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>> THE ORIGINAL AND BEST INTERNET MARKETING MAGAZINE DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR THE IPAD, KINDLE FIRE, ANDROID AND THE WEB

> TOP SOCIALBOOKMARKING SITES

PAGE 11

> TURN YOURCOMPETITORS

TACTICS ON YOURSELFPAGE 18

> KEY PLAYERS OFMOBILE ADVERTISING

PAGE 22

> 10 WAYS TO GET MORE FACEBOOK FANS

PAGE 24

> 10 ACTIVE & PASSIVECONTENT MARKETING

PAGE 27

> HOW A CHINESEECOMMERCE

RACKED UP $3B SALESIN ONE DAY

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internetmarketing

magazine

BUMPER

CHRISTMAS

& NEW YEAR

ISSUE!

MAL EMERYDIRECT RESPONSE MASTERY

> SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOWPAGE 34

> BUILDING LINKS TOWITHSTAND PANDA &PENGUIN UPDATESPAGE 37

> 7 WEBSITESELLER MISTAKESPAGE 42

DECEMBER 2012 - JANUARY 2013

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THE STATE OF THE INTERNET> INTERNET UPDATE

Amazon Going Negative to Go Positive

Amazon’s Kindle Fire media tab-let carries a BOM cost of $185.60, according to findings from the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service. When manufacturing services ex-penses are added, the cost in-creases to $201.70.

“The Kindle Fire HD, at a retail price point of $199, is sold at a loss by Amazon, just as the basic Kindle is also sold at a loss at the current $79 retail price point,” said Andrew Rassweiler, senior di-rector, teardown services for IHS. “Amazon makes its money not on Kindle hardware, but on the paid content and other products it plans to sell the consumer through the Kindle. This is a similar busi-ness model to wireless companies such as AT&T or Verizon. They sell you a phone that costs them $400 to $600 or more to make for a price of only $200. However, they expect to more than make up for that loss with a two-year service contract.”

Amazon has a very smart business model of buying the customer in order to have a captive audience to sell them ongoing services such as its Prime service or the new Kindle FreeTime unlimited which is a $4.99 per month subscription that gives access to kids books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows.Other services Amazon sells on its Kindle Fire devices to monetise it include games, apps, TV shows, movies, magazines, books, music and audio titles.

Amazon Web Services Now Down Under

Amazon Web Services has an-nounced the launch of a new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, the ninth in its global cloud computing plat-form.

“Over 10,000 customers in Austra-lia and New Zealand are already using AWS, and this is before opening our new AWS Region in Australia” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Ser-vices.

At launch, the Sydney region con-sists of two separate Availability Zones (datacenters in separate distinct locations within a region which are designed to be opera-tionally independent) and will support numerous AWS services including Elastic Compute Cloud, Map Reduce, DynamoDB, Simple

DB and the Amazon Relational Da-tabase Service among others.

This is good news for Australasian businesses and Internet Marketers using Amazon’s web services for compute cycles, databases and storage as it will result in lower latency of services and a better level of support.

E-Commerce Spending On Black Friday Tops $1B For The First Time; Amazon Is The Most Vis-ited Retailer

ComScore is reporting that U.S. retail e-commerce spending was $1.042 billion, an increase of 26 percent from last year. “This is the first time Black Friday sales surpassed $1 billion in online spending”, says comScore.

“Despite the frenzy of media cov-erage surrounding the importance of Black Friday in the brick-and-mortar world, we continue to see this shopping day become more and more prominent in the e-commerce channel – particularly among those who prefer to avoid crowds at the stores,” said com-Score chairman, Gian Fulgoni, in a release.

In terms of specific retailers, Amazon was the most popular e-commerce site by visits, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and Apple. In total, 57.3 million

In this section of Internet Marketing Magazine we cover the low down on what are the big plays that have happened online recently and how they affect you.

Kindle Fire HD

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Americans visited online retail sites on Black Friday, representing an increase of 18 percent versus a year ago. Amazon also posted the highest year-over-year visitor growth rate among the top five retailers.

Facebook Is Quickly & Quietly Making a Killing With Ads That Stalk You

Wall Street wants Facebook to find a new source of aggressive growth, and the largely agile social net-work appears to have done just that — with ads that follow you from site to site and remember you for lengthy periods of time.

