Confirmation pages (also known as thank you pages) are one of the overlooked of all online marketing assets. Join me June 11-13 at the Chicago Conversion Conference for a session dedicated to making the most of confirmation pages.

Here’s a quick preview of what I’ll be talking about…

Tony Mariotti of FriendBuy, a customer referral program tool, reports that on average 7% of all visitors who make it to a confirmation page share the company on their social networks. Adding related content links to the Clever Zebo webinar confirmation page increased engagement by over 40%!

Talk about low-hanging fruit!

In my Conversion Conference session, I’ll rapid-fire look at a variety of ideas for confirmation page optimization. Ultimately, they break down to a few call to action categories:

Here’s another example to get your imagination going:

I hope to see you in Chicago. If you’ve had any luck with your confirmation pages, I’d love to see them.

Choosing an online marketing agency can be a special kind of maze. With so many consultants and boutique firms out there, how can an ROI-minded business give itself the best shot at outsourcing marketing successfully to a successful long-term partner?

I recently wrote a piece for the G2 Crowd blog to help marketers compare marketing automation software and make an educated choice. Today I want to focus on 5 pointers to  help you choose an online marketing agency in a competitive situation where multiple firms are bidding for the business.

1. Hire all of them. That’s right, I’m suggesting you contract will all of the marketing agencies on your short list — for a test period of 2 to 4 weeks. Spell out a very specific project for each marketing firm, giving each a distinct project with well-defined action items and success metrics. You’ll quickly see what working with each firm feels like, and importantly, which team hustles to earn your business.

2. Get specific with references. Of course you’ll want to call each online marketing agency’s references if you’re serious about hiring them. But beyond the basic reference call, I recommend asking specific questions about the results these clients saw. Politely make them point to measurable improvements in conversions and revenue as a direct result of working with the partner in question. You’ll quickly discover who deflects and who is happy to show you exactly where they saw lift.

3. Get a commitment on responsiveness. Over time, agencies get complacent. During the sales process, require each agency to spell out their policy on replying to emails and phone calls. Not only will this show you which agency is ready to collaborate with you and be maximally communicative as you try to achieve results together — it will serve as a handy guideline many months down the road and hold them to a high standard.

4. Require an action plan. Ask for a detailed action plan from each marketing agency you’re seriously considering. This is at the same level as a reference check — I wouldn’t do it unless I was 95% ready to hire a couple of agencies. Ask them to provide a timetable of what happens in the first several months of the engagement, and have them outline their thinking for why this order of operations is optimal. The quality of work and turnaround time on this deliverable just might give you the answer you’re hungry for.

5. Get an expert’s opinion. Have a marketing stud in your network read the agency’s blog and peruse the content they’re putting out there (videos, webinars, white papers and the like). Do they know what they’re talking about?

This post is intended to provide a few pointers for marketers who are close to a decision and are in the late stages of evaluating options for outsourced online marketing. That said, it’s good to have a rubric in the earlier stages to help you narrow your options. This RFP template for marketing software, while not specifically tailored for selecting a services business, can be hacked to offer a rubric for evaluating online marketing agencies. The scoring system stands up — you’ll just need to adjust the criteria. Good luck!

Of course, if you have any questions during the sales process and could use a few expert digital marketers’ thoughts, just give your resident Zebo a holler.

Studies show, time and time again, that what the Internet says about your company matters. Due to the advent of the mobile Web, to say nothing of online review sites like Yelp.com and search engines like Google and Bing, it is easier than ever before for consumers to do their homework, checking up your brand on the Web — and most consumers are more than willing to do this due diligence. Before doing business with any company, Internet users are extraordinarily likely to check out that company on Google; for example, the most recent Local Consumer Review Survey indicates that 72 percent of all consumers place more stock in online reviews than they do recommendations from personal friends and family members! More than half of consumers say that reading positive reviews makes them more likely to do business with a particular brand.

All of this suggests that what the Web reveals about your enterprise matters — that it could really prove make-or-break. With that said, there are numerous online threats that could befall a company; not for nothing has the Internet been compared to the Wild West, where anything goes and anything can happen. The best way for companies to protect themselves against online attack and defamation is to know what the threats are — and how best to respond to them.

Online Reviews

Consumers place a great deal of trust in online reviews, as the Local Consumer Review Survey statistic makes plain. And because many online review sites, such as Yelp.com, rank high within search engines, your company’s online reviews will likely be among the first things a potential client or consumer sees when Googling your company. If all of your enterprise’s reviews are positive ones, then you are in good shape — but of course, there is no way to ensure that reviews remain positive. Negative reviews can appear at any time, and they can originate with unhappy or unreasonable consumers; with disgruntled employees; and with rival companies.

A glut of bad online reviews can utterly destroy your business’ online reputation, and while you cannot prevent bad reviews from happening, you can effectively dilute them. A single bad review does major damage when it is one of just two or three reviews your company has to its name; if it is one bad review to a hundred positive ones, though, you are in much better shape. Try these action steps:

• Actively court positive testimonials. Ask your best clients to give you some feedback.
• Make it easy for satisfied customers to find you on Yelp, and tell them how much their feedback means to your business; include a link to your Yelp page on your corporate website.
• Consider offering discounts or promos for those willing to leave positive feedback.
• Include a note on invoices and receipts, asking happy clients to provide you with some feedback.

Unscrupulous Attack

We mentioned that, sometimes, your business may find itself attacked by other companies, by unhappy employees, and by unreasonable customers. Sadly, this is true; on the Internet, people can say whatever they want about your company — even if it is untrue, unwarranted, or even outright defamatory. For example, a business rival may plant fake negative reviews about your company. The temptation is likely going to be issuing a response, but in many ways, this is a bad move. Responding to a negative review draws more attention to it, and causes it to gain in its search engine standing; better to focus on suppression, building up that cache of positive feedback.

Another unscrupulous online tactic: Business rivals may buy phantom domains — i.e., if your company is called XYZ Widgets and your website is XYZWidgets.com, a rival business may buy XYZWidgets.org. This domain will rank high in a Google search for your company, and your business rivals can use the domain to make you look bad, perhaps filling the doppelganger domain with bad reviews or claims of fraudulent activity. The best ways to avoid this:

• Buy up all of the matching domains for your company now; even if you do not use them all, you can prevent them from being used against you!
• Do likewise with matching social media accounts; the last thing you need is an embarrassing, fake company Twitter account that you cannot control!
• Make sure that you own not only the .com, .org, and.net domains that match your brand, but also that you own matching domains for the name of your chief executives.

