In the early days of the web, portals like Yahoo were cluttered with "stuff". Yahoo still seems cluttered. And maybe that's okay for some users but when Google stepped in with a compelling search algorithm AND a nice clean interface, people noticed.

On Yahoo, there was a lot of noise. On Google, there was a lot of signal.

That's started to change as Google AdWords dominate with affiliate marketing and MLM offers. Google search is still heavy signal, but it's getting cluttered by some noise.

Later, Myspace became insanely popular as people started getting into social networking. But Myspace pages became cluttered and directionless, and extremely ugly. Facebook stepped in with a much cleaner and highly structured system to help people connections.

On Myspace, there was a lot of noise. On Facebook, there was a lot of signal.

That's started to change as Facebook apps dominate our "news streams" when they report on how a friend did during a recent game of Mafia wars. Fortunately, these can be turned off but there are so many!

Twitter broke through with a lot of signal, especially in the very beginning. But now, there is a lot of noise as scammers and spammers follow like crazy. It takes some work to clean up the clutter but you can reduce the noise.

There are two things I want to talk about relating to signal versus noise.

First, if you create any kind of content, how much signal and how much noise are you creating of each? Signal is the compelling engagement that you might have with a prospect or client. Noise is the boilerplate email or tweet you use to promote your products. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for promotional content. However, in the wrong places it can contribute to the noise. If you are advertising on Google, if you are engaging your prospects and customers on Facebook, and if you are tweeting regularly on Twitter, make a very thorough check of your own signal to noise ratio. And, don’t just limit it to Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Those are the examples I've used here. There are lots of other places where your online marketing can be signal or can be noise. It's up to you.

Second, if you are exploring new ways of engaging your customers, or even if you're a company innovating a new way to communicate, take note: The Googles, the Facebooks, and the Twitters of the internet got their foothold because they addressed the signal versus noise issue. They found a way to eliminate the noise and help people find the signal.

The more connected the web makes our world, the more we'll have to sort through this stuff.

Online marketers work hard to create a flurry of activity in order to drive traffic to their site. This traffic might include things such as articles, press releases, AdWords, Squidoo lenses, and other types of traffic drivers. 

In the last post, we gave you a useful chart so that you could break up your long sales letter into several steps and that allowed you to track potential customers along the imaginary pathway that you had created. You could more easily see where people were disengaging from your sales letter and you could fix it, ultimately improving the number of people who would make it to the end of your sales letter and buy from you.

But there’s more you can do from this simple chart. Assuming (of course) that you would continue to use this chart to track the success (or failure) of customer engagement in your long sales letter, here are some more ideas to use your chart and take your sales page to an all-new level:

IMPROVE YOUR PAGE 1 ADVERTISING: Once you know how all of your pages are performing and you are making changes to improve the conversion rates of the pages that are "down the pathway", you should turn your attention to page 1. It’s important to note that this is not something you should do BEFORE you know how your other pages are converting. Do it after. That way, once you’ve optimized all of your pages for maximum sales, you can work on your first page to increase that initial, all-important attention-capturing page.

IMPROVE YOUR ADVERTISING-TO-PAGE-1 IMPACT: Look at your advertising and compare that to the number of people who appear on your first page by comparing impressions to clicks. (You may want to add another column in your chart.) When you work first at increasing your website’s conversion rate, then you work at improving the number of people who come to your site, you’ll maximize your own effort. (By comparison, if you do it the other way around, you’ll just be sending more traffic to a website that doesn’t convert.)

TEST ALTERNATE PATHWAYS: If you’re a user of Google AdWords, you know that you can use Google to help you test different landing pages from the same ad. Well, you can use a similar approach inside your broke-up sales letter, too. Once you have found a good conversion rate, try sending people to a different inside page. Perhaps, instead of page 4 being a list of problems they face, you might make it a list of testimonials, for example. Consider using this testing method to test a shorter letter, a longer letter, a story-style pitch, a more aggressive pitch, a funny pitch, etc.