Facebook publicly launched its Facebook Exchange ad-bidding network less than three months ago and has been testing it only since June. But the system is already shaking up the ad business, say partners who have been on the exchange since the begin-ning, delivering a huge volume of users with a strong propensity to click on ads and helping advertisers follow those users for longer periods of time than is possible under competing systems. In the pro-cess Facebook is giving Google, long the undisputed leader in the so-called “retargeting business,” a run for its money.

“Nine months ago, it seemed patently clear to me as a longtime participant in this industry that [Google’s] DoubleClick was just running away with the opportunities; they were just leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else,” says Josh McFarland, CEO of ad targeting company TellApart. “There was no other game in town, and then suddenly Facebook came on the scene and then literally in about three months became an exchange that is almost as pow-erful and almost as highly performing as the oldest, best ad exchange out there, which is DoubleClick.”

Retargeting lets advertisers utilize data they have about their customers. When I go to Backcountry.com and I look at a pair of skis, in the same way that Backcountry.com might send me an email saying, “Hey, you know these skis are on sale, you should buy them,” or the way that they would change their site to show me the skis that I looked at the last time, when I visit again — they can also do the same thing with their ads. So that, when they show you their ads, they can show ads about things that you’re interested in. So, on Facebook, they’re now

enabling those advertisers to do that, too.

Google Reincarnates Dead Paper Mill as Data Cen-ter of the Future

In February of 2009, Google paid about $52 million for an abandoned paper mill in Hamina, Finland, after deciding that the 56-year-old building was the ideal place to build one of the massive computing facilities that serve up its myriad online services. Part of the appeal was that the Hamina mill includ-ed an underground tunnel once used to pull water from the Gulf of Finland. Originally, that frigid Bal-tic water cooled a steam generation plant at the mill, but Google saw it as a way to cool its servers.

As it turns out, all 450 meters of the tunnel were in excellent condition, and Google was able to use it to start moving sea water to heat exchangers in-side Google’s new data center, helping to cool down thousands of machines juggling web traffic. Thanks in part to that granite tunnel, Google can run its Hamina facility without the energy-sapping electric chillers found in the average data center.

This is an excellent example of how Google “thinks outside the box” when building its data centers, working to create facilities that are both efficient and as kind as possible to the world around them.

The lifecycle of this facility is interesting as it ac-curately reflects what is happening in many medias with physical printing very fast being replaced by digital versions of those medias.

Google’s Finland Data Center (Photo: Google)

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From the Desk of the Editor

A big thanks goes out to you the Internet Market-ing Magazine community for your support in 2012. We’ve had a massive year of growth. This growth has largely been in the Apple Newsstand and Ap-pstore space as Apple recommends us for ‘market-ing’ and ‘internet marketing’ related searches.

Zinio has also been a strong platform of growth in 2012. The big one to watch will be what happens in both the Amazon Kindle Fire space as well as Micro-soft Surface. These are two leading edge platforms that are destined for big growth.

We’d especially like to thank our featured expert contributors this year. We’ve had some amazing experts that we’ve interviewed and also who have contributed articles on all aspects of digital mar-keting.

The members area continues to grow in usage, al-though it’s still only a relatively small percentage of Internet Marketing Magazine readers who have claimed their free membership. If you haven’t got access to the members area please feel free to do at http://internetmarketingmag.net/become-member/ (it’s free). This months Direct Response Mastery complete audio interview with Mal Emery has now been added. It has lots of learning’s in it that were not included in the magazine, so be sure to check it out.

A special thanks to those who have left reviews in the apple platforms as it really helps us out. If you are getting good value from Internet Marketing Magazine and you can spare 1 minute of your time to click this link to give us a quick honest review that would be greatly appreciated (click ‘view in iTunes’ then scroll down and click ‘write a review’, thanks :).

2013 promises to be a massive year online with eCommerce growing exponentially and mobile and social always becoming more and more important. We’ll be right on the leading edge of everything that happens and will give you the blow-by-blow reports of the big plays online.

Have a great Christmas Break and we’ll see you again in February 2013 as this current issue is our bumper Christmas/NewYear issue covering both December and January.

