Anyone know how to use the Internet to actually get results? Yes. DARPA and MIT.

Recently, DARPA (The agency who should actually take credit for inventing the Internet – 40 years ago) held a contest to see if networking over the the Web could actually enable a group of people to collectively solve problems.

The premise was fairly simple. 10 red weather balloons were  “hidden” in various spots across the United States. To win, a team had to locate all 10 balloons using social networking over the Web. The first team to do so would receive 40 thousand dollars.

And here’s where the story gets interesting. How long did it take for the winning MIT team to solve the puzzle? A couple months? Nope. A couple weeks? No – Less than 9 hours! Not only did they manage to cover a search area totaling 3,537,441 square miles to locate all of the balloons, but they did it in the amount of time you spend at the office. How’s that for a good days work?

Twitter and Facebook can actually be used to mobilize a group to solve problems over massive distances and act in a mutually beneficial way. Case in point, MIT took half of the proceeds from the win and paid the collaborators, who helped solve the puzzle, a set sum for each balloon and donated the other half to charity. So, with a strong reward/benefit message you can reach millions of people and produce results.

The fact of the matter is that we, as a community, are only using the smallest portion of the Internet’s true potential. With creative thinking and problem solving, we could do so much more.

Now get out there and look good!

Reference:

https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/tech/2009/12/05/intv.long.balloon.hunt.cnn.html
http://civic.mit.edu/news/media-labs-riley-crane-on-colbert-report

©2010 Motley Creations. Use by permission only.

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The phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees” is a very relevant concept when it comes to websites. Many a business builds a site to suit themselves. In reality, it should be built to suit your customers and prospects. Thus, the business can’t see the forest for the trees.

Many think that their website sells their product or service. It doesn’t. It generates interest, it qualifies, it provides pertinent information like statistics and user feed back - it does not close the deal. In most cases, your best result would be to get them to call or come in to a retail location. That way you have an opportunity to cross sell or up sell.

Here are a few concepts to help you organize your website:

1. How do consumers gather information?

To varying degrees, everyone falls somewhere on the chart below. You need to ask yourself, where do most of my prospects fall? This will help you to determine how to speak to them.

2. What will tip the scale?

If we try to justify all the reasons a prospect needs the product or service or take away all objections, we will end up with a long and muddied message. People buy for their own reasons. Each prospect’s reasoning is different and you don’t want them sorting through a bunch of information to find that key. The buying decision comes from comfort, not confusion. You’re not looking to close the conversation, you’re looking to open it. If your site is not well organized, so that all information is at their fingertips (not force fed), chances are the prospect will bounce out of your site and move on to another company. 

3. What’s not to love?

As a business, you must trust that your website is an effective tool. At the end of the day, you don’t have to love your website, your prospects and clients do. It has to speak to them, not you. The right images and the right message organized in a comprehensive way. You can have all the information you want to convey, just don’t shove it down their throat.

Now get out there and look good.

Chris Motley
Motley Creations

©2009 Motley Creations. Use by permission only.

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We recently did some research about e-newsletters and the numbers we came up with are VERY interesting. So much so, that I thought I would share them with you.

First of all, if you haven’t read my article “E-marketing: Newsletters” do so now. Go ahead, the rest of us will wait . . . done? Good. In that article, I mentioned some of the benefits of an e-newsletter. Now, I have some hard numbers to show you that speak to those benefits.

I have a client that sends out e-newsletters as well as printed newsletters. We had some of our preferred print vendors bid on it with the specifications of 11″ x 17″, 4 color, 2 sided, 2 folds and full bleed. the vendors were bidding on printing, folding and mail services, that is, they would label each and put them in the mail based on my clients database. The number of the people on this particular list was 2,000.

Here is the average cost sent back to us: $1,000 for the printing and $300 for the mailing. This doesn’t include producing the piece, so let’s add in $500 for production cost. That brings us to $1800.

One thing you should know is that mailers of any sort, have a 1% response rate. That means if you send out 2,000, about 20 people will respond. Given the bid numbers above, that equates to $90 per lead. That’s right, LEAD. You haven’t made a sale yet. Let’s hope your average sale is over $90.

To reach those same people through an e-newsletter the cost is about $200 on average. Yep, that’s it - $200. Of course you will have to pay some up front charges, if you have your newsletter professionally designed. I left design cost out of the printed version, so I left it out here as well.

The response rate on e-newsletters is recorded at being 25% on average. Most services can be set up so you can test these numbers yourself. They’ll give you “click through” rates; which is who opened the newsletter and clicked on a link in it to visit your site. That means about 500 people will respond and your cost per lead would be 40¢ each.

What do you think now? 20 vs. 500 and $90 each vs. 40¢. If the bottom line is important to you, and if you’re a business owner it should be, then it’s all about margins. Need I say more?

Now get out there and look good!

Chris Motley
Motley Creations
©2008 Motley Creations.

Tags: E-Marketing, e-newsletter, response rate, save.

Are you used to the new vernacular yet? E-tailer, E-marketing, E-mail, E-trends, E-business, E-commerce - E-GADS! Let’s face it, our world and how we communicate is changing rapidly. Are you keeping up?

