September 2009

Or what I learned about Internet marketing from a 120 year old book…

Claude C. Hopkins was one of the greatest advertising men of his day (1866-1932).  After an extremely successful career, one that earned him a fortune in his day, he set out to record the principles that he uncovered and to write out his general philosophy on how to attain success in advertising.

The first principle he writes about as outlined in Scientific Advertising is that everything must be tracked and tested. We should never count on our own opinions or the opinions of a few others to decide what’s best where advertising and marketing are concerned.

Mastery is gained by repetition, tracking and learning from experience. It’s been said that it takes 7 years to master something or roughly 10,000 hours of study and application; however, if you continue to do the same things over and over during those 10,000 hours, it’s unlikely you’ll come anywhere close to mastering Internet marketing strategy or any other worthwhile skill.

When it comes to marketing, and especially Internet marketing, everything significant you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis should be tracked and tested.

Here are a few snippets from Hopkins book. Keep in mind these ideas are over 100 years old.

“Individuals may come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a part of the organization’s equipment, and a guide to all who follow. Thus, in the course of decades, such agencies become storehouses of advertising experiences, proved principles, and methods.”

“Nearly every selling question which arises in business is accurately answered by many experiences. Under these conditions, where they long exist, advertising and merchandising become exact sciences. Every course is charted. The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination.”

“We learn principles and prove them by repeated tests. This is done through keyed advertising, by traced returns… We compare one way with many others, backward and forward, and record the results. When one method invariably proves best, that method becomes a fixed principle.”

“Our final conclusions are always based on cost per customer or cost per dollar of sale.”

“Some things we learn in this way apply only to particular lines…others apply to all lines. They become fundamentals for advertising in general. They are universally applied. No wise advertiser will ever depart from those unvarying laws.”

So how do you go about tracking and testing your online marketing efforts?

The first way is to install an analytics system such as Google Analytics on your website.

An analytics system will attract the majority of activity that takes place on your site.

The second way is to create and maintain a tracking journal. A tracking journal is simply a document you create where you track your marketing activities over the course of time. Ideally you will monitor and record your activities week to week. Luckily much of the work is done for you by your analytics system, however, there is still a lot of information that your analytics system can’t account for.

For example the delay between when you promote a story on Digg or another social news site and when that story begins generating traffic to your site. Or how long it takes Google to recognize an inbound link after it’s been created from another site that you own. These are good things to know and things that can only be figured out by meticulous tracking.

A few of the things is would be good to track include:

• The date of any posts to your blog and where you promoted these posts online
• The date, websites uses, and number of links you create on any given day
• Any and all changes to your pay-per-click marketing campaigns
• Any videos, emails or other content you create that resides on a third party website
• Any social media campaigns
• Your social media graph or the growth of your social networks over time
• The amount of traffic your sites receive each month
• The number of leads and sales you’re making each month

And so on…

I prefer to use Google Docs for this kind of thing so I always have easy access to the tracker wherever I am. The tracker should be used with your analytics reports – compare them from time to time, every 1-2 weeks so you maintain a tight watch on what’s working and what’s not.

Tracking leads to specific knowledge instead of generalities and specific knowledge of what works is powerful. Specific knowledge is what you should be after here. And the more specific you get in terms of results being generated, the more of an edge you’ll have over the vast number of people who operate on general principles, who fail to track, and who end up operating sloppily as a result.

If Hopkins was alive today, I think he’d end this post with this final, concise reminder. Take it to heart and apply it to your own online marketing and traffic generation efforts:

“Success is a rarity, maximum success an impossibility, unless one is guided by laws as immutable as the law of gravitation. No guesswork is permitted.” – Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

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ROFL – check out this Ping.gm Error screen. The service recently went down, on Friday Sept 11th at 8:19 PM PST.

Can you say: EPIC FAIL?

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I received a question this morning from a client: “Any tips on starting a blog and what to post?” and immediately put down what I was doing to write this article. I sometimes forget how difficult it can be to get started blogging and thought this would be a great topic for a post.

I’m a big fan of doing an hours work and having that hour pay me back in many different ways. Another way of saying this is that I like to leverage my time so when people ask questions, instead of answering the question in an email, I’ve found it to be more effective to answer the question and send it out as a newsletter and add it as a blog post to my site AND then to blast it out via my social networks. (That way you get way more results for the time and effort you’ve spent!)