ENGAGE USERS: User engagement is huge and often inadequately utilized in web-based sales letters. But the paper-based direct marketing world understands it all too well. That’s why you get junk mail that encourages users to scratch something off or check a box or apply a "yes" or "no" sticker. You might throw out your junk mail without scratching the scratch section, but others will scratch it off. You might throw out your junk mail without peeling and sticking the "yes" or "no" stickers, but other people might put the "no" sticker on and send it back… and enough of them put the "yes" sticker on and send it back to make it worth the company’s time. That’s user engagement.

You can do this, too. You might have pop-up windows that link from "click here to read more testimonials". Or you might have a video. Or you might have a downloadable document. Or (and here is the power of the chart) you might have 2 options at the bottom of your page instead of one. One option says "tell me more" and takes users to the next page in the sales letter while the second option says "I’d like to think about it" and takes users to a email sign-up page where they can sign up for a newsletter.

So, break up your sales letter. Create your chart. Watch where people are falling off and fix it. Then, use the same chart to make improvements earlier in the pathway to win more and more potential customers and move more and more of these potential customers… into REAL customers!

Contemporary VA

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For some readers, your marketing includes a long sales letter on your website. If that’s the case, I’m going to guess that you have a particular challenge: Figuring out what’s wrong.

Here’s the very common situation for these long sales letters:

You use a variety of marketing methods (Google AdWords or Twitter or Affiliates or whatever) to get people to your webpage. Once there, you present them with a loooooooong letter that is chock-full of effective sales messages and benefits and testimonials and screenshots and "buy now" buttons. And some buy and some don’t.

So here’s the problem: You can measure who clicks to your site, and from where. You can see how long they spend on your site. And you know how many people buy from you. Those give you some useful metrics, but there is one piece of data you do not have: Why do people leave?

Knowing the reason that people leave can help you create a far more compelling site with a sales offer that closes even more deals.

The challenge is to find what part of the message is driving people away. That’s hard to do when you have such a long letter.

Here’s a potential solution: Break up your sales letter across several pages. Let’s say that you have enough content to break it up across ten pages. All of sudden, you have a much more trackable funnel!

If you see that people are clicking to your home page then from page 1 to page 2 then from page 2 to page 3, but most people are leaving on page 3, then you know you’ve got a problem on that page. Over time, you can build up a very informative set of averages along this "click pathway". Set up a chart in Excel and across the top label each of the steps in your steps in the path (with "$" representing the "buy now" step. Record the progress by taking the average number of clicks each day and noting how things progress as users click from one page to the next. So let’s say that you end up with something like this.

Here’s what this chart tells you:

The first page is okay, getting an average of 100 clicks a day. An average of 22 people lose interest during page 1 and don’t bother clicking to page 2. Of the 88 who do click to page 2, 59 drop off on page 2 and don’t bother to click to page 3. So, the site owner knows to make changes to page 2.

Sure enough, after gathering more data, the site owner sees that the number of people clicking from page 2 to page 3 has improved. Now they notice another problem on page 4. The site appears to be dropping off nearly half of its visitors at that point. So, they make further changes.

Ultimately, these changes are done to help you find ways to keep your customers engaged and increase the likelihood that they will stay with you through to the end and ultimately buy from you.

This chart offers a very useful way to track viewers along your site’s pathway to take them from being a cold prospect toward becoming a customer.

Contemporary VA

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Over the years I’ve watched a lot of online businesses come and go, and I’ve worked with innumerable businesses to help them grow their presence online. I’ve learned that there are 5 secrets to marketing success online and these successes rival any secret SEO technique or "killer" traffic trick.

Consistency of presence: First, you need to be online, all the time. Maybe not you personally, but you need to create a web presence and maintain it. You can’t walk away from it for a week and then come back to it, you can’t turn it on and leave the room. You need to working on it, analyzing it, tweaking it.

Consistency of message: Second, you need to have a single message that you tell people over and over and over. If you’re a "graphic designer" on this site and a "Photoshop designer" on that site and a "freelance graphic artist" on another site, you’ll lose out. Write a short bio and use that same bio everywhere.

