January 2010

So let’s say you happen to be a company that manufactures iPod speakers and you want more coverage in Google’s search results for the term iPod Speakers.

You’re already running a Google Adwords campaign to target terms and phrases related to iPod Speakers and you want to gain more natural (aka organic) search traffic for your products.

You type iPod Speakers into Google, and low and behold you see a list of iPod speakers complete with images, descriptions and pricing. What have you stumbled across?

In the search results the title of this little area is “Shopping Results for iPod Speakers” but in fact, the way to get listed here is by taking advantage of the Google Merchant Center (Formally known as Google Products, Formally known as Google Base, Formally known as Froogle…)

Like any Google service, it helps and can save you a few steps if you already have a Google Account as you can simply login to Gmail or the Google service of your choice, open a new tab in your browser and head over to the Merchant Center to login and get started.

Assuming you already have a Google Account, here’s what you need to do to get your products listed:

1. Open up Google Merchant Center and create an account.
2. Edit your initial account settings (be sure to setup a new data feed.)
3. Create a data feed file using Excel or Google Docs (Find supported file formats here / Find a list of attributes to include in your data feed here.
4. Next you need to submit your feed.

You have several options for submitting your data feed to the Google Merchant Center:

• Direct upload through the Google Merchant Center Data feeds page (Files under 20 MB in size)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP) (Files larger than 20 MB must upload using FTP)
• Automatic upload via scheduling (Files under 15 MB in size)

Note: If you’re submitting a compressed file, your file must be under 500 MB. If your file is larger than what our restrictions allow, please split your file into multiple, smaller files before uploading.

Want to learn more?

• For a handy step by step tutorial on the entire process, visit the Google Merchant Center help topics here.
• Or check out this Webmaster World Forum dedicated to the Google Merchant Center
• Actually interested in iPod Speakers and not Google Merchant? Check out Kanto Speakers (disclaimer: they’re a client).

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That’s right, there’s a new conference focused 100% on conversion rate optimization taking place this May in San Jose California called Conversion Conference West.

The conference is being organized and lead by well known conversion rate optimization authority, Tim Ash of Sitetuners.com and includes a lengthy list of speakers,  many of which are well known in web marketing and conversion circles.

The fact that conversion rate optimization can now support a full blown conference says something about the momentum its building as a legitimate tool in the Internet Marketers tool box.

Much like search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization is now a discipline unto itself with many people choosing to solely focus on helping companies increase the number of  leads and sales they generate with their existing website traffic. In the past the focus of the large majority of web marketing consultants had been on just getting traffic to a site in the first place. Now, it’s about doing more with less – or more with what you already have. It’s an interesting trend and one that is here to stay.

• Follow Tim Ash on Twitter
• Follow Site Tuners
• Follow Conversion Conference West

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[ B55J89T3KC8F ] I just added a new book to my “to-read” list. It’s called Rework and is hitting book stores in March.

The book’s already has positive reviews from the likes of Seth Godin, Mark Cuban and Tony Hsieh.

If it’s anything like 37 signals‘ last book, Getting Real (which you can read for free online) it’s going to be a must read for entrepreneurs in 2010.

Related reco’s:

• What Would Google Do?
• Crushit!
• Trust Agents (on my “to-read” list as well)

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As vast and far reaching as Google’s ad network is I’ve decided to commit more time and energy to learning the ins and outs of generating traffic beyond Google, and in large part beyond search engines in general.

Learning the ins and outs of Google’s content network and improving the results one can achieve with Adwords are still important. But my gut feeling is that advertisers and marketers who, in the coming years, learn to generate and profit from traffic outside of Google’s domain are going to be more successful than those who do not.

Just like Microsoft in its early days, Google has experienced tremendous growth over the past 10 years. However, there’s a growing discontent building, at least in the web marketing industry, with the power Google now wields and its ability to completely kill off, shut down and pretty much put out of business those marketers who it deems as not fitting its interests.

Any time a person, company or country rises to a place of dominance, detractors spring up; it’s a given. People have been crying foul for some time about Google’s business practices and its philosophy of doing no evil is admittedly suspect (I mean why not focus on “doing good” instead?). Detractors and the doubtful aside (of which I am one…I mean I use a lot of Google’s services and only recently realized that if they closed my account on a whim, it would be hugely detrimental to my business) it just makes sense to diversify your traffic sources if you have the means to do so.

So what does that look like?

For one, there are only three ways of getting traffic to a website that I know of:

1. Direct type ins, where people type in your domain name into their browsers. (Typically 10-15% of a sites traffic coming from direct type ins would not be uncommon. In special cases, where a marketer owns a domain such as fish.com or money.com, direct type ins might be the sole means of traffic. How powerful!)
2. Paid advertising: Pay-Per-Click is by and far the method of paid advertising most of us are familiar with. This includes banner advertising and the increasingly popular interactive ads we see on our favorite news sites.
3. Traffic from links: this includes links from Google. Yes, Google does link to your site remember? It links to you in its search results! We don’t tend to think of traffic from search engines like this, we tend to classify it as it’s own type of traffic: search traffic (and links from other websites are generally known as referrals). But really, traffic from search engines boils down to getting traffic from links.

To simplify things even further, I’ll go as far as saying there are only two ways to get people to a website:

You can pay for it or you can work (hard) for it. Plain and simple.

Search engines continue to play a major role in directing traffic to websites for the time being. Social media and social networks are also rapidly growing in their influence and ability to drive targeted traffic to sites. Then there’s the opportunity the mobile web presents.

For my purposes here though, my primary interest is in buying traffic.

Some things I will be looking at:

• Ad networks other than those offered by Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Link brokers
• Affiliate networks
• And others

Really I’m just getting started in my research and already I’ve been digging up all sorts of opportunities to drive traffic, leads and sales by other means than though Google.

The web is a big place. Moving ahead into 2010, keep your eyes open for new ways of bringing people to your site and generating the results you’re after. There’s a ton of opportunity out there.

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