If you’re like I was when I was new to blogging, you’re likely finding it hard to find the time to write regularly let alone come up with great ideas to write about.

With that in mind, here are 5 tips to help you come up with great content for your blog on a regular basis. Here’s a bonus tip up front: If you want to come up with great content AND leverage your time like I mentioned above, consider sending out each blog post as an email to everyone on your list. By doing so you’ve just multiplied the potential return on your time.

5 Blog Writing Tips Anyone Can Follow:

1. Read the news
2. Keep track of your competition
3. Follow news & trends in your industry
4. Follow new & trends in your client’s industries
5. Answer client questions

1. Read the news

It might seem obvious but I find a great way to come up with blog article ideas is to scan the general news headlines every morning. Why is this helpful? In addition to keeping you up to speed on what’s going on, often what happens is that a quick scan will get the ideas flowing. You may see something taking shape in the media that relates to something your clients are interested in or something that relates to a past experience and voila: a new idea for post is born. What it comes down to is idea flow – the more you take in on a daily basis the more ideas you’re going to have on what to write about. And remember: timely, relevant content is everything.

2. Keep track of your competition

Keeping an eye on your competitors, especially your most successful competitors or the big shots in your area is a great way to come up with ideas on what to write about. If they’re covering a story, see if you can write a post with a new angle or come at it with your own twist and insight. You don’t want to play catch up necessarily but you can gleam a lot of great ideas by seeing what others are up to in your field. It also helps you to spot trends and potential weaknesses your competition might have if you follow them regularly.

3. Follow industry news and trends

Using financial services as an example, industry rules and regulations change from time to time (understatement?) and you need to stay up to date on them in order to do your job. So why not keep your clients and prospects in the loop? At the beginning of the year we saw the advent of the Tax Free Savings Account for Canadians – this was a great example of a blog post waiting to happen. Anytime something industry specific comes up that’s important to the people you do business with – write about it.

4. Follow industry news and trends in your client’s industries

In order to better serve your clients, generate referrals and build your web presence, I’ve found it’s a good idea to learn as much about your client base as possible. If you primarily serve business owners in the suburbs for examples, see if you can find some local blogs and websites that target this niche also. Then when they post news, write a quick summary of that news and post it on your site. Subscribe to newsletter’s and blogs that your clients read and pay attention to the things that are affecting them. Then see if you can put a post together about how your services fit what’s going on in their industry for example. Again the key is idea flow. Pay attention to what’s important to your clients and then showcase your understanding and ideas on your own site.

5. Answer client questions

I’ve saved the best for last. My number one tip on what to write about on your blog is to answer questions your clients and prospects ask you. Questions that come in via email, phone calls, social networks or in person chats are the absolute best source of content for your blog.

Much like the question that sparked this post, any time a customer asks you a question, if instead of just emailing a response you take some time to create a content piece (blog post) around it you can then leverage that investment of time by posting the answer on your site and also sending the article out via email, your social networks and even mail if you still use the old fashioned way!

Final Thoughts: What’s the ROE? (Return on Energy?)

So how did you like the 5 tips? Sound like a lot of work? Well, it can be in some cases but a lot of the time a quick post with some bullet points will suffice. This article took me about 20-30 minutes to write but after it’s all said and done not only will it be emailed to about 150 people immediately, I will then post it on my own site where hundreds and potentially thousands of people can see it this month (and in the future people will be able to find this article in Google which may bring more visits and views). I will also blast it out to my social networks (Facebook, linkedin.com, Twitter.com, and others) using ping.fm which means 3000+ people will receive a notification about this post in short order.

Based on experience, using this quickly implemented strategy, I will receive multiple responses…and likely a few more questions as a result!

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A friend and I are in the midst of building an online product and need a demo website built.

We’re looking to have a designer create a look similar to one of the following sites:

• http://ow.ly
• http://budurl.com
• http://ping.fm
• http://goodbarry.com
• http://bit.ly
• http://is.gd

To start, we only need 1-2 pages created, it’s the look and feel that’s most important.

If interested, please use the contact form on the site to get in touch.

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