Internet Marketing Tactics

Work in Progress: Last Updated 4/09/04

There are hundreds of internet marketing tactics that companies can use to create awareness, traffic and revenue. Some are expensive, some are not. But the sequence of internet marketing tactics is very important. For example, before launching an affiliate program (which I consider to be the most important of all internet marketing tactics, rivalled only by search engine marketing), you must demonstrate a reasonable web site conversion rate which requires a lot of usability and offer testing. Also, in order to get customer testimonials for use on your web site and in your emails, you must have happy customers. There is no perfect formula for sequence. But use common sense. Start with low-cost programs. Figure out how to make them work. Then test more scalable tactics. Eventually, great companies will find ways to deploy almost all of these internet marketing tactics in ways that are best suited for them.

Search Engine Marketing. The fastest way to test and validate your online business idea is to build a web site and then buy qualified visitors on search engines by bidding on keywords that your customers will be using. The beautiful thing about search engine marketing is that there are hundreds of millions of queries every day, so this internet marketing strategy is quite scalable. With some businesses you can generate millions of dollars a year in revenue by getting comprehensive in your keyword strategy and sophisticated about how you test and optimize your web site conversion rate for all of your keywords.

• Bid for keywords on pay-per-click search engines. The fastest way to get targeted site traffic on an ongoing basis is to set up a Google AdWords campaign. Select dozens or even hundreds of keywords and phrases that your prospective customers might type into a search engine. Bid as little as five cents per click. When people search for one of your keywords and click on your advertisement, you will be charged. With Google, you can also use their free ROI tracking tools to discover which keywords generating sales, not just clicks. After testing Google, you should set up a campaign on Overture (now owned by Yahoo), but it often takes them 3-5 days to approve your keywords. So I always recommend starting with Google and then using Overture later.
• Search Engine Optimization. If you build your web site correctly and get many other web sites to link to your web site, your web pages can be come up near the top on keyword searches on Google and other search engines. For some keywords, you can rank in the top 10 within a few days; other keywords may take months or even years to crack the top 10. But understanding how search engines work and how to make your pages visible and relevant to them is a key for long-term profitability and internet success.

Web Site Conversion Rate. Before spending too much money on search engine traffic, you need to build a web site that clearly explains what you are offering and that is easy to use. Your site needs to be credible and generate trust. You need to use some of the dozens of credibility elements listed below. If your web site is too poor and won't convert visitors to buyers, then paying for visitors will generate expenses but not revenue.

Link Popularity

• Use the Google toolbar or Marketleap.com to see how many incoming links you have (how many sites are linking to your site). This is critical for generating traffic and for getting search engines to notice your site.
• Provide free web site tracking (of page views) for the most popular web sites in your industry. This requires web sites to put some tracking code on their home page and to let you serve up that tracking code (or that pixel) and then to rank your web site traffic vs. your competitors. This is an extremely powerful technique that requires some technical skill. It can be used when it seems nearly impossible to get a #1 ranking on a keyword. I first saw it when Rootsweb used it to get a #1 ranking on the keyword "genealogy", a very popular keyword. See how it is implemented at www.genealogy.org. (Scroll down when you get to the home page). They no longer have the #1 ranking, but they are still in the top 10 in Google.
• I once created a list of 19 tactics that we used to persuade other quality sites to link to us. Then I found this page which lists 131 legitimate tactics for getting links.

Email Marketing

• Build an email database. Capture all email addresses from customers, prospects, partners, into Outlook or some other email tool. Build your personal contact list into a valuable resource for your business.
• Use co-registration and offer a free email newsletter. You can create a very large opt-in email database by using co-registration. Double opt-in names of people who specifically want YOUR newsletter can be acquired for about $0.30 to $0.50 per name.

  10x Marketing helped one company build a double opt-in email list of more than 350,000 names in less than 60 days using co-registration.

• Use sweepstakes to get people to register at your web site.

  One of the best sweepstakes-using sites is Hooked on Phonics.

Viral Marketing

• Hotmail: "get your free email address at Hotmail.com". This is the mother of all viral marketing strategies. Hotmail gained millions of users without spending any money on marketing because every customer they got "infected" everyone they sent email to with the marketing message that they could get their own free email account. Even as early as October 1997, Hotmail was getting 60,000 new customers per day. Microsoft paid $400 million for Hotmail in 1998.
• Amazon.com: Share the Love. This is an excellent program. When you buy anything on Amazon, Amazon lets you send an email to anyone you know with a discount to purchase the books/products that you just bought. I have used the Share the Love program (to send discounts to friends) and have purchased books that have been recommended to me by others.
• MyFamily.com: invite family members to join for free
• Blue Mountain Arts: offered free electronic greeting cards. In January 1999 ZDnet reported, "According to Web-tracking firm Media Metrix Inc., the company's bluemountainarts.com was the most heavily trafficked e-commerce site on the Internet during the month of December, topping even Amazon.com."
• Cleanfilms.com has an excellent referral program. If you sign up for their family-friendly edited DVD rental service (like Netflix, but without all the s*ex and violence), you can refer other members and get a serious discount on your own subscription.
• Offer a sweepstakes to your customers, and then let them refer their friends to participate in your sweepstakes as well.

