, especially if you do the right research on the type of demographic who sees that banner.

Social Media Participation - I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. If you want traffic for your blog, one of the best things you can do is get out there and comment, vote,  submit and make your voice heard on the internet. I would recommend focusing on a niche that’s related to your blog or your industry to make sure you get a higher return. If you need help with anything, leave a comment and I’ll come by and help out with a vote or submit.

Setting Goals - Branding is the one thing that is almost impossible to measure from your marketing initiatives. Metrics that can be measured are page views, uniques, registrations and subscriptions. So, do yourself a favor and figure out what your goal is. If you haven’t done this yet, then you’re ROI is going nowhere else, but up!

Marketing

So i’m surfing around on a hot as hell day in Southern California and I come across this featured article on LATimes.com - “Anne Hathaway vs. Jessica Alba” - and the first thought that comes to my head is “Damn! Jessica’s looking good!” . . . then my second thought is “Damn! Anne must be pissed cuz this is such an unfair competition!” . . . . then the third thought is “I’d hate to be Anne’s boyfriend right now!” because the dreaded “What do you think?” question is coming FOR SURE!

This is the Dark Angel vs. the Princess Diary!

Maxim’s Sexiest Woman Alive vs. World’s Biggest Smile!

Don’t get me wrong though! I think Anne Hathaway is a total hottie. Starting from Devil Wears Prada (Yes, I saw it . . . so what?) to the 150 “Get Smart” commercials and billboards i see every day, she’s really racing up MrGaryLee’s list of “Hot Girls who I actually think have a brain, too” list.

You can even look at the picture the Times decided to use. Anne looks like she got off a helicopter and Jessica looks like . . well . . Jessica friggin Alba! I know the Times is trying to increase their page views per visitor count, but damn, at least pick a better match up. Let me offer some suggestions:

Halle vs. Jada

Eva vs. J.Lo

Hu vs. Q

I could do this all day. Anyone want to help?

Marketing

For Wendy Piersall’s Crowd Sourcing post, I want to go over how to set up a simple landing page and email autoresponder program. I’m talking about properly setting up a landing page for your site to convert visitors to subscribers and then setting up your newsletter service to convert your subscribers into buyers much like this:

I’m going to show you what it takes to create the most basic of landing pages that have one of the highest conversion rates across the board for all products in this industry. These are the 3 main items you will need to create:

• Tagline - The Main Header Title that your visitor will read first
• Description - Additional information that helps support your Header Copy
• Email Subscription Field - Where your visitor will enter their email address

The Tagline is the most important part of this landing page as it is usually placed in the middle of the page and is the first thing that visitors see when they arrive at the site. For our Auction Tips site, here are the Header Taglines I’m considering to use:

• We’ll teach you how to conduct the right type of Research on eBay, instead of just wandering aimlessly around the internet
• Understand how the eBay Feedback system works and how to take advantage of the feedback system
• There’s nothing like word of mouth advertising and we’ll show you how Great Customer Service is one of the best Marketing Techniques out there.

The Description is located underneath the Tagline and should offer more detail on how the potential subscriber will benefit from subscribing to this newsletter.

As for the autoresponder service you should use for your email newsletter subscription, I recommend the only that I has worked for me:

• AWeber - Aweber has one of the best click through rates in the business as it protects subscribers from getting spammed. For example, you can’t just dump a list of emails you have into Aweber and then start sending email. They will ask the recipient first to verify that they have subscribed, then allow that person to receive any of your emails.

Aweber is extremely easy to use and has a wizard to help you generate the proper html code to place onto your landing page.

*To let you know, I am using affiliate links for aweber, but want you to know that I recommend this program because I use them for my work and if I can make a few bucks, then why not, right?*

There is an ongoing debate on how much content you should post on your landing page to achieve the highest conversion rates. From what I’ve seen, as long as you have a subscription field located in every “fold view,” the conversion rate will not be affected dramatically. What I mean by “fold view,” is that when your user is scrolling down your page, as one subscription field is being scrolled away, another subscription field will appear.

Once you have set up these 3 main items on your web site landing page, one of the most important things I recommend you set up is your Google Analytics and Google Web Optimzer accounts. They both come in the Google Adwords Account which is absolutely free.

If you do not know already, Google Analytics is a web analysis program that keeps track of key metrics of your website like conversion rates, traffic sources and number of clicks your site receives, just to name a few. Google Web Optimizer is used to test different parts of your website like the tagline and description by displaying each variation equally to avoid the troublesome task of weighing the effects of testing during peak and offpeak hours.

If you’d like to take a look at the completed product, please take a look at the site Auction 411.

Don’t worry about the graphics and all that extra stuff. If you’d like to add more things to the landing page, feel free, but just make sure to use the Google Optimizer to make sure that you know what kind of effect the image will have on your conversion rate.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment and I will reply to them as soon as possible.

Marketing

I might have got sidetracked just a little bit about my first day at ASW with my observations on Jason Calacanis’ viewpoints of Shoemoney Photos, so I wanted to make sure that I get the rest of the day caught up with, so that you guys know that more is going on here than name-calling and ego-boosting!