Until next time… Cut your losers short and run your winners long. Have a great Christmas and a Fan-tastic New Years from the entire team here at In-ternet Marketing Magazine and our sister marketing agency Internet Marketing Done For You.

GregCassarGreg CassarInternet Marketing Strategist& Editor – Internet Marketing Magazine

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> EXPERT INTERVIEW

An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar

Mal Emery is a master of direct response marketing. Originally with a background in buying and selling businesses Mal went on to specialise in direct mail, followed by selling from the plat-form, mentoring, and mastering many other digital and print medias.

For those who are not familiar with the term could you clarify what you mean when you talk about ‘Emotional Direct Re-sponse Marketing’?

Mal: I suppose the simplest def-inition is it’s the polar opposite of branding. You know, you’re led to believe by the media peo-ple, like TV and radio and print, that if you just run your ad often enough eventually you’ll make a sale.

Of course, that’s what they want you to believe and it suits them because you run the ad over and over and over and you get little or no response and without any methodology for actually mea-suring that response.

So, as the term implies emo-tional, direct response. So, that means if we take some of the words in definition – so, firstly, it’s emotional. Now, that’s because a business doesn’t buy from you, a person buys from you. So a per-son is what I call a skin bag of emotion. There are five emo-tions that get any body to do any thing - and they’re love, greed, guilt, fear and pride.

Now, by response that means we expect to make some money, or we expect lead generation to produce a prospect. So it actu-ally is measurable. Everything about emotional, direct response marketing is measurable and that way you know if your dollar is actually making you a dollar. In most traditional media that’s not the case. You’ve only got to read every ad in the newspaper today, or go to TV or radio and you’ll find that there’s literally

no methodology for measuring the response.

If you’re not a master of direct response marketing, you’re leav-ing an enormous amount of mon-ey on the table.

Greg: You know what’s interest-ing about that, a lot of people online are interested in the next traffic technique, or the next widget, or tool that you can buy, but in reality if you don’t under-

MAL EMERYDIRECT RESPONSE MASTERY

Types of Emotions

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stand direct response it’s very, very hard to smack it out of the park.

Mal: Well what – you probably know and the mass-es don’t know, is the gurus of the Internet, and you can list them if you like (particularly the guys that hang around Dan Kennedy) – they’ve all pre-viously belonged to a particular cult that thought the Internet was everything.

Now, that said, is the Internet the money spew-ing, cash making, opportunity that dreamers said it was in the early 1990s? Yes. They were right. It was a bit early, but they were right. But then we bred this culture of the Internet as everything. Well, it’s not. And the gurus of the Internet – they are taking their clients offline, or driving from of-fline to online as fast as they possibly can – be-cause it is more effective and more reliable than any other media.

Use direct mail. Get them offline as fast as you can and use direct mail. But I’m saying; use every single media - the online media and the offline media. Because direct mail to your list of clients, or prospects who are interested in what you have to say, is an absolute game changer.

So, am I saying the Internet is not a great way to go? No! I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying, mas-ter everything, but master offline direct mail.

One of the biggest lessons I ever learned from you was about Psychology and Maths in a win-ning offer. What’s been your learning’s in this space?

Mal: Well marketing is about two things – and that is psychology and maths. So, your mathematics is the money side of things – that is, your profit, what it costs you to do what it is you’re doing. Your psychology is the ability to enter the conver-sation that a prospect is having – and that prospect needs to be – in pain (if you really want to get rich) and they need to know they’re in pain - and they need to have money. There is no point solving problems for poor people. Let’s do that when you want to change the world after you’ve fixed your own problems first – so fix the money thing first.

Psychology – let’s take an example. Let’s say we’ve got a cellulite product right now. Most beauty sa-lons offer you every single thing under the sun, and marketing to the masses as a giant piece of meat is a losing economic model. That’s why you see so much niching on the Internet – that’s why you see so much niching in business. It’s because the riches are in the niches.

So, if we took over that salon that sells everything, including hair removal, facials and everything else, and if we had a conversation with that salon and said, “Ok, where’s the money in your business?” And that salon owner said, “Well you know, it’s in cellulite”. So, I would niche that business into cel-lulite first – and here’s what I’d do. I’d make it a cellulite business that only fixed cellulite.