PR Problems

Finally, it is crucial to note that not all online attacks come from without; sometimes, there can be an unfortunate happening or PR meltdown within your company, which leaks out onto the pages of the Internet and causes you embarrassment and bad buzz. Once more, there is no way to prevent this from happening — but you can develop a crisis management plan, to be prepared, at the drop of a hat, to go on the offensive.

• Compile several strong, compelling press releases and blog entries, highlighting positive assets of your company. Have these ready to deploy as soon as a PR snafu occurs; these positive assets will help move the spotlight off of the negatives and onto the positives.
• Make sure you have an account and a good working relationship with PRWeb, so that you will be fully prepared to take action.
• Make sure that you have Google Alerts set up for all of your branded terms, to ensure that you know the minute a PR disaster strikes — and, to make certain that you can respond promptly.

At the end of the day, the Internet really is something of a Wild West scenario, and small companies can never be too sure of what to expect — but they can prepare for most all contingencies, and do what is necessary to defend their online reputation.

Before becoming President and COO of www.reputationchanger.com, Mike Zammuto worked with a number of leading Internet companies. Reputation Changer offers a variety of online reputation management services.

I’ve been on both sides of the client-agency fence at a number of different levels. While it’s clear that marketing agencies can add tremendous value (why I started Clever Zebo , it’s important to know how to get the most out of your agency team. Having worked with dozens of clients on the agency side of the fence, I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what client behavior is most effective at driving KPIs. Here are a few recommendations.

BE demanding. It’s up to us to say no if something is out of scope.

DON’T ask us to make up numbers. While forecasting is critical for budgeting and resource planning, there’s a fine line between thinking ahead and wishful thinking. Our job is to bring you ideas for hitting your goals and then help you execute on them. Developing a plan based on historical performance and ramp is wise; making up a data story to conform to investor demands is a way to run in circles and create a lot of anxiety.

GET a clear plan from the get-go. Know what is going to happen when and who is going to do it. The outset of an agency relationship often makes or breaks the ultimate product. Request a timeline with action items and then share them with a couple of your smartest marketing friends/co-workers/employees for feedback. Dealing with concerns upfront prevents a lot of wasted time.

BE upfront about what’s working and not working for you. We’re here to solve problems for you. Don’t worry about our feelings or motivation — we’re not employees! We’re paid to tackle very specific tasks for you. If you don’t like how we’re communicating or tackling those tasks, say so. You’ll be amazed what a fire it lights under an agency’s ass when you complain a little.

DEMAND regular check-ins, progress reports, and analysis. We’re hacking through the details. Your job is to make sure it’s all moving in a direction that works for your company. Ask questions until you feel like you understand what’s being done. But also …

RESPECT our time. Time is our most precious resource. We can either spend our time trying to make you comfortable or spend it trying to get you results. If a check-in call only needs to be 5 minutes, let it be. If an update can be communicated through bullet points, request a quick write-up. Needle us enough to make sure we’re delivering 110% but then give us the freedom to do our thing.

BRING ideas to the table. No one knows your product better than you do. Shoot over thoughts, ideas, and recommendations. If we don’t like it, we’ll say so, but never underestimate the power of your expertise; it could be what inspires a major breakthrough.

INCENTIVIZE the relationship. While it’s harder to structure deals where compensation is partly based on results, it can pay big dividends. Why wouldn’t you want us both to benefit when good things happen?

BE realistic. As much as I want to instantaneously double every client’s revenue, progress is often gradual. Sometimes we strike gold right away; sometimes it takes failure, iteration, and perseverance. Ensure you’re getting hard work and quality thinking. If those are in place, the results will follow; it’s just a matter of timeline.

If you have other recommendations for how to work best with an agency, I’d love to read them.

I know I’m supposed to be professional, but do I have to be boring?

I’m splayed across my couch, thinking about how I’ve signed dozens of guest blog posts, realizing just how boring they make me (and Clever Zebo) sound.

Take my Unbounce author page, where I describe myself as…

a revenue optimization expert and cofounder of Clever Zebo, a group of web marketing strategy experts dedicated to helping interesting businesses get more customers online. While Igor loves to geek out about search engine marketing, conversion funnel optimization and partnership development, he’s also a pretty fierce snowboarder, musician and beer taster.

Snazzy! :-\

Ok, here are some alternative takes.

Igor Belogolovsky is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of online marketing strategy pros. In his spare time, he finds nuts for squirrels.

Igor Belogolovsky is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of online marketing strategy pros. He blogs under the influence and heckles little-known cartoonists on ICQ.

Igor Belogolovsky is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of online marketing strategy pros. He does not drive steamboats.

Igor Belogolovsky is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of online marketing strategy pros. He enjoys a good laugh, except when it’s at the expense of another’s misfortune, in which case he doesn’t enjoy it.

Igor Belogolovsky is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of online marketing strategy pros. Among his most underwhelming talents is an uncanny ability to unwittingly end a perfectly pleasant conversation.

Igor Belogolovsky cofounded Clever Zebo to outwit and wrestle its predecessor, not-so-Clever Zebo, into submission.

Igor Belogolovsky is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of overgrown hyenas tasked with drinking excess bathwater in local communities.

Igor Belogolovsky is cofounder of Clever Zebo, a team of online marketing strategy pros. He prefers cookies to Jewish guilt.

How do these strike you?

Heads up: I’m going to plug our client’s blogging contest in this post. Yes, I’m plugging it because they’re our client and we love them — but more than that, I’m plugging it because it’s a pretty sweet deal, and I’ll tell you why I think so.

It’s not every day that an opportunity crops up to earn a valuable backlink – from a PageRank 6 site — with relatively little effort.

Sounds pretty good, right?

Our friends at BestVendor, who focus on software and app ratings, are offering you this opportunity until October 31, 2012. To get your juicy backlink right now, all you have to do is create a list of useful apps and tools around a theme. For example, we put together a list of “Killer conversion tools for the clever startup.“

On top of writing in a little backlink for yourself, you can also win a $1,500 Amazon card or an iPhone 5 if you share your list and garner a bunch of views.

