Internet Marketing Newsletter
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There are huge competitive advantages of marketing on the internet. This is a market segment you cannot afford to give up to competitors. For example, Dell Computer is one of the most profitable web marketing companies today. They produce a commodity item but they sell it at a lower cost to a higher quality customer due to their use of Internet marketing. They integrate both sales and marketing into a continuous stream of information that allows "real time" adjustments to pricing, marketing mix, and production based on current conditions. These "real time" adjustments result in lower inventory costs and accelerated new product rollouts.

Reciprocal Consulting creates feedback systems with your Internet marketing campaign that permeate every level of your company so that you can drive costs down and seek out the best customers. Large web marketers including Dell, Amazon, EBay, Interactive Corp, and Apple Computer's iTunes seek to gain a competitive advantage by delivering content and advertising that is continuously measured, optimized, and improved to create maximum profit for the company. These companies have full time staff devoted to this effort. You can outsource this job to Reciprocal Consulting and we will bring the very best testing methods and optimization techniques to your company. We will bring your web marketing effectiveness up to a level that only the most sophisticated and experienced companies have.

There are select industries, primarily services, which are perfectly suited for this type of customized Internet marketing strategy (public adjusters, marriage counselors etc.) These industries have only recently begun to take advantage of the great efficiencies offered by Internet marketing. Unlike retail businesses which have low profit margins and high volumes of product sales, a service company can create and deliver high margin service to many niches with little increase in variable costs.

The best web marketing efforts in the world are done in-house. Companies like Dell Computer, EBay, and Amazon have deep and dynamic web marketing knowledge that permeates every level of their company. While few firms aspire to that level of involvement in the web, the business models that these firms set up is indicative of what it takes to dominate a market. It requires a significant investment in learning how to continuously improve a virtual marketing machine that runs day and night. A good web presence means that your company has an intelligent, computerized agent promoting your products and services at precisely the time and place required. When your website is booming with sales, hundreds of customers are interacting with your site at 11PM on a week night and each customer is getting the wealth of information he or she needs to make a buying decision.

Advertising has never been so dynamic, so specialized, and so closely tied with measurable results. The first wave of selling products and services on the Internet was a ripple compared to the wave that is emerging now. Bandwidth is increasing, customers are learning how to use the web better, and the new wave of web marketing is focused on return on investment (ROI). ROI is being broken down into subsets and steps everywhere along the user interface and supply chain. Companies that learn these tools first and best will dominate their markets and create a high barrier to entry for potential competitors.

When Amazon started to offer Lawn and Garden Equipment, it required a huge investment in tracking systems and dozens of web pages. A service company can add any number of services much more readily. If a market segment is overcrowded or becomes unprofitable, it doesn't have to sell off inventory, restock shelves, or find new products. It only has to change an ad and a web page. If a mortgage company wants to offer a new loan product, it can be rolled it on the web.Calls can be directed to one particular desk that will handle the new product. Likewise, service products can be tested easily in limited markets on the web. Whatever company capitalizes on these efficiencies first will have three critical advantages versus competitors who use traditional marketing methods:

• By being "first to market," they will access the best customers first and establish loyalty. The best customers need the least human interaction. They seek out information and make buying choices on their own.
• They will drive costs down dramatically by using the principles of testing, feedback, and integration of Internet marketing into their business practices and production.
• Most importantly, they will build a large "moat" of technology and intellectual property that will take competitors years to match. Many improvements in marketing on the web are counter- intuitive. They only become evident with experience and testing. When you drive down ad costs and increase conversion rates you create a very difficult environment for competitors. They simply cannot afford to compete with you.