Now, as a specialist it’s so much easier to dominate your category, or industry. As a specialist it means your business solves the one problem every day, so you need less skills, less clutter in your business. And, on the other side of the coin, the psychology is that you only enter the conversation a woman was having with herself about her cellulite.

You can charge what you like in a niche, because it’s easier to dominate that category, or niche and affect the market place better.

Now, if I did cellulite under the banner of every-thing I do, you can’t charge 4,000 dollars for ten treatments. But if you only do cellulite you can charge so much more. So, the psychology becomes – we solve the problem for women with cellulite; who go to bed thinking about it and wake up wor-ried about it.

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“ There are five

emotions that get any body to do any thing -

and they’re love, greed, guilt, fear

and pride.

“

And then the mathematics of course, it becomes spectacular (because this is an actual example I’m sharing with you) and after you’ve bought that ma-chine, which costs about $85,000 you’re maths are, it costs $22 for a technician to do it to a woman for an hour – so that’s your cost – yet you can charge three to four thousand dollars for ten treatments. So there’s psychology and maths.

None of my trained clients will touch anything with-out ticking those big rocks – that is, you have a client, or a prospect in pain, and you can enter the conver-sation they’re having. Two, that the mathematics is spectacular. Now we might test cheaply, in terms of the mathematics. In other words we might try some-thing and the maths might not be perfect, but we have the knowledge that we can fix the mathematics – because rarely can you fix the psychology. If they’re not in pain you generally can’t fix it.

So, there is a formula for this and it’s eight times cost of goods. If you want to get rich, you want a minimum of eight times cost of goods. You can sort of make four times cost of goods work, but boy oh boy you start getting into the eights and your bank ac-counts going to explode. So there you go. That’s what it takes.

Greg: Just to add to that, I’ve found one thing is that you’ve got to have both, the psychology and the maths side. You can’t just have great psychology, or you can’t just have great maths – both parts really need to work together – because I’ve made that mis-take myself.

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Mal: Yes, that’s a very good point.

You can have a situation with great psychology but if your prof-it is poor, that means, you’ve got one part of it right and you’ll die slowly in business.

Conversely, you can have great maths – you make fantastic prof-its, but you don’t know how to sell. So you haven’t mastered psychology, which is marketing, and you’ll be dead in the water – you’ll never make a sale.

The balance is you need to master both. And understand, marketing is two things, and two things only – it’s maths and psychology.

One of the most important mar-keting formula’s you teach is Problem / Aggravate / Solve / Prove / Call to Action. Can you talk us through this briefly and when to use it?

Mal: Well, I use it everywhere. If I can’t have that conversation with the marketplace, I won’t do it - because that’s the psychol-ogy. So I won’t do it. It is very much a science. If you leave any part of the science out – it’s a bit like a recipe baking a cake – if you leave any bit out you get a mess.

The Internet is unforgiving - If you don’t master these secrets (well, they are secrets because very few people will know it) and if you don’t master emotional di-rect response (and this formula I’m going to share with you in just a moment), you’re going to fail dismally.

This is the formula online and it’s the formula offline. Now, like everything in life there’s lots of ways to skin the cat. I’m shar-ing the particular formula that’s worked brilliantly for me and it works in every single market-ing piece I write, including a TV commercial, a radio commercial, a blog, an email, a website, a sales letter – every single piece of marketing; a yellow pages ad – there is nowhere where I don’t use this formula and it will never let you down, provided you fol-low it truly and correctly.

Now, I’ve broken it down to a very simplistic formula.

So, first you’ve got to identify a problem. Now that problem is a problem that a group of people are having. So in my earlier ex-ample it would have been ladies with cellulite, probably between the ages of 20 and 45 years of age; might be your hypersensi-tive group.

In other words it might even be a bit younger than that, but 20 year olds have cellulite also – but as they get a bit older they prob-ably aren’t as concerned with their cellulite.

So, your sweet spot is probably somewhere between 25 and 35. So, that’s your market. The prob-lem they’re having is, they can’t go down to the beach and wear that bikini they’d like to wear; they use mood lighting with their husband, or partner because they don’t want their partner to see the cellulite.