Ok. Sales pitch is over. Go do it!

Enter the BestVendor list-a-thon

Now.

Joint webinars can be a gold mine. Not only do you give your audience added value but you get access to another company’s audience to boot.

Producing successful joint webinars takes some work but is ultimately worth it. Here’s our list of highest priority action items with some reminders to keep you on track.

1. List your webinar partner dream lineup

When we started the Clever Zebo joint webinar series earlier this year, I was skeptical that CEOs and founders would take time out of their crammed days to work on a webinar together, even if we had a relationship. Many joint webinars and hundreds of participants later, I was wrong. Over and over again I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how willing awesome, fast-growing companies are to team up. Start by contacting any friends you have at companies you admire (or ask friends to recommend companies to team up on a webinar with). All you need is 1 or 2 joint webinars under your belt to start reaching out to bigger and bigger companies.

2. Pitch prospective partners with a good topic

The hardest part of a joint webinar is choosing a topic interesting and relevant to both companies. Because we don’t want to invite direct competitors, this can be tricky. In our webinar series, the primary theme is conversion optimization and a/b testing, so I find case studies relevant to both us and the partner (Wistia: does video improve conversion rates?;
Help Scout: how customer service improves conversion rates; ReTargeter: the impact of different banner ads, etc.) The point is come prepared with a great topic when reaching out.

3. All they need to do is invite their people

This is the most important part. The true value of joint webinars is in getting access to your partner’s database (and them getting access to yours). Do everything else for them but make it a condition of joining the webinar that they reach out to their database. Unless they have an enormous social following, social media mentions aren’t enough. Get them agree to send a dedicated email (newsletter inclusion is an okay alternative but usually doesn’t pull as well).

4. Stay on top of your partners

People get busy. Don’t assume anything will get done unless you push. Here’s what I do to keep partners on point:

- Send a check list at least two weeks before the event.
- Send at least 2 reminders/check-ins per action item
- Add Google Analytics UTM parameters to the registration link so I know when their people register
- Do an audio-visual check a few days before and verbally review all their todos

5. Expand your recruiting

Now that you’ve produced 1 or 2 successful joint webinars, it’s time to ramp up your efforts.

- Put together a kick-ass recruiting email that talks benefits of their participation
- Research 25 companies that would be a good partner (regardless of size)
- Email and social media bug those companies

6. Create amazing webinars

Most company’s webinars suck — it’s just a voice speaking over a boring PowerPoint.
Add video and music, ask your audience lots of questions, run polls and show the results, spend a little extra time in
the research process to extract real value-add insights.

Wanna see how it’s done? Register for Clever Zebo’s next webinar.

I covered the basics of LinkedIn advertising in a post on the KISSmetrics blog a few months back. Now, I’m going to touch on more advanced strategies for structuring your campaigns, writing your ads and stretching your LinkedIn ad dollars.

Are you ready to try out some expert tips and get clever about your LinkedIn PPC campaigns? Good.

Writing the perfect ad copy for LinkedIn

Take a look at the pair of ads below. These showed up on my LinkedIn homepage the other day. What do you notice about them?

If you said that they both call out their target audience in the headline explicitly by title, you’re right.

Try an ad variation using your target audience’s job title in the headline (e.g. Sales Executive). This strategy is likely to improve your clickthrough rate, and in turn, conversions, while decreasing irrelevant clicks.

Now, have a look at these two ads. Why is the ad on the left more effective?

Nice, large photo of a person’s face. In most cases, you’ll get a better clickthrough rate if your photo is of a person’s face, clearly visible. Your company’s logo is not as effective in this context as a live human being. Of course, you don’t have to use a photo of a person if it’s more relevant to depict something that your target audience will immediately relate with. If you’re selling software that helps beef up Excel for superusers, a “supercharged Excel logo” might be even better.

Strong call to action. The ad on the left encourages you to “Get a free quote” – the ad on the right leaves you hanging.

Punctuation. Using clean punctuation and terse, natural-sounding phrases is best. Although this particular example doesn’t capitalize the first letter of every word, excluding articles and prepositions, this is also an AdWords ad copy best practice that translates nicely.

Relevant headline. Needless to say, using your company name in the headline is not effective. Speaking to your audience and clearly laying out your product or service offering is how you want to spend your 25 characters.

Contrary to the best practices cited by LinkedIn, their customer success team has recommended running just 2 ads at a time per campaign. If you only have 2 ads active within a campaign, the system can quickly determine which ad is the best and show that ad more often. Once you know this information, you can turn off the second ad and replace that ad with a new ad variation. Then you simply rinse, lather and repeat.

Be sure to have a free offer that’s targeted and compelling. Give away something for free, whether it’s written content, promotional items or a seat in a webinar – you’ll see a healthier response, guaranteed.

Try using a “use by” date in your ad copy to create urgency. What’s true in mass email subject line testing also works for LinkedIn ad copy: if the ad is explicit that your giveaway has a limited supply, or ends by a specific day, your clickthrough rate will almost certainly improve.

Switch up your ads often, at least once a month. New ads get a boost in terms of impressions and have a chance of scoring a higher CTR than your previous ads. Although LinkedIn claims a good solid clickthrough rate to be 0.025%, you can do better with laser-targeted ads featuring compelling copy.

Finally, don’t overlook that you can target members of particular LinkedIn Groups, similar to the way you can target Facebook ads at users who “like” the page of a company or cause. Peruse the groups directory and find cohorts that could be relevant to what you’re slingin’. Then, write ads that speak to those group members.

Smart campaign structure

It’s tempting (and intuitive) to create one campaign targeting your audience, plug in some ads and let ‘er rip. But according to the optimization ninjas at LinkedIn, you’ll actually get more impressions if you segment your campaigns by the types of titles you’re targeting, the company size you’re going after, etc.

In the example below, check out how every demographic sliver has its own campaign. Professionals with a specific job title, e.g. VP of HR, have a single dedicated campaign, as do those with a job function in HR and relatively senior titles, perhaps director-level and above.

If you choose to target by job function (e.g. Accounting), run just one Job Function for each new campaign.

