Eric Ward, famed link-marketing consultant (he helped put Amazon on the map), has started a special relocation directory to help out the 300+ About.com Guides who have been dropped, and those who wish to connect with them. This is a useful place for publishers looking for specialist writers, and for content publicists who want to get links to their niche content picked up by guide sites. Check it out at:
A MarketingSherpa reader writes, “I’m trying to find advice about developing a powerful opt-in message that is both honest, yet compelling. Any idea where I could look for how-tos or great examples?”
My personal favorite email newsletter opt-in message (this week at least) was written by Dan Eskelson of ClearWater Landscape. It reads, “Learn professional landscaping tips, from ‘hands on’ gardening technique to design theory, in our free monthly ezine.”
Dan told me that he chose the wording after carefully examining his site server logs to find out what search terms visitors from search engines had found him using. Then he incorporated the most popular search terms into the opt-in message so it would strike at the hearts of visitors!
Inspired by Dan, I looked up which terms most people find our site by, and it turns out “Case Study” is the most popular — so you can guess how I’m rewording our subscription offers for the site redesign due out soon. 🙂
BTW: Case Study about ClearWater’s online marketing at:
http://www.MarketingSherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1882
Clever ad sales tactic from PRWeek, the weekly print tabloid for PR professionals. They are selling the advertisers in their “listings” section in the back (you know where businesses pop short ads with their logo, 8-12 to a page) on an email version. Now once a month PRWEEK subscribers get a special emailed guide to a different type of vendor.
This month’s email subject line is “Do you need to find a PR firm? with this email you can search by State or even Industry sector!”. The HTML email is really nothing more than their print directory scanned in. Paying PR firms have thumbnail logos and brief text descriptions that hotlink to their own Web sites. The Ad Sales guy in charge could not give me exact sales figures
(secrecy) but admitted it’s really popular.
If you are a B2B trade magazine or trade directory publisher, this is a great idea to steal. For a free sample, email matthew.gull@prweek.com
I just clicked through on a spam message and I feel kinda guilty about it. It was for a “Unique Mexican Gift Basket” and I’m a sucker for Mexican handcrafts. Luckily the basket just featured stuff like Tequila and salsa, which are easier for me to resist. But, if it had had stuff I yearned for … would I have bought? Should I have bought?
As an outspoken supporter of the anti-spam movement, it would be wrong for me to buy something from a piece of spam because if you buy then you encourage them to think it works. Guilt. guilt, guilt.
The folks at one of my favorite UK-sites covering the Net marketing scene just emailed over an invite to all London-based Sherpa readers:
As Great Escape, sorry, Christmas Day approaches, netimperative.com and the BOOB Honchos would like to see the industry turn its back on the gloom and declare: I’ll have a babycham. BOOB (Buy our own Booze) is a networking party set up over two years ago by a collective of internet professionals who wanted to get together once a month for a few drinks without being beholden to a commercial sponsor. Last month’s BOOB was a great success and we’ve had huge amounts of encouragement from those who couldn’t make it.Of course, we’d also like you to come along to the next BOOB Night and bring some likeminded colleagues with you. No need to RSVP, just turn up.
Date: Thursday December 6th 6:30pm til 12:30am
Venue: Denim, 4a Upper St Martins Lane, London. WC2 (downstairs bar)
How good is your Web site? Gartner’s now offering their “Web Evaluation Tool” for free.
They’re clever marketers, because this is just a series of three pretty obvious quizzes that you fill out ranking your own site on everything from personalization to customer value. But doesn’t “Evaluation Tool” sound more impressive than that? Anyway, for some reason they don’t let you take the quizzes at their site, instead you have to “download the tool.” If you’re trying to pry extra Web development costs out of your CEO and he/she is the type to be impressed with the Gartner brand name, then download the Tool today here and use the results for some internal marketing.
According to a recently published Consumer Reports survey, consumers vastly prefer buying computers online to buying them in stores. Apple, Dell, IBM, Micron and Gateway’s sites all got good or great marks for selection, “savvy” and useful shopper help features. Not a single brick and mortar retailer, such as Costco, Office Depot, Circuit City, Best Buy, got high marks. In fact, offline stores’ marks were pitiful compared to online.
However, everybody who got high marks for selling online, got pretty lousy marks for tech support. Seems like computer sellers have figured out how to make the sale, but not how to give good after-sales support to keep the customer happy. Which is pretty short-sighted given that the personal computer marketplace is no longer a new one. Most people who will buy a computer in the next few years have done so at least once in the past. The game is now about making consumers happy for a lifetime of multiple sales, not just grabbing that first one.
I remember a day back in the late 90s when I advised my then-boss — hey we’ve got to buy as many domain names as possible!!! There was a sense of a landgrab. Rush to get your share before somebody else snakes them away from you.
Boy have things changed. These days I get approached by at least a domain-name-owner every week asking, “Hey wanna buy some names?” Even though the names they have to sell are related to our business, we never buy them anymore because we’re all about building one focused brand now, instead of zillions. (Hey, it’s hard enough to build one, let alone zillions.)
If you are enticed by a domain name offer — for example reader Barry Kluger just wrote in that he’s selling some useful B2B domain names such as HighTechPortal.com and FarmPortal.com (see a complete list here) — ask how much traffic the URL is currently getting just from folks typing it in to see what’s there. Then adjust your bid accordingly.
If you are sending a campaign to a particular email list or placing it on a specific Web site (vs. run of network), it’s absolutely worth asking the list/site owner for creative and offer advice. We’re about to launch an email campaign for a new Sherpa report to a partner’s list, so I asked the partner if she had advice on what works for her audience…. and her reply made a huge difference.
For example, we were just going to include a link to our store page for the product, but she said about 20% of her list are more likely to order if we include a phone number, even though they may order on the site instead. She also advised us that her list prefer longer emailed letters than average. This type of advice is gold, and you can only get it if you ask for it. Funny thing is, according to list and media owners I chat with, hardly any marketers ever ask for it.
Did this year’s stay-at-home Thanksgiving affect content sites in the US? I sure noticed a difference. Last year Thanksgiving was one of our *best* days ever — we got the highest rate of new subscribers in a single day that were not linked to a specific promotion ever. MarketingSherpa’s 2000 traffic logs revealed that thousands of marketing and content professionals fled familial togetherness around 2pm-9pm ET on Thanksgiving day. They went online and subscribed to Sherpa instead.
However, this year it was one of our lowest days for new subscribers, and traffic was far down as well. The only thing I can figure is that since fewer people traveled, the average marketing pro was surrounded by fewer, potentially annoying family members. It’s a crackpot theory, but it’s mine.
http://www.marketingsherpa.com