Consistency of delivery: Third, you need to deliver your products or services with consistent quality. While this isn’t a direct marketing action, it is an indirect action because inconsistent quality can result in bad PR about your business. And unfortunately, bad PR can appear in results for your name.

Ubiquity: Fourth, you need to be everywhere. Okay, maybe not absolutely everywhere (because I just said that you can’t do that in my last blog). But you do need to find a number of channels and use them. For example, make sure you’re posting content that includes web articles, blogs, forum postings, Twitter, etc.

Selectivity: Fifth, even though you need to be ubiquitous, you also need to be selective. You can’t truly be everywhere. So in your effort to be in a lot of places, you need to choose those places carefully. For example, if you’re going to distribute web articles, distribute articles at an article distribution site that is reputable and offers a high quality editorial service.

These 5 laws are the trustworthy fundamentals that, in my experience, are the steps to online marketing success.

Contemporary VA

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When you think of wine and wine connoisseurs, you probably think of quiet wine tastings by people in tuxedos (who might also be the kind of people to go to art gallery openings or museums). That’s fine for a slice of the populace but it’s a little reserved for most of us. But there’s one guy who is changing how we think about wine and at the same time he’s changing how we think about online marketing.

Gary Vaynerchuk (read his Wikipedia bio here and visit his website here) has enjoyed multimillion dollar success, national (even international?) fame and a multibook deal, all thanks to his online videos.

As the owner of a wine retail store in New Jersey (sorry NJ but you’re known for your wines), Vaynerchuk needed to promote his store, generate traffic, establish his expertise, and create a following. So he created WineLibrary.com, an online video blog where he tastes wines and talks about them.

I like wines, and I’ve been to wine tastings so the first time I saw a video I was expecting something like this: "This wine has good fingers with a hint of oak early and then a strong vanilla finish. You’ll enjoy it with a good cut of beef… blah blah blah".

But it wasn’t like that at all. One of the wines he featured he talked about how it reminded him of Golden Grahams, the breakfast cereal. He said other things, too, during his video but that stood out as the memorable thing for me. Since then, I’ve watched his videos – both on wine and on online video marketing – and find him to be engaging to watch.

Here is a recent video of his:
http://tv.winelibrary.com/2009/05/29/talking-new-zealand-wine-and-more-with-daniel-schuster-part-2-episode-685

If you have a business that you want to position, brand, drive traffic to, and grow, you might consider online videos as well. If you do, and you want to take some lessons from a page in Gary’s playbook, here’s what to do:

1.  Be consistent. He didn’t get where he is today because he did one video a month for a few months then stopped when he didn’t see any traffic. He has been taping consistently since 2006 (episode count is 685 or so) and is enjoyed by 90,000 people.

2.  Be opinionated and courageous. Your videos will fall flat if you try to explore both sides of the issue and let viewers decide. Have an opinion. Be brash. Tell people what to think. Tell others that they’re stupid. Don’t be afraid of backlash (just make sure that you can stand by your position and, of course, never ever slander someone).

3.  Find new ways to communicate. Gary doesn’t buy into the wine community’s lingo. He talks about breakfast cereal (and many other things – just watch his videos). He combines a New Jersey attitude with his wine tasting.

4.  Take a step up. You don’t have to invest in high end equipment right away. But your videos should probably be made slightly more professionally than if they were filmed on your laptop’s built-in camera. Invest in a camera with a microphone, take the time to script something about your topic, and go for it.

5.  Never one thing. If you’ve read this far and think that this is the only answer you need to be successful, you’ve missed the point. This is Vaynerchuk’s crowning jewel. It’s the thing he points people to when talking about wine. But he has also been active on blogs and forums and Facebook with good comments that are relevant to the topic.

Contemporary VA

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Webinars are a huge marketing opportunity and, in our opinion, underutilized. If you want to create a meaningful, multimedia interaction with prospects and clients, webinars should be on your list. In this blog, we’ll talk about the types of webinars, how to get started with a webinar, how to get the most from your webinar, and some resources to consider.