Remarketing & LinkedIn Ads can play together

If you’re retargeting your site visitors with ads while they browse the web elsewhere, you should recognize your LinkedIn campaigns represent an opportunity to build up a laser-targeted remarketing pool! For example, target only Chief Legal Officers at large corporations with a specific offer and landing page. With remarketing code on that page, build up your tailored creative and remarket specifically to that pool of CLOs. Even if they don’t convert on the landing page, you get nearly-free brand exposure down the road.

If you create a dedicated landing page for the CLO-focused ads you’re running on LinkedIn, you can consequently tailor your display advertising message via retargeting only to that particular pool. Your remarketing tags on the rest of your site can be different from those you place on this LinkedIn-specific landing page.

Don’t forget, if you’re crafty, you can grab a $50 LinkedIn Ads gift card. Reach out to an online marketing firm you’re chummy with, or try to hit up the LinkedIn team.

Ultimately, testing and playing around with different offers and targeting options will lead you to discover your own expert tips and strategies. These tips are a good place to start optimizing your campaigns, and once you’ve had a chance to toy with them, we’d love your comments on what worked and what didn’t.

Warning: this blog post contains a powerful dose of tooting our own horn. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t deserve tooting.

This morning, the Zebos are beaming with joy after receiving this email from our awesome client, ActionQuest, a company that runs outdoor science & marine biology camp programs for teens.

“Just wanted to thank you again for your work on our CPC account. [While reviewing] our analytics, one stat in particular caught my attention:

“Compared to April 2011, this past month saw almost a 100% increase in conversions while having 23% fewer visitors (due to smaller budget)… Not bad at all considering that’s exactly what we were looking to do.”

When you load up a marketing channel with rocket fuel and it works, it friggin’ works!

With more and more businesses moving online, it seems that the dominance of cyberspace in the global business environment is only set to increase. Certainly, the web offers many great tools for marketing your e-business and increasing your number of sales. However, where the internet suffers in comparison to the traditional bricks-and-mortar sales environment of a physical shop is its lack of direct, face-to-face engagement.

Online it is much more difficult to initiate a relationship with a customer that will hopefully lead to a transaction. This is where live chat solutions come in.

While the typical conversion rate to sales for e-business is just 1-3%, meaning that of 100 visitors to your site only 2 or 3 will actually purchase, with live chat software you can boost these rates considerably by improving your customer engagement and creating a strong feedback loop that will help you to improve your sales processes. Here are 3 ways in which chat solutions can help to boost your website’s conversion rate.

1. Opening the sales relationship

Just as a sales rep in a bricks-and-mortar store would approach an entering customer and offer their assistance, with chat solutions your business or organization can make the first step and initiate a sales transaction with a potential customer. This facility has an advantage over the traditional bricks-and-mortar setting because it is available around the clock, 24/7 – so that no matter when the customer accesses your website, you can have customer service ready to initiate contact and respond to their needs.

This immediate engagement will instantly set your business apart from others and demonstrate that your brand is hands-on, caring and professional, with a strong emphasis on customer service.

2. Keep visitors on your site longer

When trying to improve website conversion rates, many marketing professionals and webmasters will only concentrate on methods of increasing overall traffic to the website. However, a more effective solution is to examine why visitors are leaving your site – on average, 97% of them!

Increasing traffic to your website is not useful if these visitors will continue to exit before completing transactions with you. Fixing any problems and resolving customer issues is a smarter way to improve your conversion rates. Using chat solutions can help you to identify these issues and locate the bottleneck that is occurring between the point at which visitors enter your site and the point at which they exit before purchasing.

Being connected to a live human being has a powerful impact on customers, and will encourage them to spend much longer on your website than they would otherwise. Friendly, accessible and customer-focused chat services are a great way to make your customers feel cared for and valued, and will make them feel more positive about your brand as a result.

3. Helping customers through the buying process

Live chat through e-business websites has been proven to increase the number of sales, help to generate sales leads, and reduce the proportion of shopping carts which are abandoned before checkout.

According to a survey carried out in 2009 by the North American Technographic Customer Experience Surveyors, 57% of consumers online stated that they were ‘very likely’ to abandon their shopping cart if they were unable to quickly locate answers to their questions – for example, regarding delivery rates, product information or legal statements.

Some retailers have found that live chat has a conversion rate as high as 15-20%. Chat is particularly effective for customers who do not know what they wish to purchase, because chat agents can guide them quickly towards products that meet their needs. If a customer encounters problems with vouchers or shipping, live chat can be crucial for keeping the transaction going.

A couple of good live chat solutions out there include:

Live chat by Olark

Live chat by Liveperson

Live chat by Velaro

 
This is a guest post by Liza, a blogger who also works with a company helping clients discover their average site conversion rate and ways to increase it.

Ok, so Pinterest is blowing up. In this post, three contributing authors explore what the site is all about and what it can (and cannot) do for your business from a marketing perspective.

First, we’ll dig into the facts behind the company.

Pinterest’s growth big for social bloggers

With social bookmarking a past invention, one could say that Pinterest’s first few months were destined for failure.  Digg, Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us were past projects that involved sharing websites and pictures for the world to see, so, what was going to make Pinterest so much better than previous lackluster efforts?

Simple: engagement.  The previously listed social bookmarking websites may be ones of interest for sharing articles, websites full of pictures and even keywords yet they lacked real engagement from their participants.  Pinterest has changed this by heading back to the basics in marketing: simplicity creates publicity.  There is nothing exceptional about the design of Pinterest; in fact, it would appear like the website platform – script aside – took about an hour to create.  However, two years from the launch of the beta site, Pinterest now shares company with social media giants you’d think would have dominated them.

Pinterest growth facts

If the amount of time Pinterest retains its viewership weren’t enough, we’ve compiled more data that will make you wonder why it took so long for a concept such as Pinterest to become developed.  First, we’ll throw out some facts on how Pinterest has grown in membership and unique visits over the last two years.  Hold your applause until the end, please.

• Pinterest became the fastest website to hit 10 million unique visits.  That means faster than Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook.  In January, the total current unique hits count was roughly 11.59 million.

• The company currently employs 16 workers at this time, an amazing number considering the visitor volume.

• In order to offset expenses and turn a profit, Pinterest will alter affiliate links to capture payments that would have normally gone to an affiliate marketer.

• The company currently has a net worth of $200 million, although they’re reporting no significant revenue.

