Here is another way that I have used Google Remarketing. I needed to identify the occupation of an individual to effectively advertise to them. The product was group insurance for this particular profession so they had to be employed as a professional in this field. Since Google does not have the ability to identify occupation, I had to figure out a way to qualify who I was going to advertise to.

Very specific keywords could be used, but the volume was low and accuracy wouldn’t necessarily be very high.
So I thought that I could use Google Remarketing to help me out.

The client would send emails out regularly to its members (400,000 email addresses). All of these members were employed in the profession I needed to market to for them. So I placed Google Remarketing code on the landing page that was linked within the email.

This accumulated more than enough traffic to create a substantial remarketing list and now these individuals are being served ads for this group insurance with virtually 100% accuracy.

The No. 1 most important part of any company in today’s competitive business climate is its database. Create it, build it and protect it. How do you protect it? Well, imagine if your No. 1 salesperson was hired away and left with your most valuable asset—your list of customers and everything you know about their buying habits and preferences. I’m sorry to tell you, but this happens every day. Talk to your lawyer about creating legal and binding contracts with anyone who has access to the database. Don’t ever print it out and hand it to someone to use for a mailing. Even if you are renting your database out on a limited basis, as some firms do, don’t hand out that list. Instead, you mail to the people in your database on behalf of those you’re renting it to or give the list to a bonded, third-party mailing house where you are guaranteed legal protection against theft.

2. Outsource! The successful startups in Silicon Valley have found the key piece to the puzzle of having a successful business in this day and age. Small, fast, lean and mean is the name of the game. These gazelles have smaller offices, less overhead and far fewer staffers than startups of the past. How do they function with so much less help, especially when speed to market is so important now? It’s simple: They outsource an incredible number of daily tasks and functions: executive assistants in India, logo creation from firms like 99designs, even photos or videos needed for marketing campaigns are bought as needed from a host of websites that make these tasks only a click away. To find tens of thousands of freelancers or outsource partners, try looking at these three websites: Guru.com, ELance.com or oDesk.com. Also, go to Success.com if you haven’t seen the November issue’s story on how to run a virtual office (“Beam Me Up, Scotty” by John H. Ostdick). There, young entrepreneurs from around the globe recommend the outsourcing resources that have helped them the most.

3. Fire your public relations firm. Want to get your message to sports editors at daily newspapers in East Texas? Need your product to snag a good review from some beauty editors at national women’s magazines? Do you think your product or service would interest a particular TV show? In the past, one of the hardest things for a PR firm to do was to target the right editors, TV producers or other decision makers for their different clients. Today, the secret to getting your message out to the right person or the right group of editors is to use an Internet “wire service.” It’s a PR firm’s secret weapon, and they prefer you not know how they do their job. A variety of services can help you distribute your press release to the right folks, and they cost a lot less than paying a PR firm (which in many cases is doing exactly what you’ll be doing yourself from now on). Note: Some of these electronic releases “feed” directly into the media website. My company wrote a press release on my book Get Rich Click and got over 75 newspapers to cover it because our release went, unedited, right into the site’s story database. Media outlets looking for news stories go to these sites to try to find ideas. I like these three services: PR Newswire, BusinessWire and CISION.

4. Try affiliate marketing. I’m a huge fan of this sales tool. In short, affiliate marketing is when you pay a person or website to bring you a buyer. The affiliate spends its own money and time, and often uses its own mailing list or website to obtain the customer, and then sends that prospective buyer to you. If that person buys your product or service, the affiliate is paid. If the prospect doesn’t buy, the affiliate gets nothing. It’s the ultimate win/win situation! The big boy in the affiliate market is a firm called Commission Junction (CJ.com). They not only help you set up the transaction and pay the affiliate when a sale is made, but also have tens of thousands of website owners looking at their list daily to see if they feel your product might be something they can sell on their sites. I also love a firm called ClickBank (ClickBank.com). ClickBank is the largest “digital download” firm out there. Think of it as a digital bookstore, selling downloadable files, songs, webinars, digital books, even recipes. If it can be downloaded, Clickbank can help you make money by posting your product for sale on its network.