Your company has a good reputation and delivers excellent service at such a good price that you think you have no need for advertising. In fact, you don't want to advertise because you think it is a waste of time dealing with leads that need to be coaxed into the door when referrals just want to make an appointment. How many more referrals would you get if, for example, you had a monthly newsletter campaign that reaches all your old clients, your existing clients, and your business contacts. Think they don't want your "spam" email? Think again. Your satisfied clients will welcome your monthly email if it has relevant and valuable information. We put recorded audio in our emails so your clients get to hear your voice if they click on the link to the recording. Your old clients want to hear about issues that you are expert in that concern them. They want to know about new services you offer. Unless your business never changes, you have a captive audience who want and need your expertise. Are you a dentist with an opinion about mercury amalgam? Are you an attorney with an opinion about tort reform or new bankruptcy laws? You will be amazed at the response you will get after just one mailing. People you have not heard from in years will call with referrals. Believe it or not, your number may not be recorded in your clients' rolodexes. However, if you send them an email with a VCard for Microsoft Outlook, with one mouse click you are now a permanent entry in their address book. How much is that worth to your business? If you send a thousand emails out and 3 people get back to you with referrals every month, is that worth it? What if 30 people respond or 50?

In the chart below, you see that a surprising number of internet marketing firms fail to track click fraud and few firms see it as a significant problem. At Reciprocal Consulting, we think click fraud is a serious problem if you do not track it. We have found some search terms on PPC campaigns to have as high as 95% click fraud. We track fraud continuously and avoid PPC services like content matching because of what we suspect is rampant fraud. By focusing your campaign on fraud free areas of the web, we are working in the most effective areas.

Google's own CFO, George Reyes, spoke of click fraud at a Credit Suisse Investor Conference on December 2, 2004. "I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model."

While Google is worried about their "business model," we are concerned about its effect on you, their advertisers, and your ROI. We find click fraud and its variants widespread on the Internet. Our efforts negate its impact on your web marketing. While your competitors are wasting money by ignoring click fraud, we are raising our bids and finding new keywords for the sectors of PPC that have a low incidence of fraud.

Unlike other companies, we don't wait for a click fraud disaster to occur, and then complain to Google or Yahoo in search of refunds. Although we have won refunds from these companies, they grant refunds in only the most egregious cases. We monitor your campaign on a daily basis. When we see unusual activity, we take decisive action to limit losses. Recently we had a run of 7156 impressions on the term "Cherry Hill Lawyer" that generated 7 clicks. The number of impressions was so high that more than 10% of the entire population of Cherry Hill would have had to have done searches for "Cherry Hill Lawyer "over a two day span. When we confronted the PPC Company with this obvious problem, they granted us a refund but refused to admit that this was a problem.

In this way, we turn click fraud into a competitive advantage. PPC is a highly efficient and cost effective way to advertise and test advertising. By constantly sorting out true clicks from fraudulent ones we make sure your ad spend is targeted to what is truly bringing in new business.

The next phase of the Internet will utilize full streaming video. The Internet will come directly to your television and programming will be on demand. Advertising will be on demand as well.

On demand advertising will require offering deep and dynamic content that allows a visitor to learn about your service and the benefits it offers on an as needed basis. All studies of advertising show that the more content delivered, the higher the conversion rate. A ten page site with audio and video will forever and always convert more visitors than a one page listing in the Yellow Pages.

Google is currently in beta testing mode with streaming video indexing. This will surely lead to PPC for streaming audio and video and will change the way consumers use the web and view advertising. It will also lead to television based searching and delivery of consumer information. In the near future, consumers will be instantly able to call up audio and video ads and information about specific products and services. These ads must be optimized in the same way as text for conversions and for keyword searches. Our marketing firm is currently working on proprietary content generation technology that will allow high quality streamed audio content to be created and posted in only two hours. Inexpensive and rapid content generation is critical. Video and audio are much more effective than text for driving sales.

Unwanted advertising on billboards, television programs, and banner type advertising will become increasingly marginalized as the best customers, closest to the buying decision, will request "real time" information and ads.