• 20% of users who have connected Facebook profiles to their Pinterest account comprise the daily visitor tally of Pinterest.

• Pinterest has three times the ability to retain readership and engagement as Twitter, by some measures.

• The Midwest comprises the largest concentrated area of Pinterest users with many coming from Mississippi and Kentucky.

• Whereas most United States visitors are sharing their crafts, hobbies, paintings and houses, United Kingdom visitors are more geared towards sharing pictures for website optimization purposes.

• In just 6 months, daily visitors went from spending 14 minutes on site all the way up to 98 minutes, an increase of 700%.

• Was named the top startup company for 2011 by website technology site TechCrunch.

For a website that simply shares photographic items, the numbers are tremendous and continue to push the website rankings to new levels.  Current U.S ranking puts them 16th in Alexa, still trailing the likes of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook yet remaining firmly ahead of Tumblr.

Pinterest’s financial growth

Pinterest currently does have an estimated worth of $200 Million dollars yet doesn’t seem to have much oomph as of yet to turn a profit.  Though you’ll not find paid advertising slots on their website at the time of writing, their general means of keeping above water was the aforementioned affiliate link ‘snatching’ strategy.  Although many challenge the legality of this maneuver, they’ve yet to get taxed for doing it.  Social bloggers can enjoy the future of Pinterest as it appears to be in strong hands.

What is Pinterest all about?

For those who somehow missed the appearance of Pinterest, it’ll be useful to understand what the service actually is. Pinterest has been initially designed as a collection of pictures of people, places or things, either self-uploaded or found on the Web.

Web photos can be added to your collection in a click, if you have added the “Pin” button to your browser. You can also enter a URL, and Pinterest will define all available photos on a certain page.

The service has now become much more than just a user’s digital photo-album with separate groups of pics (called pinboards). The service is also a simple and convenient way to increase the popularity of your brand and earn more by attracting your target audience to your business.

How should I promote my business on Pinterest?

The simplicity of Pinterest is, actually, one of its most essential benefits, as it won’t take much time or effort to start pinning the most inspiring pictures related to your company or the product you’re offering.

The experts recommend taking several important aspects into account. These are:

• quality of the pinned images;
• topic of each photo.

Major Do’s…

Generally speaking, there are several groups of photos which should be pinned when you own (or promote) a brand or a company.

Here, it would be useful to pin:

• corporate photos (e.g. funny photos of the team members, snapshots from office life or corporate events);

• photos of products associated with the brand (logos, corporate mugs, etc. not just the company logo);

• infographics illustrating your work, or those associated with the sphere you are engaged in;

• inspirational photos, aimed to evoke users’ positive emotions (enchanting scenery, smiling people and so on).

Major don’t's…

The key recommendations for how not to lose your audience in Pinterest include the following:

• Avoid posting overly promotional pics.

These might be taken as spam and can cause negative reaction from the side of users, rather than eliciting positive feedback.

• Don’t copy your competitors.

Although it often seems like others know better, you should make your Pinterest account really unique to impress your users and attract more customers.

Exceptions and other Pinterest marketing avenues

If a particular company offers a service to its users, rather than a product, e.g. a file storage service, like 4shared, there’re also ways to market such a business via Pinterest.

You can promote your virtual business by pinning photos from the site of your service. This will drive more traffic to it via backlinks.

How to increase sales with Pinterest

Similarly to its younger rival Fancy, Pinterest has introduced the special “Gifts” pinboard, where users can buy certain products directly, usually at a discount.

Use the “Gifts” pinboard to encourage your customers to get a discount and purchase.

Does Your Business Need a Pinterest Page?

Many businesses will not benefit from a Pinterest page.

Social media is vital for an effective online marketing strategy, and Pinterest has been generating a lot of good press lately. I’ve seen a ton of how-to posts explaining how to set up a Pinterest page for your business, what Pinterest can do for your marketing efforts, and how to maximize the effectiveness of your Pinterest page.

Pinterest is huge. It’s true. But I don’t think every business needs to create a Pinterest page just because it’s popular right now. Before you sign up for a Pinterest account, the first thing you need to ask yourself is “How will my business make more money from using Pinterest?” If you’re unsure, or don’t have a clear idea of what direct financial benefit your business will see from using Pinterest, why are you considering signing up in the first place?

When it comes to social media, you should only use sites that are right for your business. If you run an e-commerce site, Pinterest is ideal for you. Pinterest provides a great platform for advertising new products and howing off features of your items. It’s also great for promoting sales, discounts, and other special events.

If your business is a SaaS application, or another form of business that doesn’t translate well to easily shared images and videos, Pinterest may be a waste of your time. The time you spend trying to think of ways to make Pinterest fit your business model could be better spent using Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or another social media outlet.

Signing up for social media accounts isn’t enough. In fact, signing up for a Pinterest account and letting it gather dust while you spend more time on Twitter or Facebook is worse than not signing up in the first place! Social media provides a perfect means of engaging with users, and a lack of social media engagement tells potential users you don’t care about that platform. Linking to your site from Pinterest is valuable, and the traffic you could see from popular pins are even more valuable. But it’s more important to provide value than to have a social media presence. You should only create a Pinterest page if you plan to post information users will find relevant.

Take Wayfair, for example. Wayfair is a home decoration e-commerce store, and has made tremendous use of Pinterest for marketing purposes. Wayfair has been able to leverage Pinterest to increase traffic and drive sales.

However, like any other marketing effort, traffic from Pinterest isn’t worth much on its own. It’s going to be up to businesses to make the most of this potential source of new, interested traffic. The short answer is: if you’ve already established yourself with Facebook, Twitter and Google+, are you really going to have time to put into developing a presence on Pinterest?

Proper use of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can produce a tremendous increase in traffic, as well as better visibility in SERP placement. But your site doesn’t need to belong to each and every social media site that pops up, no matter how popular that site becomes.

The value of social media for marketing and SEO purposes is nothing compared to the value of engaging with your users in a way that makes sense. Twitter is perfect for quick customer service, and broadcasting news to a wide range of people. Facebook is great for holding contests, finding new customers, and measuring user engagement with your brand. Pinterest is still the new kid on the block, but so far it’s proved to be a fantastic source of traffic for many businesses.

Still, if Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or the next big social media site that pops up aren’t going to make you more money, why waste your time?