5. Enable “pay per action.” Most of us have heard of pay per view on television. You may have heard of pay per call, when the caller pays a fee for, say, tech support over the phone. On the Internet, most marketers have heard of “pay per click.” What you may not know is that there are more than 30 ways to pay per click—one to fit any business model! If you want the prospect or client to download something (a song, a short story, etc.), you can implement a “pay per download” strategy. If you want to pay only when the prospect fills out an application—like to get a bank card or credit card—you can institute a “pay per application” fee. The Internet allows you to pay for what you are trying to obtain—a lead, a sale, a download or even a phone call to your office.

Feeding Your Database

Ever heard of a marketing funnel? Think about names and email addresses and other information about potential customers being channeled into your database. The goal is to find as many ways as possible to get names and email addresses into your funnel so that you are in charge of the communication process vs. waiting for prospective customers.

Here are 10 ways to find new customers to put into your marketing funnel.

1. Pursue free traffic and paid traffic via the search engines—Google, Yahoo and Bing.

2. Find your way onto product comparison websites, such as Amazon.com, eBay.com and PriceGrabber.com.

3. Use the coupon sites like Groupon, LivingSocial or Coupon Cabin. When people sign up for your coupon, you get a name and email in your database.

4. Run a blog or newsletter and market to readers.

5. Capture respondents via a free sample or free download.

6. Keep names and numbers of people who call your telephone number.

7. Develop an app so folks can learn more about your product or service. You can give them a taste of what you’re selling, and tantalize enough so that they need to come to your website for more information—where you can capture their contact data.

8. Mine trade shows, conferences, and leads obtained while attending or speaking at events.

9. Join associations and online groups on Facebook and Twitter that fit your target audience.

10. Don’t forget your own followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

Ever come home from an event with a stack of business cards? Now there are two great ways to get those into a database. One is to scan them with a product called CardScan. The other is to download one of the cool new smartphone apps (I use one called CardMunch) where you simply take a photo of the card and the app’s software puts the info into a database for you.

-successmagazine

Information and Methodology

List Rental, Purchasing, Deployment

The advantage to working with an Email Service Provider is that they have a “relationship” with their ISP (internet service provider) and they utilize seasoned IP (internet protocol) addresses.  This means that over time the Email Service Provider has increased their send volume and the rate of bounces, undeliverable and spam identified messages are maintained at a “reasonable” percentage.  This “reasonable” percentage will depend on the age and reputability of the IP that the messages are being sent from and are ultimately determined by each ISP.

In my experience, “low cost” lists yield low deliverability (i.e. 25%).  Lists that cost more usually have higher deliverability (i.e. 80 – 90%), but vary in quality.  The quality factor varies and can only be approximated based on the source of data or from experience (personal experience or reference). I am defining quality as a measure of the activity generated from an email deployment (i.e. open rate and click through rate).  The most significant quality measure for me is the open rate.  Even though a message was delivered it may have been delivered to an abandoned email address or an email address that is not checked often.  I have personally obtained open rates from 0.5% to 12% from purchased lists and from those rates received between 0% to 30% click through rates.   In the majority of these cases I managed these deployments myself using an SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) server provided by an Email Service Provider.

A major obstacle exists when managing your own deployment through an SMTP server.  This is that many reputable Email Service Providers want you to prove that your list was obtained through a specific opt-in process.  Some will ask to see live collection points online and in most cases they let you know that when creating an account with them you are on a watch list to ensure that your list does not generate a high number of opt-out, spam filtered, undeliverable or bounced responses.  Many of the Email Service Providers will tell you that they do not allow purchased lists to be deployed through their system.  They are very sensitive due to the fact that they must maintain that good standing relationship with their ISP.