So, the point being you don’t walk past the mirror, you don’t get changed in front of the mir-

ror, a whole bunch of things, you haven’t worn that little black dress for years. So there’s the problem and you go to bed aggra-vated by it, you wake up thinking about it.

Now, aggravation, so firstly you point out the problem. Do you suf-fer from ugly cellulite? Aggravate the problem. Well, you know, it’s not going to go away. You won’t be able to get in to that bikini, or that one piece; you will use mood lighting and heck, he might leave you for someone without cellulite. I mean, I’m making this up now – but there’s the aggrava-tion.

Solve! Here’s our equipment, here’s the machine, revolution-ary treatment from France seems to melt cellulite and fat away for almost any woman that uses it. So, that’s the solve side of things. So, first we have the problem, so we aggravate the problem, then we solve the problem.

The next one is proof, or proof that it works. So that’s testimo-nials, case studies, guarantees – all sorts of things that would go to prove. It might be your expert qualifications that will allow you to cure that problem. It may be the machine has been used by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of women to great suc-cess.

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Then you have some sort of call to action, and I’m often aggravated by this one, because this is where a lot of people fall to bits. I mean, again, watch TV, listen to the radio, read a print ad and there’s no reason to respond now, and no urgency, no scar-city. So, in other words, if you’re one of the first 20 women to respond in the next ten days we’ll give you a free report, it reveals the big mistakes women make when choosing cellulite treatments, and how to avoid them. So there I’ve created scar-city and urgency. And some form of offer, usually free in particular, because the marketplace the free line has been moved.

So there’s your working model. It’s problem. Aggra-vate the problem. Solve the problem. Prove that it works and then the call to action with urgency, and scarcity.

Mal, you have an amazing track record of suc-cessfully buying, building and selling businesses from an early age. I know you teach business owners to prepare for the sale from Day 1 – what do you mean by this?

Mal: The definition of the perfect business is one that works without you and makes you a ton of money. That is what it is about so one day you can sell it for a fortune and lie on a beach and relax.

81% percent of businesses in this country will be for sale in the next ten years – 75% percent of those

business owners have no idea about how they’re going to sell it, or have an exit strategy.

I do digress slightly, but the point I make, is if you want to build the perfect business, the way to do that is to start with the intention of selling it. Am I saying that you have to sell it? No I’m not.

Most people get into business with only one inten-tion, and that intention is to make money. 99.9% of business owners – that’s what they’re doing. That’s to make money this week, or this month and pay the bills.

We, of course start the business with other inten-tions. Our intention is to build a passive income as the second thing we do and the final thing we want to do is, we want to build the value of the asset. That is sell it for a fortune one day.

For any business owners in the Internet Market-ing Magazine community who are struggling on-line or in offline business – what advice would you have for them to set themselves apart for an amazing 2013 and beyond?

Mal: You want a simple answer to a complicated question. I will give you the simplest answer that I can – bearing in mind you need to consider all the factors I’ve pointed out previously.

And in no particular order, one of the most impor-tant things you have to figure out and fully under-stand and appreciate is the ‘who’, or the market you want to help. So, who’s in pain? Do they have money? Do you have a media to communicate with them, that’s affordable, predictable, reliable and profitable? Can you craft a message at the end of the conversation they’re having with themselves?

So, number one is ‘who’. So, find out who your ideal who is, that will give you money, and lots of it – if you solve a problem for them.

That’s one of the biggest problems I see with ev-erybody online and offline. It’s not what you’ve got to sell; it’s what they want that you then create. It’s in total reverse and of course it’s re-engineer-ing, and little or no business owners get it. They want to sell you what’s in their wagon.

“If you want to get rich, you want a minimum of eight times cost of goods”. - Mal Emery

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That’s one of the biggest problems I see with everybody online and offline. It’s not what you’ve got to sell; it’s what they want that you then create. It’s in total reverse and of course it’s re-engineering, and little or no business own-ers get it. They want to sell you what’s in their wagon.

In a world of clutter where the cost to get them has tripled and the results have halved today you need to have a mathemati-cal model that allows you to buy a client. So we buy a client every day of the week knowing what our lifetime value of a client is.