  Ask Jeeves increased its sweepstakes participants by 78% by using word-of-mouth technology by Qbiquity.com (no longer in business?)

Affiliate Marketing

• Have a decent budget? Set up an affiliate program using Commission Junction, Be Free or LinkShare. Low Budget: Set up an inhouse affiliate program using software from Kowabunga, or another provider.
• Provide a generous commission to attract and retain affiliates.
• Recruit hundreds of affiliates personally. Treat them with the greatest respect. Provide them with high performing links, banners, search boxes, etc, that you have already tested via paid online advertising. Spend a lot of time building up your affiliate channel, helping them optimize their results.

Distribution Tactics.

• Use eBay to get exposure and sell your products. They have more than 7 million daily visitors looking for stuff. If they don't find you, they're finding something else.
• Consider setting up a Yahoo Store even if you already have an e-commerce site. You will get extra distribution with an additional storefront. Same thing with Amazon.

Content Tactics

• Publish thousands of pages of content. Amazon.com has almost 4 million pages of content that have been indexed by Google, which has about 4 billion pages of content in their index. So 1 out of every 1,000 pages on Google is from Amazon. Google has 200,000,000 queries per day. If all pages in the Google index were weighted equally, then Amazon.com, by virtue of its massive number of pages would get 1 out of every 1000 searchers to visit it's site. That would be 200,000 visits per day. Or 6 million per month. And the marketing cost for getting those 6 million visits per month? Zero. Question: how many pages do you have in the Google index? Can you think of a way to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages on your site?
• Publish a blog. I bought Radio Userland software for my blog for $39.95 per year. Blogging doesn't immediately generate hordes of traffic, but a consistently good blog that is syndicated can create awareness and build influence over time.
• Register blog with Feedster.com and other blog search engines
• Syndicate your blog through RSS
• Email other bloggers about your blog.
• Offer a free email newsletter with excellent content about your industry.
• Syndicate your email newsletter through other content web sites.
• Offer to produce content for radio, newspaper, or television stations.

  Worldhistory.com plans to produce a This Day in History feature for media companies

• Competitive Press Releases. One large company watches for press releases from competitors, then issues their own press release commenting on the news of the first company. Since press releases are good content and are often distributed on many web sites (including news sites), the search engines pick them up. Then when potential customers are searching for Company 1, there is a good chance they will find the press release from Company 2 commenting on the news of Company 1. So a smart customer will now do research on Company 2 as well before making a buying decision.

No-Cost or Low-Cost Tactics

• Choose a great domain name. Often, before we decide which domain name to purchase, we run a quick test on Google. Using AdWords, you can actually test URLs before even owning them. Take your 2-4 best domain names, run an advertising campaign using each domain in the visible URL field (the actual URL can be to a web site that you actually own). Sometimes, the click rate for a good domain name is up to twice as high as for a poor one. Let your potential customers decide which domain name they like best. If you're not comfortable running this test on Google without first owning the domains, go ahead and buy all of them (for as little as $7.95 per year on GoDaddy.com). Then just use the one that tests best.
• Get involved with newsgroups. Read them. And appropriate post messages to them. Some newsgroups are read by tens of thousands of people per day. Article: Marketing on Newsgroups
• Create a signature line that attaches to every email that you send out. Make sure it says something positive about your company and lets people know how to find your web site and contact you. Use email a lot to let people know about what you do. When you post messages on newsgroups, your signature should show up, even though the text of your post usually won't be commercial in nature. John Bresee, founder of BackCountryStore.com, used this tactic as early in 1997 when he started his outdoor gear company, and these signature line links still continue to bring him exposure and traffic seven years later.
• Print your dotcom address on your box. When you ship packages, consider having your URL printed boldly on the box. You never know how many people might see the box during the delivery process.
• Include web offers when you ship or mail boxes, billing statements, or in any other mail you send. Include web site information and offers in the box. Every time you ship something, you can include literature at no additional cost.
• Submit your web site DMOZ.
• Submit your URL to hundreds of online directories. One smart SEO that I know likes to search in Google for the phrase "add url" along with a query string that describes the industry you are in. Generally, you'll fund dozens of places that you can submit your web site to, although many of them will require a small fee. One entrepreneur I know adds the word "free" so that he can filter out many of the paid directories and focus on the free ones.
• Trade advertising impressions with other web sites.
• Trade links with other web sites.
• Post press releases for free on PRweb.com and Press-world.com

Offline/Online Marketing

• Use classified ads with your URL.
• Use job boards to promote your company.
• Sponsor the local theater for $25 per year. Get your URL listed in all the printed programs that often tens of thousands of people will see over the course of a year.