CAN-SPAM is defined by 3 methods of compliance:

Unsubscribe compliance

• A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
• Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
• Opt-out lists also known as Suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

Content compliance

• Accurate from lines (including “friendly froms”)
• Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive)
• A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.
• A label is present if the content is adult.

Sending behavior compliance

• A message cannot be sent through an open relay
• A message cannot contain a false header

Content is exempt if it consists of:

• religious messages;
• political messages;
• content that broadly complies with the marketing mechanisms specified in the law; or
• national security messages.

There are no restrictions against a company emailing its existing customers or anyone who has inquired about its products or services, even if these individuals have not given permission, as these messages are classified as “relationship” messages under CAN-SPAM.

CAN-SPAM compliance is easily achieved and does not limit an individual/company/agency to only send to opt-in email lists.

We have seen response rates up to 1.5% from these mailers and then clickthrough to enrollment at 50% plus!
We are now utilizing split testing in our mailing efforts to increase the response rate and ultimately drive higher volume to the enrollment process.
When you’re talking about 350,000 plus mailers, increasing the response rate can mean big profits!

Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing Mix.

Google recently announced that they would begin encrypting searches for searchers who were logged in to their Google account. So now many search marketers and business owners are seeing a rise in the number of keywords labeled as Not Provided in their analytics from the Organic Google traffic source.

Google originally stated that it would most likely account for 10% or less of searches, but many small companies are seeing larger spikes. And as many of you search marketers out there would agree, “This Sucks!”

Matt Cutts even stated that this would only affect searches by a single digit percentage. But within the last two weeks we have seen as well as others higher than 10% results for the not provided keyword in our Google Analytics Accounts.

The word is that you will get the full keyword results in your google webmaster tools account, but this is aggregated and cannot be placed at the individual level.

Darn it Google, what’s the deal?!

It was a very fun and sadly I did not win.

Let me describe the experience, the clues and how to win the Chevy Sonic Adventure challenge.

We arrived at registration around 8:40 am and registration began at 9am.  We just gave them our name, they checked us off the list, gave us an instruction card and sent us to get our Chevy Sonic Adventure T-Shirts.  We waited until about 10 minutes to 10 and then they started telling us how the contest would go, what to do if we have a problem and cheered for the sponsors.

You can either receive text clues and answer by text or if you have an iphone or Android OS you can download the SCVNGR app to play, which is much better because there is a map showing you where each clue is relative to your location.  *USE the SCVNGR app!!!

The way to win is to be quick!  Hit as many challenges as possible !  You get 3 chances to answer each clue so if you think you know the answer,  quickly give it a try so you can be off to the next if you’re right.  If you aren’t right that first time take a bit of time to READ the clue Carefully and then answer.  (HINT) the harder the clue/question the more points it is worth.

Here are some examples of the challenges/clues/questions:

“Go to Christ Church Cathedral and find a red information sign and find the reverend who is listed last and send back his last name as a seven digit phone number.   So the reverends last name on the sign was KILGORE so the answer was 545 4673.”

“Go to Busch Stadium and find the player statues outside of the Team Shop, add the number of players with one foot on the ground to the number of players with two feet on the ground and divide by the number of players with no feet on the ground.  There were 5 players with one foot on the ground, 4 players with two feet on the ground and 1 player with no feet on the ground. 5 + 4 = 9  /1 = 9″

“Go to Flamingo Bowl and count the number of bowling pins and martini glasses dancing on the edge of the marquee/sign then text back as a roman numeral.  there were 35 pins and glasses so the answer was XXXV.”

“Go to the Statue of a pink suit in the city garden and count the number of visible buttons then add that to the birth year of the artist.  There were 13 buttons and there was a small round plaque on the ground that showed the artist was born in 1964, so the answer was 1977.”

“Go to the wainright building and look across the street at the production posters and text back the number of syllables of the longest title in production.  The longest title was Joseph and and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  The answer was 13.”

!!!VERY IMPORTANT!!!