I’ve always been prepared to go negative to buy a client knowing my maths. I might do a free semi-nar or send out a free gift and pay for all of it, but I know what you mean to me over your lifetime.

So, in a world of clutter where it costs more than it ever did today you need to build bigger better baits. You need to go negative and you need to know very clearly who your who is. This is a very pre-cise science. You need to master all media. You need to master the marketing triangle – that’s mar-ket, that’s message and that’s me-dia, and be able to dominate all of those things, or you are going to struggle, and you need to be in constant reinvention. Just when you think you’ve made it some-one’s planning to steal your cli-ents. Your clients are testing your prices against your competitors, trying to pay less, and if you’re not constantly reinventing yourself to-day you’re in big, big trouble.

The other main one that I would add to that is to the focus on building your database of leads and clients and market to them over and over again.

How can our readers and listen-ers find out more about you on-line and also your Streetsmart Business School coaching envi-ronment?

Mal: We have several web entities worth checking out such as male-mery.com and the rebelliousrant.com. The http://www.ultimate-successkey.com.au/imm - it is the ultimate financial driver and key to success today, and when you see it, or read it, or listen to it you will understand that I’m not, like a 100 percent right, I’m a thousand percent right. There will be win-ners and there will be losers, and if you don’t master this ultimate success key, well you can never enjoy the sort of success that I’m speaking about today.

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TOP 35 SOCIALBOOKMARKING SITES LIST

> SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

By Angelos Papaioannidis

Social Bookmarking is a way to organize and share your book-marks on the Internet. Apart from being able to store your bookmarks categorized, helping you find what you search eas-ily, it’s a very effective way for webmasters to promote their website.

The two most important positive effects of using social bookmarking sites are the increased num-ber of direct visitors if the story you submit gets voted and appears on the front page and the link value that they give to the article. Submitting your articles to social bookmarking sites will help each post get “link-juice” and rank much better for its main keywords.

There are two types of Social Bookmarking sites: general bookmarking sites and niche book-marking sites. In general you can submit almost all your posts in whatever niche it belongs to, excluding of course adult oriented posts, gam-bling, etc. Niche social bookmarking sites have less traffic than the general ones but are much more focused, helping you spread your message in a much more efficient way. Getting on the front-page of a niche social bookmarking site of-ten can also help your branding tremendously.

Let’s start by mentioning the gener-al ones first and then go to the niche ones.

Delicious is the first social bookmarking website that went live on the Internet and remains one of the most important of its kind. If you want to use only one

site and you just need to organize your bookmarks, Delicious is the way to go. Its tagging system will help you organize everything according to the tags you specify and you can access it from any device

connected to the Internet. Delicious can bring a lot of traffic if a story submitted reaches the front-page but mostly that has to happen organically: you just submit your article to it and that’s it.

Digg is one of the first social bookmark-ing sites set up that still ranks in the top 5, whose popularity suffered a small de-crease after its redesign (which I’ve ac-tually found to be pretty great). Don’t

get me wrong though, getting on the front-page of Digg will bring you thousands of visitors to your post and hundreds of backlinks. It’s an asset for your promotional efforts. Stories that work very well for Digg are world news, technology, and hu-mor posts. If your website niche is close to one of the aforementioned, your chances are increased.

StumbleUpon is not only my favorite so-cial bookmarking site, but the guys who created it sold it to eBay and after two years of steady drop in traffic, they bought it back in order to resurrect it, and they

did! Now StumbleUpon is more powerful than ever.

StumbleUpon is heavily based on its toolbar that Firefox and Chrome fully support. After the regis-tration, the system asks you to enter your interests and hobbies and then starts to show you relevant sites to your interests when you press the Stumble button on your toolbar. By liking and disliking the pages you visit, you “train” StumbleUpon for it to serve you pages much closer to your taste, making it the perfect tool for missing your deadlines :P As you can imagine, it is an amazing tool for you to promote your own pages as well. You can discover a page in stumble upon, set its category and hope that the users who stumble upon it will like it too, creating a snowball effect, bringing even more traffic. Need-less to say that in my 7+ years in Internet Marketing, SU is by far the number one referrer to my sites.