Track Everything Using Web Analytics

• Use Google's free tracking codes along with Google AdWords in order to measure ROI
• Understand why online tracking is never perfectly accurate and online campaigns are almost always underreported: give them the benefit of the doubt

Miscellaneous

• Make offers on domain names that are already taken. There are still millions of good domains that are registered but not being used. Contact the owner and make an offer. We purchased the MyFamily.com domain name for $18,000 back in 1998. Recently, we paid $5,000 for LDSAudio.com. Getting the right domain really matters in the long run.
• Get added publicity and brand recognition by choosing a stock symbol that will create buzz (Examples: Salesforce.com got CRM, other symbols include GEEK, COOL, and AMEN.)

Credibility

• Solicit and use customer testimonials wherever you can.
• Create a "From Our Customers" page and rotate real testimonials.

  From webmasterworld.com re: the effect of using testimonials: "Last year we changed the index page for a client website to BEGIN with a "from our customers" panel -- it's animated (oh, the horror of it) and rotates through five or six real world testimonials. The panel is the very first thing a visitor sees when they arrive. We keep the testimonials fresh and edit them very minimally so they retain the authentic voice of a real person. That one move gave a nice boost to conversions."

• Free Shipping was the #1 tactic used by e-commerce merchants in the 2003 holiday season.
• Place 1-800 number on all site pages
• List your physical address so people know you are a real company.
• Provide multiple payment options. Accept all credit cards, checks by phone. Even provide printable order forms so customers can mail in order with checks.
• Provide excellent satisfaction guarantee, 30, 60 or 90 days. Make refund options clear.
• Qualify to use the Better Business Bureau online logo, to build your credibility.
• Join TrustE. Use their logo to demonstrate that you are following best practices in security and privacy.
• Provide phone and fax number for internationally callers
• Use LivePerson or other real-time customer service chat system so customers know that someone is there if they need to talk
• Bandwagon: "thousands of satisfied customers" or "#1 in our industry"
• Awards & Recognition
• Endorsements (like myvesta.org) use the ***** star approach if possible
• Do scheduled online chats or online seminars
• Offer free white papers (written in house or by trusted third parties)
• Publish a book or articles and mention that on the site
• Have a quote or promise from the CEO
• Have a picture of the CEO or company employees on the web site
• Use a strong headline

General Usability Rules

• Improve speed of web site and reduce size of web pages and images. Try to keep all pages under 30k-40k in size. Use Netmechanic.com or HTML Doctors to check your page size, HTML coding and speed.
• Design your site for speed
• Clearly Identifies on your home page what the Company is Selling
• Most Wanted Response Is Clear and Visible
• No Use of Flash or Other Plug-in Technologies

  Usability Tips From by Jakob Nielsen

• Jakob Nielsen: "Go through design elements and remove them one at a time. If the design works as well without a certain design element, kill it. Simplicity always wins over complexity ... every three bytes saved is a milisecond less download time."
• Jakob Nielsen: "Never use a fixed pixel width for any tables ... specify layouts as percentages"
• Jakob Nielsen: include WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes on all images and table columns
• Jakob Nielsen: "Complex tables take a long time to render ... Split the information into several tables ... the top table should be simple and fast to render."
• Use a Search Engine for Catalog/Shopping Cart or Site -- Jakob: put search box on upper right hand of every page on site -- Jakob: "slightly more than half of all users are search-dominant, about a fifth are link-dominant, and the rest exhibit mixed behavior."

  Learn how one small retailer had a 35% increase in sales by adding site search

• Atomz.com and Freefind.com offer free search engines if you need one. (I prefer Atomz.com because it has nicer reports)
• Optimize search engine on site to handle misspellings. (This may require building a custom search engine)
• Study log files to see what people are looking for -- make sure the search results are highly accurate. Jakob: Users don't understand boolean!

  Example: Thane.com, a leading direct response marketer, analyzed its log files and found many customers were searching for a product which they did not offer. They worked a deal to offer the new product and it quickly became a best-seller. Lesson: give the customers what they are looking for!