Some of these challenges that involved the chevy sonic cars didn’t require you to be there.  For example one question was on 6th and Pine there is a silver Chevy Sonic with its smooth lines and angled tire stance what kind of animal does this remind you of?  There was no wrong answer, you could have said anything and it would have been right.”

So my advice to you is use the SCVNGR App, work off the map and do each challenge by location – move to each one as quickly and as efficiently as possible, if you aren’t as familiar with the city look where others are going / at and jump on it.  See what they are doing to gain a quick edge at that challenge, don’t stop moving, run as much as possible (this thing is two hours long so it is a workout).

The prizes are a Chevy Sonic Car for first place – two Ipads for second and 3rd through 10th get one Ipad per team.

In St. Louis there were around 150 teams.

It used to be that when obtaining backlinks you would want to get every link to be the exact match for the keyword you were looking to rank for. An example is “PPC Agency” vs the “Second Best PPC Agency” the first would be an exact match for PPC Agency and the second is a partial match for the term PPC Agency. But now the times are changing and you are seeing much more weight attributed to partial match anchor text links. So get em!

Below is a transcript of the video above:

1. Exact Match

In the old days, if you wanted to rank for something, your tactic was very simple. If your target keyword was Bing cherries, you just tried to get as many exact match anchor text that said Bing cherries as possible to your website. Those of you who have been practicing SEO for a long time noticed something about a year and a half ago or so, that this method did not work as well as it used to. If you got too many exact match anchor texts, it could actually hurt you. That’s why you say, that’s such a 2009 tactic.

Now with the Google Panda update, we’re talking about a whole other realm of ranking signals, such as engagement metrics, social signals, but we don’t want to forget these link signals. Even if exact match isn’t the end all be all, there is still a lot of information that Google and other search engines are getting from these link signals, and that’s what we want to talk about today.

2. Partial Match

Now, one of the most overlooked types of anchor text links is the partial match, and I am in love with partial match. I really quit going for these a long time ago. Now it is all about partial match. People sort of misunderstand what partial match is. The technical definition of partial match is any anchor text that contains at least one of your keyword phrases. So, if your keyword phrase was Bing cherries, these would all count as partial match anchor texts: Bing are the best cherries; I love cherries; Bing is awesome. Yeah, it’s probably not what they are talking about, but it is still technically partial match anchor text.

If you are a fan of the 2011 Ranking Factors that SEOmoz did – we’ll link to it in the text below – we took a look, one of the factors we looked at was the power of partial match anchor text versus exact match anchor text. Now, in general, if you look at the root domain metrics, the correlation between the number of exact match anchor text was 0.17. All things being equal, the power of partial match anchor text was 0.25. Significantly more power and more correlation between the number of partial match anchor text and exact match anchor text. So, all things being equal, it seems like people rank higher, just a little bit, if they have more partial match as opposed to these exact match that everybody is always going for.

This is how I’d like to explain it. If you give me a choice, if you could say I could have any 300 links I want but they have to be 300 partial match anchor text or 300 exact match anchor text, a lot of webmasters would go for this thinking it is the best policy. Statistically though, this is your best choice. This is going to contain some of your exact matches, but you’re going to have such a bigger broad tail, long tail queries that you can rank for. You’re going to get more traffic. You’re going to rank better for your targeted keywords, and this method is future proof. As Google deemphasizes these exact matches, this is going to take you forward in the long run. Those links are going to have a lot longer long-term value, and it is just going to give you a better natural looking link profile.

3. Context, Placement and Relevance

Other link signals, how do you make these links count? If you’re not getting the exact match anchor text, what are other context signals that Google could be looking at? Well, first of all, they are going to be looking at the on-page signals of the page that’s giving you the link. If you are trying to rank for Bing cherries, you want the title tag of that page to be cherries. There is an article Rand wrote a couple years ago, “The Perfectly Optimized Page.” All those on page signals, those are what you want on the page linking to you – the title tag, the H1 headers, keyword usage, alt text in the photo. Those are all signals to Google that this page is about Bing cherries. It’s linking to you. You’re more likely to interpret that as this link is about Bing cherries.