TYPES

There are a few different ways to present your webinar but we believe that the two most effective ways are pre-recorded or live-and-interactive.

Pre-recorded. Okay, the purists among you will point out that a "pre-recorded webinar" is just an online video of you talking. Fine. Sure it’s no different than creating a video that you might post on YouTube, but sometimes that’s all you need. You don’t have to go high tech, especially if you’re not comfortable with a live performance. If you want to have the freedom to do a couple of takes and then edit the best together, or if your content is demanding and complex, and perhaps not easily "digestible" in a live setting, try pre-recording your seminar.

Live-and-interactive. Live webinars, for those who are comfortable with that kind of delivery, offer a meaningful way to communicate and interact with your audience. You can have camera on your for some of the time, you can show your desktop or some other presentation tool, and you can field calls and written questions.

HOW TO GET STARTED

Creating your first webinar is easy. Don’t bite off more than you can chew to start. Consider doing a pre-recorded seminar where you talk at a camera, save the file, and then post that file on your website. That will get you started. Then, get a small group of peers together and lead an online meeting (which is basically the same thing as a webinar). This will give you the feel for the interactive nature and technical demands of a live webinar. Then, schedule a webinar and invite your customers and prospects to attend.

HOW TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR WEBINAR

Make sure your webinar is about a specific topic and prepare what you want to say ahead of time. It’s helpful to know more than what you want to cover so that you can fill time if necessary or answer questions effectively.

Prepare your presentation materials beforehand but don’t distribute them. Expect people to sign in and watch. Afterward, offer people the option to download the presentation materials.

At the beginning of your webinar, after you greet everyone, tell people what the webinar is going to cover, how long you expect to be, and when you will answer questions. In other words, set the scope so people know what to expect.

Stick to the time you committed to. Don’t go over, especially if you have clients or prospects on the phone, and especially if those clients and prospects are business people.

If you are delivering a webinar for customers, create a limited-time bonus link and tell your audience that you will give out the bonus link at the end of the webinar, in order to encourage people to stay through entire thing.
Record your life webinar and add it to your website for people to view later.

RESOURCES

The three leaders in online meetings and webinars are: Webex.com, GoToMeeting.com, and Adobe Connect. These three offer rich interactivity and are very userfriendly.

Contemporary VA

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Facebook gives a number of marketing opportunities for businesses, and in this blog we’ll highlight what those opportunities are and give you some ideas to be successful.

Pay Per Click ads (http://www.facebook.com/advertising): Behaving like you’d expect, Facebook’s PPC ads show up throughout the site so that users are exposed to your brand again and again.

Some success tips:

• Think about why people are on Facebook in the first place. Avoid B2B marketing and stick to B2C marketing because lots of people still separate their life from their work. You’ll likely have more success with topics like home, lifestyle, beauty, dating, entertainment, and wealth-creation.
• Consider putting an image in your ad that resembles a Facebook profile picture because people will more likely look at it.
• And here’s an anecdotal observation: Facebook ads are among the worst-written PPC ads online so a well-written ad will help to set you apart from the crowd. You don’t get much space so consider a heavy benefits-oriented ad.
• Don’t try to sell your entire product or service in the ad. You don’t have enough space. Give a teaser and entice them to click. That’s it.

Pages (http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages). If you’re familiar with Facebook, you know what a profile is. Each user has one. Facebook Pages look and act like profiles, but they aren’t about an individual; they’re about an organization or a band or a business. People become fans of whatever it is your page is about.

Some success tips:

• Creating a page is not unlike creating a profile: you’ll be most successful when you participate. Schedule time to actively post on your Wall, share links and videos, and talk to people.
• Avoid blatant encouragement to buy. Instead, think of your page as a way for people to learn more and then give them a linkout to your website to learn even more and buy. This isn’t the place for a hard-sell approach.

Share (http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?share). If your site has compelling content that people like to talk about, use the Share function to enable Facebook users to push content from your site onto their Facebook profile to share with friends.