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But beware: It’s not a tool to shamelessly promote your web properties. You must first be a user and then a promoter. Stum-ble doesn’t like it when the same account discovers pages from the same domain all the time and there’s really no way to fool it. If you like using stumble on your free time, you might do very well when submitting your own con-tent too, otherwise you’re out of luck!

Reddit is a love-hate relationship for me. If you’re looking for a site with the best community that will

sometimes help you, sometimes troll you, hey, that’s what Red-dit is for! The most powerful user driven site on the net.

For simple users it’s heaven but if you want to promote a story, there comes trouble. A ban can come as easy as adding a post in a sub-reddit. To see if you are banned, copy your username page url inside reddit, log out and then refresh it to see if it is visible. If not, you’re banned and there’s no point in submitting new pages.

Reddit has what it calls sub-reddits, something like a social bookmarking comminity inside a social bokmarking community. Each subreddit has its own rules that submitters and users have to follow, and it’s self maintained by the users. Every subreddit has the url structure of http://www.reddit.com/r/subredditname, and when you submit a story, you have to type that name where

you want your story to appear. People vote up or down a story and then you have a chance to make it popular on that sub-red-dit. If it becomes that popular and the subreddit is big, many people will start seeing it on the main page. And that’s where you’ll get amazing traffic!

So to make the long story short, Reddit is not somewhere you just go to submit your posts and leave: it’s a one way road, and that’s to actively participate in it, engage in conversation, help others and at the same time pro-mote your properties too.

Pinterest is the new social media craze. While being a new social media website, it already

has managed to become one of the most visited websites on the internet (Alexa Rank: 53). While the majority of the traffic comes from a female audience, lately and after the thousands of posts that spread on the Internet ev-eryday about it, its male audi-ence started to get an increase in numbers too. I don’t know if this climbing in traffic will continue, but if it does it’ll be something that I won’t be able to explain.

If you’re promoting products that heavily rely on images and design, then Pinterest is your heaven. You should create new content with amazing product shots and images and promote it on Pinterest.

While Facebook is not even close to a social

bookmarking site, it would not be fair not to include it in this list because it plays such an im-portant role, even in organic re-sults in Google. In Facebook you have two ways that you can pro-mote your articles: one is to sub-mit your articles in your per-sonal feed, and the other one is to create a fan page, and while promoting that to your friends and readers, distribute your ar-ticle links there. In the long run, creating a fan page is the best thing to do and what we do with our in-house projects is to always buy some Facebook ads in order to gather a good amount of links to the fan page, increasing the initial likes by a bit every time we post something on it. It’s not something you should ignore, no matter what type of site or store you have.

While Twitter as well, is not a social bookmark-ing site, it really has to be in this list too. We

both added Facebook and Twit-ter to this list because they are both part of your social book-marking efforts. When you sub-mit a post to social networks and social bookmarking sites, you hope for mentions, links and vis-its and both Facebook and Twit-ter can help you in that. In Twit-ter, you create an account and have a stream where you post interesting links that people who follow you can see.It’s great for any niche because when some-one follows you it’s sure they will love to see more from what you’re posting and that’s why you shouldn’t go off topic a lot.

13internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

Google+ again, is not a social bookmark-ing site but if you are serious about your website and especially if your niche is business oriented, Google Plus is the

place to be. And I’m not talking about just push-ing your links to your stream; that won’t do any-thing. You have to become active and network with other like-minded people and players in your niche. It’s actually the best social network-ing tool you can use to build your reputation. One tip goes a long way and that is to try to get into the most shared circles you can (relevant circles with your niche, ofc). There’s only one way to do that and that is to share amazing content with the network. The force is strong with this one.

LinkedIn is the most popular business social network. While Facebook has many more times the traffic that Linke-dIn does, with LinkedIn you can build

a brand and reputation while at the same time explore new job opportunities and partnerships. You can also use LinkedIn to promote your latest posts by sharing your posts’ links on your timeline and in groups you belong to and are relevant to that post’s theme. LinkedIn is one of the best re-ferring sources of traffic for this site and works amazingly well for all business types of blogs.