Context, Google is getting increasingly more sophisticated at being able to do block analysis and determine what the page is about. So, if you have a section of ads, Google can kind of tell that is a section of ads. If you have a link in that section of ads, probably not going to count for very much. Same on the sidebar. If you have a link about Bing cherries on a page about monkeys and it is hidden in this link of text, well, the context and the placement of that link, Google says that’s probably not about cherries. It looks kind of like a paid ad, and that’s not going to count for very much. So, context, on page signals, all those traditional on page optimization, those things that you would want on your own page, you want to look for from the link.

4. The Future of Link Signals

Google is spending a lot of money to learn how to understand pages, to learn context. The days of the dumb search engine are kind of leaving us behind. Google is getting better and better at figuring out what these pages are about. If you read Google patents, which a lot of us like to do, SEO by the Sea is a great blog to read, they’re seeing patents such as sentiment analysis, such as in online reviews. Google will actually try to figure out if that review is a positive review or a negative review. So, even if you get the link, if there are words around it like Joe’s Pizza sucks, well that might not be, in the future, as good as link as Joe’s Pizza is awesome. Now, this is all theory. We don’t have the data and the facts to back this up, but the patents tell us this is where the future is going. Author profiling, the author tags that Google is using, they might be asking is this person an authority? If Rand Fishkin links to you with anchor text about SEO, Google may in the future decide Rand Fishkin is an expert about SEO. That link is so much more important than Joe Schmoe SEO because they know his author profile.

In the end, this system was easy to game. Exact match profiles, very easy to game. That’s why it went away. In the future, it is much harder to game. Search engines are becoming sophisticatedly more like human beings. So, when we look at these pages, we have to be human as SEOs. We have to judge these pages like a human. We have to write them like a human. We have to link like a human. The higher quality you do that, the longer your strategy is going to work and anchor text, linking signals, they’re all going to work for you.

What does all of this mean for Online Marketing ?

Well it could actually mean a lot.  The fact that Google has found the social integration to be such a massive force that it has put its efforts into this new development says to the world of online marketers that social media is a must!  Most of us good online marketers already know / knew that social media is a huge key to successful online marketing campaigns, but this is a confirmation to the enormous impact it actually has.

We have talked about this in the past, but now with the full integration of the Google Plus 1 button you can now tell Google, Peers and Strangers that you find this or that result more appealing than others and when logged into a Google Account these kinds of recommendations play into the formula that decides what results are shown to you and to others searching the web.  This is very dangerous for Google, but great in theory and again dangerous for everyone since we have many great online marketers who can game these types of recommendations.  These also may appear in the paid results which can lead to many arguments about fairness in the marketplace among advertisers.

Just food for thought.

Many will talk about social media as connectivity, friends, FarmVille!  There are many great attributes within the many popular social platforms out there, but the real successful marketers out there will implement age old strategies in their social media campaigns that get results.  Catchy Headlines to get people to act, Flow and Games.  All of these tools become exponential grabbers of attention and exposure.

Let’s say two marketers are going to place a link to an ad on a social platform that has 15,000 people linked to it.  The first marketer puts a link that reads:  Come check out our great deal.          And the other marketer creates a link that reads:  Tired of Wasting Money, Click Here to Save.

Which do you think will get a higher click through rate.  In almost any scenario the second one would perform better.  This is nothing new.

What is great about today is there are so many new creative ways to grab attention (video, animation, graphics, sound, etc.) Just have fun with it, but make sure to collect and measure your results!

We are suggesting to individuals looking to start this up, a good script already set up for that type of functionality called Couponic a Groupon Clone script that has all the features, bells and whistles that the big boys have.

It is very robust and will serve you well in creating a suitable Daily Deal site.