Some success tips:

• Don’t bother including this function on your site unless you have sharable content. If you sell Analytical Studies of Historical Well Drilling Methodology to oil executives, this function is not for you. But if you’re the next YouTube, this is something to think about.

Profile: If you have a Facebook profile, use it to promote your business. (But show some restraint).

Some success tips:

• Like the Facebook Pages (above) you shouldn’t be blatantly self-promoting and don’t use hard-sell methods. Simply make sure that your website link is present on your page and talk about your business from time to time.
• Participate! This is a marketing channel that requires active participation and a lack of participation is a primary reason that this channel fails.
• Be careful about adding your URL to every outgoing email. You might trigger Facebook’s spam alert. Instead, approach Facebook just as you would approach face-to-face friendships: You’ll talk about your business sometimes and other times you’ll talk about weather or sports or whatever.

Groups: Facebook groups are like communities of people focused on a single topic. Create a group about your area of expertise and invite people to join.

Some success tips:

• Again, this is not the place for blatant self promotion. Groups are most effective when everyone participates and there is a sense of equal sharing of ideas and interest.
• Think of this as a positioning medium, not a sales medium, and your leadership as the Group’s creator will help to position you as an expert in the field.

The above are some of the marketing methods you can use on Facebook. But Facebook is not going to be a marketing method for everyone. It might blur the lines between work and life more than you prefer, or you might not have the right business to compel users to take interest in what you have to say. But if it is a good fit for your business, sign up, participate actively and become exposed to the millions of loyal users who spend hours each day on Facebook!

Contemporary VA

@ContemporaryVA on Twitter.  Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

As a child, I lived in an older home that my parents were restoring. One of the features of the home that my father created was a huge fireplace that he made out of fieldstone. He went out to an old gravel pit in the country, he dug up a big pile of stones, and brought them back to our house.

To look at that big pile of useless stones, you wouldn’t think it was much except a big pile of useless stones. But my dad turned those rocks into a beautiful work of art that became the stunning focal point of our living room. (Insert nostalgic pause here). As my father worked, I discovered that the secret to turning a big pile of stones into a beautiful fireplace was in carefully placing the stones and then working on the spaces in between.

The web is like that, too. Websites and blogs and wikis are like the big pile of rocks. They are out there for people to visit but they sometimes lack context. They’re in a conceptual pile and don’t always fit comfortably together. In a way, that’s what web 1.0 was all about: "Digging up a pile of stones" by creating websites.

But now we have this pile of stones, what next? How do we lay them out so that they become a manageable and useable group of sites?

This is what web 2.0 is all about: bringing meaning and coherence to those individual sites by bringing them together… in a way, it’s about creating the spaces in between.

Sites like Plaxo allows users to gather and manage online identities in one place. So if you have a blog and a website and a wiki and a half dozen other sites, you can gather them together and keep the content in a nice, neat, publishable stream.

Squidoo is another site that has been created to fit nicely "in betweens" sites to bring meaning to the big pile of stones. Rather than hoping that our website and our blog will be understandable to consumers, we can create a Squidoo "lens" to help people find our information and understand it. Along the way we can add content, additional links, opinions, polls, and other interactivity.

These sites are huge for opportunities for business. They may not be something you’d use on their own (although there are some who do so quite successfully) but instead, they act as the space between to help us bring context and meaning to our web presence; and tie things together.

If you have a number of sites or blogs or wikis (or some combination thereof), and they all link back and forth, that’s great. That’s step one. But there’s an important step 2 that you shouldn’t ignore: The mortar.

Start with a Squidoo Lens. They are free and incredibly easy to create. You’ll be able to link to and from all of your other sites and provide a new way for people to find you, but a way that will also help them to understand what you’re all about before they visit.

Visit the IAC Virtual Assistant Squidoo Lens to see an example of a great lens in action.  You’ll notice that because IAC Professionals offers much more than Virtual Assistants (and probably more than the first things you think of when you think "VA"), the lens expands on their many offerings across the web.

Contemporary VA

@ContemporaryVA on Twitter.  Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!