So after the infamous keynote speech, we headed over to session on “Video Innovation in Affiliate Marketing” featuring Melissa Salas from Buy.com, Tim Carter from AsktheBuilder.com, Joel Comm from Infomedia.com, Brian McCarthy from Revver.com, Steve Rosenbaum from Magnify.net and Gary Vaynerchuck, the host of Wine Library TV. The theme of the session was again the quality of content determines the popularity and traffic of your video. There was a little bit of insight on how Google Videos timestamps and transcribes the content in a video to make it more search-friendly. Also, Steve Rosenbaum gave some demographic information by telling us that a majority of videos are viewed at the office, so keep that in mind that the average internet video user might not have an elaborate setup at home to watch video on their home big screen. Other than that, Gary was trying to get attention by using profane words and outlandish claims like going against Yahoo’s advice to make his videos shorter from the original 14 minutes to a more friendly 6.5 minutes and instead making them longer to 25 minutes because his content was that good. To each his own, but I know this session was only scratching the surface of what is to come on the internet.

Danielle, Greg and I then headed over to the luncheon where we sat down with the crew from Shopzilla.com. A guy named Dave something started asking Danielle and I about Pink Deals and was selling us on his ideas of how we could integrate their feeds onto our site. He didn’t really say anything we didn’t know, so we just smiled and continued to eat. The awkward silence was broken when a quiet Asian guy in a suit comes and sits at our table. At first, I was just happy he sat down at our table because he had with him one of the best giveaways at the conference - a skateboard with a Las Vegas collage on the background. I wanted to ask him where he got it, so I could make sure to get one for myself before I leave. To my surprise and also to Danielle’s (see her reaction here), the quiet Asian guy that was getting his ass kissed by Shopzilla was Ben from BensBargains.net - one of the oldest and most successful deals/coupons site on the internet. To tell you the truth, Ben’s site was the site that truly inspired me to become the online entrepreneur I am today, so having him sit at our table out of the hundreds of tables in the luncheon room was quite amazing.

We got to ask him a few questions and he was very straight forward with his answers. He began his site while he was at college and populated the site with deals between classes. I remember his posting pattern was about 20 some time during the day and then 20 more at night. While I was at college, Ben’s site was the place to go if you wanted to get any coupon for Dell computers. For a stretch, I remember I was buying an item from his site on a weekly basis. It was sick. He also told us that all his posting was done manually and that there was no way to maintain quality control while having feeds populate your site. Bottom line - it’s going to take a lot of work to get Pink Deals up to par with Ben’s Bargains! No matter though, Ben was very cool and offered his business card to contact him at any time if we had any questions. I really appreciated the offer and we wished him well.

After lunch, we met up with Greg and John over at another table in the lunch area. We were talking about some kind of new online reality show that John might be a part of and the other sessions we were going to after lunch. All of us went to go check out Wil Reynolds speak on “How to Futureproof your SEO Efforts” which wasn’t extremely informative, but instead, was a very engaging presentation:

Topics and Points that I jotted down on my notepad (in no particular order):

Inequalities:

• Putting a Digg Button on your website does not equal Social Marketing
• Writing a Blog does not equal Blogging
• Recording a Video does not equal

Link Bait Tips:

• Use Digg
• Get Social Traffic
• Be Creative - it takes time, but it’s worth it.
• Be involved - get out there and comment on other people’s blogs. Integrate yourself.

Link Tips:

• Get rid of your reciprocal links
• Buy good quality Directory Links

Meta Tips:

• Write quality descriptive titles and descriptions that get users to click on your link instead of stuffing as many keywords as possible.

Tools:

• Digital Point Keyword Rank Checker
• Touchgraph
• Google Alerts
• Copemix Tracker
• Adcenter Plugin for Excel 2007 - this one he swears by and is something I will be testing out very soon.

Guess who’s the guy with the Flat Top rocking to Blue Man Group!

After that session, we just headed back to our rooms to get ready for a night of food and partying at Venetian’s new club - Tao. The party was sponsored by Pepperjam, RocketProfit, Webmaster Radio and some other affiliate networks. I’m really not going to talk much about the party because it sucked. It really did. Here’s why:

• I didn’t need to RSVP for this party. They just wanted my information.
• The line at the bar wasn’t too long, but the bartenders were horrendous. It looked like they just got out of bartending school since I saw one girl printing out a cocktail recipe and all of them were on edge, making sure they made the perfect drinks. It wasn’t until everyone left the party that I got a bartender to get me drinks quickly.
• The DJ for this party was THE WORST DJ EVER! I don’t know who it was but it had to be the kid of the club’s owner. It was worse than an iPod DJ. It was worse than just setting up a radio at a house party. The DJ had no clue how to control the ups and downs of the party. He had no idea how to turn down the music to make announcements, but instead, just turned off the music. He didn’t even know how to make annoucements as I’ve heard commencement speeches shorter than his “shout outs!”
• The Blue Man group that performed were aight. I’ve definitely seen better and I definitely wasn’t too impressed. The crowd wasn’t too enthused so I think they may have just cut the show short because of that.

After the party, we headed back to our room at the Rio where we got some drinks and I passed out.

Today, we’re headed over to hear John and Zac speak and then we need to go snag a skateboard.

Marketing