This is a guest post written by contributing authors Tyler M., Greg H. and Andy S.

Andy S. is a blogger interested in the best new apps and startups in the marketplace.

Greg H. is an internet marketing professional from sunny California. His company helps people find email addresses and look up cell phone numbers.

Tyler Moore works at Expected Behavior, a web development firm from Indianapolis who runs a product called DocRaptor, a web application used to write PDF files from HTML.

What’s this user testing thing all about? It sure seems to come up a lot. Let’s briefly explore what user testing is, and why companies are doing it.

User testing is a method of developing and improving a website’s design and overall user experience through careful study of real live user sessions conducted by people who could conceivably be a prospective customer of the business in question.

It manifests in different ways. For example, some user tests will be more scientific than others. Some will focus more on qualitative data and feedback from users; others will be more quantitative in nature. At the end of the day, though, the objective of user testing is, quite logically, to find guinea pigs in the actual potential customer base and have them interact with your site in an effort to ensure the site caters to their actual needs and expectations.

And even though many sites have never adopted user testing, it’s not surprising that lots do invest in it. Imagine you were a head chef at a well-known restaurant here in San Francisco — would you start serving up a brand new dish without first testing it out on at least a few close friends?

What’s useful about user testing?

1. Find out why prospects leave your website

2. Uncover potential areas of confusion

3. Shed light on bugs and faulty functionality

4. Get a fresh set of eyes on your content, message and processes

5. Get feedback from people who actually fall into your target demographic and understand how they uniquely see things

Ultimately, the answer to “why user testing” is simple. Everyone has ADHD when it comes to the Internet. Our attention span is about 4 seconds. When you test the critical elements of your site against the real-life experiences and expectations of prospective users, you uncover what turns them off and what empowers them to get sh*t done on your site quickly and effectively. You get answers to the questions, “What will keep my visitors here and inspire them to convert?” and “What aspects of our design will send visitors running for the hills?” If your site visitors translate into revenue for your business — and for most of us, that is the case — those are very important questions.

Why don’t more companies conduct user tests when developing web pages?

1. It can be expensive, both resource-wise and cost-wise (of course, it can also be tremendously inexpensive if you find the right tools).

2. Designers, developers and project managers have a vision for their site and don’t always want to “muddle” it with user feedback. CEOs certainly tend to have a vision too.

3. User testing can lead to feedback the team doesn’t want to hear. Pulling on a single thread can unravel the entire sweater… sort of thing.

I won’t list all the technologies out there, as there already exist several perfectly good articles describing the top user testing software. Businesses can conduct these tests at different levels, too — you don’t have to go down the road of hiring a professional team and investing months to test the crap out of your site from every angle. But whether you choose to employ an online usability testing tool or simply record user sessions to see how they use your site, something is better than nothing. Put energy and thought toward this early on, and your website will reflect the needs of your customer base. And that’s more “cha-ching” coming your way.

A week ago during a Clever Zebo retreat with Igor in the remarkably beautiful hills of Big Sur, I came to a few startling realizations pulled together from across my life — they span philosophy of science, cosmology, technology, social interaction, organization systems, and the nature of consciousness to name a few. If you’re interested in these thoughts, keep reading. And if you’re wondering what any of this has to do with online marketing, read to the end.

1. I am conscious of being conscious, and I hunger for experience.

2. To the best of my knowledge, my consciousness cannot (yet) survive without my physical body. Thus, minimizing potential risk to my physical body is of paramount importance.

3. Just as an electron appears a point when measured but is really a field of potential states, my consciousness appears a point in the fabric of humanity but is too a field.

4. My consciousness animates my body but is not bounded only by my physical body.

5. My consciousness, an infinite field of consciousness, can meld with other consciousnesses. Talking, loving, relating, fearing, helping, thinking about are all ways of describing the joint field generated by my consciousness joining with another.

6. My consciousness is limitless in what it can comprehend. It can contain the entire spectrum of human experience, past and present. Thus, every accomplishment another consciousness makes is my accomplishment when I become conscious of it.

7. In all the observable universe, the only other beings I can find conscious of their own consciousness are human beings.

8. Human beings were born on Earth from an ancient process called nature. Although nature (apart from humans) is not conscious of its consciousness, for the gift of consciousness we owe nature infinite gratitude. Thus, I feel a sacred duty to protect and care for nature.

9. Although the knowledge upon which my consciousness draws is spawned from my physical body and thus its immediate environs, the field of my consciousness is, at a nearly incomprehensible level, joined by the consciousnesses of all other humans. Because I do not know if their consciousness perishes when their body dies, I have an incentive not only to prevent human death and not only to foster the birth of new human beings, but it is deeply in my interest to foster the expansion of the consciousness of other humans.

10. Because my consciousness is precious and because my consciousness comprises and expands with the totality of human being, the assured future flourishing of my consciousness depends on the well-being of humanity.

11. Humanity is too vulnerable. Life-threatening disease, weapons, collisions with extra-terrestrial objects, high energy bursts from dying stars are capable of greatly diminishing or even destroying human being. Thus, it in my interest to expand humanity’s potential for survival.

12. Human survival lies in our ability to live more harmoniously together on this planet and colonize additional planets inside this solar system and without.

13. Everything permissible by the laws of physics (known or unknown) is accomplishable by consciousness.

14. Everything we need to survive and flourish in this universe is abundant. There is enough hydrogen, oxygen, metals, and other materials in this solar system to support hundreds of billions of conscious beings living harmoniously together and expanding our reach outward.

15. Accomplishment is a networked system familiarly represented by a figurehead but existent in reality only in the fabric of consciousness (Einstein’s equations are meaningless without others to interpret, modify, contemplate, and use them. Jobs’ iPhone would be trash without its consumers.) Thus, accomplishment is fundamentally and necessarily a shared phenomenon.
16. Communication methods among consciousnesses is infinitely diverse, and new methods are constantly invented.

17. The rate of consciousness expansion is accelerating. Every consciousness knowingly or unknowingly contributes to this expansion. While the lessons of history frame the paths forward, the future can be anything, even the most lustrous vision of our most brilliant dreams.

Imagine for a second a world with unlimited access to unlimited energy, food, information, and materials.

This is the world we live in.