• Jakob Nielsen: Weight results of searches based on importance of pages (FAQs, product pages, etc)
• Jakob Nielsen: Use a wide search box. Search results are more accurate when they contain more keywords; wide search boxes generate queries with more keywords.
• Jakob Nielsen: Publish popular or latest queries
• Jakob Nielsen: Support URL butchering (where users hack off trailing parts of a URL in the hope of getting to an overview page ...)
• Jakob Nielsen: Avoid linkrot
• Jakob Nielsen: Advanced search is fine if on another page
• Jakob Nielsen: "[Do] not include any text in graphics" -- it's slower and makes translation into foreign languages more difficult
• Indicate the size of any download next to the link
• Jakob Nielsen: Use short anchors for links
• Jakob Nielsen: Only the most important, information-carrying terms should be made into hypertext links
• Jakob Nielsen: Links to a directory should include a final slash in the URL
• Jakob Nielsen: "Unvisited links must unmistakably be blue and visited links must unmistakably be reddish or purple. . . . Standard link colors explained about 16% of the variability in a user's ability to do things on the sites ..."
• Jakob Nielsen: Use outbound links to add value to your site
• Jakob Nielsen: Enable incoming links by having permanent URLs for each of your pages
• Jakob Nielsen: Provide printable versions of any long document
• Jakob Nielsen: Online Writing: Concise Text, Scannable Layout, Objective Language
• Jakob Nielsen: HTML page titles should be 2-6 words long
• Jakob Nielsen: Rewrite headlines when you link to other people's work
• Jakob Nielsen: Headlines: make the first word an important, information-carrying one -- name of person, company or concept discussed
• Jakob Nielsen: Make online document pages searchable
• Jakob Nielsen: Do videos as downloads, not streaming
• Jakob Nielsen: If you use audio or video, do VERY BRIEF CLIPS
• Jakob Nielsen: Use comparison tables to help customers find the right product for them

Generating Online Sales

• As in direct marketing, create and test offers to find the most compelling offers for your customers. Test sale prices, price points, free shipping, bundles, free gifts, etc.
• Market benefits not just features. Explain how your product or service going to improve my life, not just its technical features.
• Use great online copy--words that sell. I like the book "Words That Sell" and use it regularly to brainstorm copy ideas.
• Create strong headlines (or offer) on home page and product pages. Many customers will never see your home page. They may enter your site on any one of the pages that is indexed by a search engine. Make sure you have strong copy, headlines, and offers on many pages, so that customers know what the site is about.
• Top 5 or Top 10 Best-Selling Products List on home page and other entry pages

  Thane.com used this tactic to increase conversion rate. When someone sees a list of best-selling products, they are more likely to purchase it than if they simply browse to find it through a directory.

• Urgency: Limited Time Offer or Deal of the Day or Special Discount That Expires

  In the early days of Ancestry.com, almost 50% of our daily e-commerce revenue came from our "Deal of the Day." We made it such a compelling value that many customers felt they just had to buy it when it was on sale. More recently, I have seen two software companies experience a heavy-drop off in sales when their "limited time offer" expired and was replaced by a normal price point.

• Clear Value Proposition: compare two products to each other to show value or compare our products to other companies
• RealOne A vs B tactic to increase conversion rate ($4.95 offer side by side with clearly valuable $11.95 offer)

  At the 2002 MarketingSherpa subscription conference, the most valuable lesson of the entire day came from RealOne, who experienced something like an 800% increase in conversion when they started giving customers a choice between $4.95 for one "channel" and $11.95 for about 15-20 "channels." (I'm trying to locate my MarketingSherpa typescript, so I can verify the facts here).

• Cross out regular price with redline, use the phrase "your price"
• Landing pages for each keyword or group of keywords
• 30-day (or more) money-back guarantee clearly in shopping process
• How good is shopping cart process? How visible and Amazon-like are the buttons? What is the drop off rate for each step?
• Show images of Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover (always default shopping cart to Visa)
• Accept Checks by Phone!
• LivePerson or some other way to interact with a sales person easily
• Make the web site internationally friendly (have a phone number that works outside of the U.S., etc.)
• Easy Access to Products through Browsing and Searching
• Eliminate Anonymity--show picture of owner or President with his guarantee of your product purchase (myvesta.org)

Outrageous Tactics

• Streak at the Superbowl with a URL printed on your body. Next day, land on front page of USA Today.
• Convince a small town to change its name to your domain name (Half.com, Oregon)
• Live online for 12 consecutive months (never leave your house, order everything you need on the internet) and legally change your name to DotComGuy.
• Wear your MyFamily.com t-shirt to the hospital while being filmed by the Learning Channel for a documentary. (This actually happened to me, but was not planned. It just goes to show that you should wear your company logo whereever you go. You never know when you'll end up at the hospital or on TV!)

 

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