E-marketing is simply using electronic media to achieve marketing results. I should exist in conjunction to your normal marketing efforts as a powerful tool to get the right message to the right people. In this article we are going to cover E-newsletters.

The E-newsletter is a great way to keep in front of your current clients and promote new and exciting products or services you provide as well as special events and pricing. Some of the other benefits are that it has a global reach and can be viral (meaning each person may send it to many). It costs much less than printed pieces in production and postage. It is highly track able and measurable thanks to new technology - on average a website will experience a 300% increase in hits when the newsletter is sent out. You can also use any media you want such as graphics, video, audio and interactive media.

Some things to keep in mind before you start. Because of the CAN SPAM Act (read more HERE) you must be careful how you go about this. Let’s face it, nobody likes spam. You have to have an “opt in” and “opt out” method associated with your newsletter. Opt out means the recipient must have a way to stop receiving the emails. The opt in is permission to send the email to the client. Some services have a double opt in to be safe. Buying a list from a company without permission to send it to these users is expensive and get get you into trouble.

There are numerous legitimate companies, such as your local newspaper and magazines, that will “rent” you an email list. That is, you provide the art and they send it out to your target demographic. The problem is that you have to pay each time you send it with these lists. You never own the information. You can use this method while building up an email database of your own.

If you have a database of clients with no email addresses, there are services that can find the email address for you through various public records. A legitimate company will then send a form email to each address and ask if they wish to receive information from you as a method of opt in. You usually only pay for the number of email addresses you receive although there is a minimum charge. The least expensive I’ve found was $500.

Once you have your email list, you need to figure out how often. Once a day may be too many and once a quarter may be to few. I prefer once a month. If you sell products on-line and have weekly specials, once a week may be OK. I think if you do it that much people tend to just trash it without reading it. You can consult with your client base to get a feel for what is right.

Now you need content. I suggest that not only do you promote your products and services, but you give people information that will help them. If you sell widgets, include short articles on widget maintenance or how to choose the right widget for you. I also suggest that you use the newsletter as a teaser and drive the traffic back to your website to read more. Keep the newsletter short, concise and scan-able because we are all busy people.

There are some great methods of segmentation you can use as well. If you have birth dates in your data, send out a birthday special offer to each person born that month. Some services will let you personalize each email with the persons first name.

Their are several services out there to use to send your newsletter. I use YMLP.com. Other popular services are Constant Contact, iContact, Jangomail, etc. - just type “email newsletter service” in a search engine and you’ll get millions of hits. These services charge by how many emails you send out. Make sure that there are tracking and conversion tools built in, segmentations abilities and that you are comfortable with the interface. Some will even provide you with code for a sign up form to put on your website. Most will allow you a free period to try them out.

Now get out there and look good!

Chris Motley
Motley Creations
©2007 Motley Creations.

Tags: database, E-Marketing, e-newsletter, email, email newsletter service.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the art of getting your Web site to list higher in the search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Consider it to be like running in a race with 2,000,000 other people. The good news is some of them have only have one leg or are wearing high heels. The bad news is that some are very fast, agile and efficient.

SEO is more of an art than a science (although there is some science involved). There is no “magic switch” – if there were, everybody would be using it, and then we’d all be back to where we started. There are as many theories about SEO as there are Web sites out there. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to keep things basic.

Before we start, you might want to consider how you are going to measure your results. Most hosting servers come equipped with tools like Webalizer, where you can track what the Web site traffic trends are. Google Analytics is a great free way to tag your pages to this purpose if your hosting solution doesn’t provide one. You will, however, have to add a small bit of code to each page or to your template for Google Analytics to function.

Let’s start with a big one – keywords. Those words that bring qualified traffic to your Web site by using them in content, your domain name, page titles, links, etc. The name of the game is to get qualified traffic – people who want what you are selling.

Start by making a list of obvious keywords. If you sell flowers, some keywords might be flower arrangements, flower pots, fresh flowers and flower delivery. Keep in mind that the more general you are, the more sites out there are using it. So you may want to combine some phrases and add more specifics such as “fresh flower arrangements in Lenexa Kansas.” It still has the general term but it also contains more qualifiers to bring specific people to you.

You might also try some of the great tools out there such as Overture Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) or Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/). You can use these tools to narrow, edit or add to the list by seeing how many people actually search for your keywords and what the competition is for those keywords. Also remember, people tend to misspell and have names for items or services used outside the industry. Some of those “off words” can be beneficial at raising your ranking.

Now what do you do with the keywords? Start with page names. You don’t want 400 keywords in your page names, but you do want keywords relevant to the page content. Then move to navigation. If your top navigation is built in Flash or JavaScript, make sure that you have it again at the bottom in text form and name them, using your keywords. Other things to consider: heading tags and using your keywords in the page content. Don’t try spamming a long string of them in your meta tags – it’s been done – it’s been overdone. Search engines tend to ignore it now.

This is just one 10,000 foot fly-by of some of the things you can do to improve your SEO status. Play with it. Check results more from month to month rather than from day to day. If you are in a big hurry, pay a professional or look into Pay Per Click. This information is to help you start your process, not complete it. SEO is never done. And there are several more factors involved other than keywords.

Now get out there and look good!

Chris Motley
Motley Creations

Tags: analytics, google, keywords, search engine, seo.