The seeming scarcity flowing about us (poverty, starvation, etc.) is not a necessary feature of our world. Scarcity is the by-product of poor human systems and ignorance.

Through the explosion of democracy and capitalism, we are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of coordinated creation. The fabric of this explosion is communication, knowledge transfer, dispelling ignorance.

While communication can be a weapon for maintaining the stranglehold of scarcity and perpetuating ignorance, we have the power to use this tool for something more wonderful.

Our businesses are the outpouring of our consciousness, and we can choose how we’ll spread the knowledge we create. Sure, you can see an online marketing program as just a way to make a buck, or you can see it for what it is — a key catalyst for the inter-connection, exploration, and collaboration of consciousness. When we see our businesses as critical constituents in the infinite expansion of consciousness and align ourselves with a dedication to tapping the reality of abundance, how can we not succeed?

(Note: Recent influences for this post include David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Brian Green’s The Hidden Reality, and a keynote speech by Robert Verzola.)

We’ve taken a look at some effective AdWords strategies in the past — how to write effective ad copy, what types of lead forms convert well, and the like.

Now I want to show you 4 AdWords “strategies” that I continue to see in clients’ and prospects’ SEM accounts, and debunk them. These are 4 things that AdWords veterans simply don’t do, and now you won’t either.

1) Advertising on peripheral terms. Your best shot at AdWords ROI is to identify keywords that signify searcher intent to find your site or product, and to tailor your ads to those search terms as closely as you can. It’s tempting to think, “Maybe if I bid on terms related to tax season, like ’1099′ or ‘find a tax accountant,’ I’ll hook potential customers for my tax software — but don’t go down that road. You’ll find you spent time to set up a campaign only to suffer low quality scores, low clickthrough rates and poor-converting traffic.

2) Let AdWords set your bids. If you’re racking up enough conversion data to use Conversion Optimizer bidding, you’re golden. Manual bidding is cool too. But there’s another option: “AdWords will set my bids to help maximize clicks within my target budget.” This auto-CPC strategy is self-admittedly ineffective unless all you’re trying to do is get unqualified traffic and money (and ROI) is no object.

3) Brand name in your ad copy. With all these impressions, you might get the harebrained idea that search marketing is an opportunity to build some brand awareness. Let me set you straight: in display, that might be true, but in the search network, nobody cares about your company name unless your brand carries some major weight. If you’re using your brand name in AdWords ad headlines, 9 times out of 10 you’re wasting real estate.

4) Copy & paste from AdWords keyword tool. The AdWords keyword tool is a great resource, but if you don’t parse carefully, your adgroups will earn terrible quality scores and even worse ROI. Be sure to use the option to “show search terms closely related to the ones I entered,” and filter down from there. Your objective is to create tightly themed adgroups focused on a specific search intention — not to pull in every possible keyword under the sun.

Now go make sweet AdWords love, you crazy marketers.

It’s really easy to get frustrated, discouraged, stressed out, and/or upset building a business online. In any given week, I experience all of the above …

… but I don’t give up.

If you want success and think communicating online will somehow achieve it, then I have two words of advice: “Keep Trying!”

When we started Clever Zebo, we made a commitment to grow our business the way we help our clients (through online marketing!). So just as we advise clients, we’re going after it.

Partnerships, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, retargeting, webinars, a marketing automation program, SEO, social, etc. At first, it was slow-going:

At many points along the way, it’s been tempting to throw our hands in the air and give up on marketing ourselves. But A) we’re committed to growing this business and B) we want to do it the way we preach.

So we keep trying, keep testing, keep giving it our best. As a business person and as a human being, there just isn’t more you can ask of yourself.

If you feel like you’re about to give up but know there’s more you can do if only you could get that second or tenth wind, call me — I’d love to get you pumped up.

Clever Zebo officially succumbed to Blathy (what happens when your blog lays fallow for more than a month, and you don’t even spell out the words “blog” and “apathy”).

It’s a sad state of affairs I know many startups and even ongoing online marketing programs share. While Clever Zebo has been kicking butt in a bunch of other channels (partnerships, webinar, referrals, even GUEST BLOG POSTS ironically), we let our blog slip over the holidays.

Self-criticism aside, I want to talk about where we’re going with this blog and where you might consider going with yours.

There are blog evangelists out there who argue that regardless of the topic and your temperament you should blog multiple times a week and constantly share your ramblings on social media. The argument concludes with a general promise of a steady increase in traffic, leads, and new business. While certainly this dream scenario is true for some, there are mitigating factors, namely:

A) How much weekly writing and social sharing time is spent versus monetizable return.

B) What kind of long-term commitment is required to make this strategy pay off.

C) What kind of interest is there for the topic versus competition and noise.

While the ideal of an obsessively-maintained blog is attractive, what it takes to get there simply is not feasible for all companies — at least not in a short enough time frame to address fundamental business acquisition needs.

WHY WE ALL SHOULD KEEP BLOGGING

From the first part of this post, you might think I’m trying to talk you out of your commitment to blogging. But I’m actually attempting the exact opposite. I’ve noticed an interesting trend the past few months: the majority of our new clients and serious prospects cite connecting to our blog’s content as a big reason why they wanted to have further conversations with us and ultimately work together.

While it’s not yet at Seth Godin level, the blog nonetheless has an impact on our site visitors — they want to know how we think and are looking for practical, logical advice on how to improve their online marketing program.

This realization has been tremendously empowering. Maybe I don’t have to worry about a weekly regimen of vomit-blogging and social rampaging; maybe the key is to keep using this medium as a way to keep my thoughts sharp and Clever Zebo’s followers current on online marketing trends and thinking. If I’ve learned anything in nearly a decade of online marketing, it’s that best practices are best unless they’re not.

I invite you to revisit your blog and ask yourself a few tough questions:

Last time I rapped at you about creating effective lead forms, we covered the basics. Here, I want to spend some time on slightly more advanced tactics.

1. Sometimes, minimalism is a poor qualifier. Yes, I told you to ask only for the information that’s absolutely essential. But let’s say you’re capturing leads and everything’s fine and dandy, except that the leads aren’t taking your calls. They won’t call back, they barely remember submitting the form or they simply aren’t qualified to have a sales conversation.

Add a field or two that better qualify your prospect. What you ask for depends on your unique sales cycle.