While other firms talk about search engine optimization, they rarely talk about inbound text links with your keywords in the link text. Keyword stuffing into ad copy, page rank, meta tags, and other methods are yesterday's news. Inbound links and fresh content are the most critical elements of modern Search Engine Optimization. This may all seem like jargon to you, but these are the strategies that help drive up search engine rankings.

Copy writing on a web page is no different than any other kind of copy writing. However, you routinely see the "classic rules" of copy writing ignored on even the best designed web sites. We are not afraid to divulge our copy writing secrets in public because good copy writing has been written about for years by the masters of advertising. For whatever reasons, many advertising firms are blind to the simple rules of good ad copy. Web pages need headlines that grab a reader's attention. Studies show that the average visit on a website is 8 seconds. This time window will get shorter as web accelerators allow browsers to display the linked page simply by running the mouse over the link. What this means is that you have one opportunity to capture your readers' attention. Pretty pictures of city skylines or scenes of attractive young people smiling will not draw people deeper into your web page. A well written headline followed by compelling ad copy that clearly lays out the specific benefits your company offers will pull your reader onto the page and get them scrolling and clicking.

The "rules" for ad copy specific to the Internet are too numerous to discuss. But as a rule of thumb, if the current landing page for your site is heavy on graphics and has a three word slogan along with the name of your firm taking up 70% of the space "above the fold," then you are likely throwing money out the window all day every day.

At Reciprocal Consulting, we are constantly finding aspects of advertising that are counter-intuitive to traditional advertising methods. For instance, our research shows that by using the words "Click Here" on a button on your web page, you will get up to 300% more conversions. Our research shows that having white backgrounds and compressed image files allow your site to be faster loading and easier to read for your customers. We have found that by standardizing on Verdana and Times New Roman fonts you will get better click through rates. Other "fancy" fonts are hard to read and not as effective in producing click throughs. We have also found that having your company name in your title page is ineffective at maximizing click through rates. Embedding keywords relevant to the page content is a more effective method of getting click throughs.

The Internet is a dynamic medium that is indexed constantly for new content. If you are using the same static pages you had last year, you likely are missing out on new business. New content can be expensive to write, edit, and format for a web page. However, we have methods for getting you new content; for example, through recorded interviews that are posted as audio and text on your site.

Fresh content is critical for a website. The search engine "robots" (software programs used by search engines to read and index certain information on your website) love fresh content. The more content you have, the more hits you will get for narrow search terms. As people better learn how to use search engines, they increasingly use longer search terms that are specific. Where people used to just type "lawyer" into Google, they are now typing in "Harrington Rod Malpractice Cases in Pennsylvania" What this means is that stuffing your page with the word "lawyer" will not help much when you have just settled a large case that was based on a misplaced Harrington Rod. If you are a mortgage broker who specializes in low documentation loans with negative amortization, and you just announced a new product with a market beating interest rate, then you surely want that posted to your web site so that a search for "Low Documentation Loans" will bring it up in Google.

Believe it or not, the Internet is just getting started. We are aware of the new Internet tools that are in development and we understand what the Internet will look like five and ten years from now. We have already mentioned some aspects of the important upcoming trends in audio and video content.

But what other trends must be considered? Currently, business blogs are popular. Do these fit your strategy? Should you invest in one of these? How do you decide?

Reciprocal Consulting can help answer these questions? Do you do something just because it's a fad, or do you do it because it brings in new business at a cost effective rate of return? Right now, we are not impressed by blogs, but we are impressed with the new audio pod casting that has grown out of it. Pod casting is low cost audio for the web. We have found ways to make high quality pod casts and place them on your website. We are also aware that the very first search engine for audio files has been launched and this may be a key component of Internet marketing of the future. Given the choice, people would much rather listen than read. If they can search for information in audio files, they will do it. There are already video search engines on Yahoo and Google. Reciprocal Consulting are preparing strategies to leverage this technology as bandwidths increase dramatically over the next decade. Verizon is now laying fiber optic cable to the home that offers ten times the bandwidth of cable for the same price. This means full streaming video on demand.

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