Many businesses, especially local businesses rely on their websites contact form to bring in new business. One mistake often made is making these contact forms too damn long. Do you really need to know my shoe size, mothers maiden name and whether I prefer paper or plastic at the supermarket when I want to find out about your gutter cleaning services? The answer is NO! Keep your forms as short as possible to maintain the highest conversion rate. Most of the time you don’t need more then a Name, Email & Phone Number as the person making the inquiry wants to be contacted personally anyway. Keep your forms short and sweet to maximize your bottom line.
xBMANx
May 9th, 2008
I have a major gripe and we ALL deal with it. Automated phone systems. Whether you are calling Google, Yahoo, Your Bank or in my case today, Sirius Radio, we all contend with automated phone systems.
I was having a problem with my Sirius radio so I called tech support. The automated system asked the following questions:
1) English or Spanish?
2) What department do you want to speak to?
3) Home phone number?
4) Home Address?
5) Name
After waiting about 10 minutes for tech support, the technician answers the phone. She greets me and asks my name. Then my home phone number followed by my address. Why would you send me through an automated phone system to take this information and then pay a human to take it again before helping me with my problem? Automated systems should be used to create more efficient systems. The only reason I could see using an automated system is if it were going to record the information I gave it and then present it to the technician so the questions did not get asked twice.
Sirius is by no means the only company makes you give an automated phone system information and then asks for the same information again when you talk to a human. Ever call Google Adwords support? They ask for your client id and then ask for it again when you get connected.
Let’s make a pledge to ensure our automated systems are being used to create less work and help the consumer rather then create more frustration and redundancy.
That is all.
xBMANx
April 21st, 2008
I’m not the first person to write about AffSpy and certainly won’t be the last. I’m a big fan of NickyCakes blog and in his post Affspy: Epic Failboat he rips them a new one. I actually first heard of the service when he posted about it. Although all of his grievances are 100% true and his points are valid, I did use the service today to help me see if their are any street payouts higher then the one I am obtaining on my affiliate network of choice.
It just so happened I was getting the best street payout of the networks they report, which means nothing but I thought if another network were offering a better payout I could use it as leverage. In one quick search I was able to see what about 10 networks were paying on the offer. If indeed there was a network offering a better payout I could have used it to negotiate a better payout on my current affiliate network.
One grievance I would like to air myself is that the information on AffSpy.com was actually wrong. Affspy reported that the offer I was running was valid only on email. I was promoting it on search so wanted to make sure I wasn’t breaking any rules and went to the network to find out. In fact the offer was fine for email, web, search or downloadables. If I were relying on Affspy for all of my info I would be screwed because I wouldn’t have thought I could pick up that offer and run it on search.
Overall, Affspy has its uses but don’t rely on it exclusively.
xBMANx
April 4th, 2008
On Landing Pages small Changes Make BIG Differences. I had a landing page that was performing poorly. VERY poorly. The desired action I needed someone to take on the landing page was simple. Click a button to enter. Only about 1 out of 20 visitors were clicking the button. The area I needed the user to click looked like this:
Of course thats not the entire landing page, its just the call to action. My reasoning for adding the disclaimers “Must be 18 To Enter” & “Must Provide Valid Contact Information” were that I felt it added validity to the offer. I was reasoning that if someone read it they would say, “wow this offer is real, let me take action”. These two restrictions were also placed by the advertiser to warrant valid leads on the page that this landing page lead to. The campaign was losing money because visitors were not clicking through to enter the site so action needed to be taken. I adjusted the “click to enter area” to this:
Notice I took away the restrictions. The result was that almost 17 out of 20 people who now landed on the landing page took the action of clicking to enter. My click through rate went from 5% to 85% with a simple little tweak of the landing page. About 15% of the people who went through to “click to enter” also became a qualified lead.
What did we learn here?
Don’t obfuscate your call to action with restrictions. Don’t cloud the action you want your visitor to take. Make the entire landing page direct the user toward the desired action and you shall profit.
April 1st, 2008
Spam is BAD (Unless of course your a spammer and making money or of it)! Spam wastes time and decreases productivity. This is one of the reasons I’ve completely migrated to Google’s Gmail / Calandar offerings. It saves time and Spam (in the past) has been a non issue since their spam filters are far superior to others I have tried. My gripe is that all of a sudden I am getting TONS of Spam in my Gmail inbox. What’s going on? Is someone sleeping on the Google Gmail spam team? Is anyone else seeing a proliferation of spam making it to your Gmail inbox?
xBMANx
P.S. : If you ARE seeing spam hit your inbox, be sure to report it as spam so Google can work out the kinks.
March 17th, 2008
I recently had a client insist it would be a good idea to bid on Nissan terms as part of a “bad credit car financing” paid search campaign. The results? :
Google then gave us the old:
Keyword(s) are currently inactive for search.
These keywords are marked in the Status column of the Keywords tab below. Improve their quality through optimization, delete them, or raise the keywords’ bids to the minimum bids indicated. (Raising the bids to at least the minimum will activate the keywords.)
The lesson behind this is pretty simple. If you forget WHY search engine marketing works, it will never WORK for YOU! Search engine marketing works because people have intent behind the searches they make. If you can match your ad with the users intent, you now have a good campaign. The intent behind a search performed on a Nissan related keyword is not to find someone who will give them a “bad credit car loan.” The intent behind that search is to either find information about a Nissan, Nissan pricing, Nissan Dealers etc.
Step 1: Match your ad with the searchers intent
Step 2: Profit
xBMANx
March 13th, 2008
Happy New Years to everyone in the internet marketing community. I wish you all a prosperice year of driving traffic and making money. Best wishes to all!
xBMANx
January 1st, 2008
Wikipedia defines Affiliate Marketing As:
Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is an interesting marketing method. Advertisers only pay based on performance The performance metric is defined by the advertiser. Some advertisers want traffic, some want a lead and some want a sale. The beauty of affiliate marketing to the advertiser is that the affiliate takes on the risk of the advertising campaign. Since the advertiser is only paying based on the performance metric they specify their risk is minimized. Affiliate networks monitor the whole process to make sure that advertisers and affiliates are acting fairly.
Working in an advertising agency is much different then affiliate marketing. We have account managers who go out and recruit new clients. The risk of the advertising campaign is soley placed on the shoulders of the client. Agencies rarely guarantee results (although most client are happy and do get great results). An advertising agency can be a complicated structure with owners, managers, artists, salespeople, creative people, media buyers etc. At the end of the day a successful agency can rest on the shoulders of just the sales department as without clients an agency is nothing.
The interesting connection to affiliate marketing is that both entities are advertising but the game is almost completely opposite. An affiliate marketer takes full risk for the campaign but can easily recruit clients by signing up through affiliate networks. Clients are just one click away as you can start promoting any campaign in any niche that you want to. In affiliate marketing the success of the person or agency rests squarely on the know how of the marketer rather then a sales department.
If you are into advertising I suggest giving affiliate marketing a try. In another entry I will list the different networks but for now I suggest going with NeverBlueAds. Their interface is very simple and they explain clearly what each advertiser expects in order to pay out commission.
xBMANx
December 27th, 2007
Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays To Everyone That Reads My Blog!
I sincerely apologize for the lack of posts lately. I have been very involved with some new internet advertising projects and websites. I’ve learned a lot over the past months and hope to start posting again much more regularly.
I am currently sitting infront of a nice cozy fire thinking about internet marketing in the year 2008.
How are YOUR holidays going?
xBMANx
December 25th, 2007
Previous Posts