One idea is to force your lead to specify a “best time to call” or “requested phone appointment.” Generally, the more specifically your leads answers this question, the better the lead. Some companies require the lead to name a project budget. You can also ask for specifics around the challenge that drove them to write in for help. In every case, entering more detail requires more commitment of your lead and better qualifies them.

2. Plug your forms into a marketing automation platform. The advantages of doing this are:

• Get richer data about each lead (geography, business IP, etc)
• See the keyword(s) the lead searched to get to your site
• See form conversion data over time in pretty charts & tables
• Automatically add your leads to specific mailing lists if you wish
• Automatically push lead data to the platform and to your CRM
• See exactly which pages the lead visited before & after converting

There are plenty of options, but I’d steer most small businesses away from the heavyweight, feature-rich marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Marketo unless:

• You’re ready to make an investment of at least $50k to $100k annually
• You know what you’re doing when it comes to marketing automation
• You have at least one dedicated person whose full-time job is making your marketing automation engine sing

On the other hand, if you just want to get your feet wet, some lower-end yet powerful marketing automation tools include Pardot and Loopfuse. The latter will even give you a free trial with functionality for up to 1,000 prospects.

3. Explain why you’re asking for the info. Assuage your visitors’ concerns by adding tooltips that explain why you’re requesting their phone number, email address or mom’s maiden name. Build trust with your prospect by over-communicating early. If you can’t put into customer-friendly words why you need the info, reconsider your decision to collect it.

4. No checkboxes. For heaven’s sake, don’t make them check any boxes. Unless you’re a giant corporation with a legal staff, don’t require a checkbox about your terms & conditions. Just insist that submitting the form signifies acceptance of your terms, and link to them. If you must add a checkbox — be sure to make the entire text and area around the box clickable.

5. Sell softly. Your visitors get it: you want their contact info so you can sell them stuff. But if you don’t couch your lead form in enough information — if you don’t give them enough to go on — they’ll just leave.

Every time a prospect encounters your lead form, they engage in a (sometimes subconscious) decision process: is this company worthy of my contact info?

Be informative, be brief and earn their trust by spelling out the benefits of what you do, featuring prominent logos of your partners and clients, making other options beyond your lead capture form available to them and being open about your company. Check out how helpful Gmail’s sign up page is. Aim for that level of hand-holding and transparency.

What companies are sporting the most effective, most powerful lead forms out there?

I was recently surprised to find Google’s keyword tool reporting more than 44,000 monthly searches for “cheap SEO.” Many of the results, as you’d guess, are offshore companies using less-than-wholesome SEO tactics — but I bet you they get business.

For reference, the first 5 organic Google results ranking for “cheap SEO” look like this:

“Cheap SEO” companies get business because SEO is tremendously confusing.

Consider the difference between hiring an SEO contractor and hiring a salesperson for your small business:

Salesperson

• Most business owners know what to look for in a great sales candidate
• Most business owners have done the job of the sales warrior at some stage; they got to where they are by selling their own ideas
• Measuring success is easy and relatively fast in most sales cycles

SEO contractor

• Many business owners have a light understanding of SEO principles, at best
• Most business owners have never done hands-on SEO; they have to rely on what they’re told and what they’re “sold”
• Measuring success is tricky as SEO takes many months to propagate
• SEO is a high-maintenance channel

It’s no surprise that executives and business owners are daunted, and because the understanding of SEO is weak, the promise of “cheap SEO” is very enticing. You can “test it out” with a small budget, and if it “doesn’t work” you can move on without taking a big hit.

The problem with this approach is that optimizing your site for organic search isn’t a one-shot makeover, and the time of people who are great at it is worth a lot more than the $10/hour you can get on Odesk.

This approach is analogous to hiring a junior salesperson at $40,000/year to sell a complex, long-cycle B2B software tool. You might be able to shoehorn something, but if it doesn’t work out — while you haven’t taken a big hit, you also haven’t really tested or learned anything. If you fire your junior sales guy (or gal), you haven’t determined the tool can’t be sold; you’ve simply determined it can’t be sold by cheap help.

Why writing 6-figure checks for SEO expertise is hard to swallow

• You can’t measure success quickly enough
• Cheap SEO services seem to be available all over the web — how can I distinguish between them?
• It’s not immediately clear what you’re getting

Good point. Why is it that you see what should be a relative commodity — the “SEO audit” — priced at $1,000 in some neighborhoods, at $5,000 in others and sometimes at $35,000?

Well, there’s a few reasons. First, SEO for a simple site is very different from SEO for a complex site. Second, there are a bunch of crappy companies out there that offer cheap SEO. What makes them crappy is this: a strong SEO action plan requires profound research.

Choosing which keywords you target is a very critical decision. You can spend an hour on the research, 9 hours on HTML recommendations and troubleshooting, and sell a $1,000 audit. Conversely, it can take many hours to consult weapons-grade SEO tools like SEOmoz, Raventools and the like, and ensure you’re choosing terms that are sufficiently high in volume, not overly competitive and, importantly, terms that you can actually rank for, given the content of your site.

It’s the same story when developing a content strategy, troubleshooting your site for potential indexing problems, building a backlink footprint and the rest.

Why it doesn’t matter that you can’t “see” the results of SEO right away

Think about how you get traffic to your site. Chances are you’re paying for traffic in some way. It could be any of these channels:

• Paid search
• Display ads
• Other PPC advertising
• Affiliates
• TV / radio ads
• Blogging
• Email marketing

No matter what you’re doing to get customers to your site, you’re spending time on it, and in many cases you’re paying by the click, too.

If your average cost per click across all channels is $1.25, you should think of every organic visit your site gets as a $1.25 credit against your account. If you grow your organic traffic to as little as 1,000 visits per month, that’s a $1,250 return on your investment — plus what each conversion is worth.

The bottom line: Cheap SEO is a mirage, good SEO is the real Giving Tree

The point I’m trying to make, and perhaps belaboring, is this: cheap SEO is bullshit, and good SEO appears expensive because it’s uncertain and difficult to measure. There are no guarantees in search engine rankings (company who give them are, well… disingenuous at best). But, actually, done successfully, a site well-optimized for organic search can be among the greatest assets of a business and can generate tremendous revenue from free traffic. SEO is the Giving Tree of online marketing.