Bloggers is a social network for bloggers but it can also work very well for social bookmark-ing too, and without the need to manually submit your posts to it. All you have to do is to add your site to the bloggers platform

and add their banner to your site. Then, when you publish a new post, it will automatically get it and show it as your blog’s latest post and others will be able to vote for it. If it gets enough votes, it will be promoted to the site’s main page and get much bet-ter exposure. The key is to make friendships with other users so you will be able to mutually vote oth-er people’s posts that are worthy and at the same time get votes on the good posts you publish too.

While FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook for quite some time and its feed is displaying the links with a nofol-low attribute, it’s still a powerful website

to post your links to. It works like twitter most-ly and it’s very fast to submit a link; so why not

utilize FriendFeed to get one more link to a post you have created? I wish it was still being actively developed, but well, you can’t have everything, they still have the site up and running well. :)

Pinboard is very close to Delicious and gained a lot of traction when there were rumors that Delicious was about to close. It’s a paid website but giving close to $10

once is nothing when you’re in it for the long run. It’s a great and fast way to bookmark your links so if you haven’t already registered, do so now.

TiltZero is the brainchild of this team and just got released to the public. You might think, why the heck does the world need one more social bookmarking site?

And the answer is that if everyone thought of that, the Internet would have less than 1000 websites. Social Bookmarking is something we actively do and we thought that creating our own social book-marking community would benefit both us and all the users of the site. Being one of the first peo-ple that use a website has its benefits (having a powerful account when the site goes mainstream), so jump in the bandwagon with us and start sub-mitting your useful and inspiring posts with the rest of the world. It’s a general social bookmark-ing site that accepts links on many categories.

BlogEngage is a well established so-cial bookmarking website with good traffic and a well established commu-nity. It’s a general bookmarking site that prefers business and motivational

articles, but anything goes. It’s one of the sites that are worth your attention because its results can be quite good for your website. The key is to participate in the community and make friend-ships. Give it a try, you will most probably like it.

BlogInteract is the brainchild of Bry-an Hollis, and while it had some up-time problems in the past it has now become more stable than ever. Bry-an is heavily involved with it and

we’re expecting many great new features for it in the future. BlogInteract accepts all kinds of posts and if you haven’t already got an account there, give it a try, we’re sure you’ll love it.

14 internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

Chime is one of the new players in the Twitter competitor list and while main-taining good traffic levels, it hasn’t yet become a great threat for Twitter yet.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t promote your posts there. In fact it’s a very good site to ping with your posts and updates and the use of tags is very well thought.

Whenever you add a new “chime”, you should add the most important tags for that specific post and that will help other users find your post within their most preferred categories. It’s a great promotional tool to use.

Diigo works like Delicious and has quite some traffic: you should submit your ar-ticles to it but more than that, I can’t find

any other reasons than link value to be more in-volved.

Fark is the strangest of ‘em all! A social bookmarking site to submit funny, strange and amusing posts. If you have a site with funny images, it would be a great site to

submit your posts to. Or any other offbeat news to be honest!

ZooTool is a great social bookmarking website that also has an iPhone applica-tion. You can create folders and submit your articles in a folder, making their re-

trieval later on a breeze.

While Folkd seems to have a lot of traf-fic, it does not have a strong commu-nity. Just submit your links and you’re good to go. One day I’ll study this site

more but until that day comes, that’s what I would suggest.

NewsMeBack has decent traffic and from the quality of links seen on the front-page, should be moderated, so send your links to it without being afraid of being

blacklisted without reason from the search engines. Other than that, I can find many more reasons to be more involved in other social bookmarking net-works. It’s a great place to enter a link into but not a community site.

Tagza is a good place to bookmark your post but that’s it; no reason to stay lon-ger on the site since the community there is underdeveloped. That’s what you get

when you focus more on promotion and less on the community. And we’re not saying this to blame them, we’re just trying to repeat it so we never forget it. ;)

BizSugar is the most popular social bookmarking website for business articles. They’re

heavily promoting it using all kinds of online promo-tion but most importantly, banner retargeting. This gives BizSugar the traffic it needs to be the number one social bookmarking site for business blogs and sites. Getting on the frontpage of BizSugar will give you many benefits. While the traffic to your story is not that big (approximately around 200 visits), top stories are distributed via their newsletter; plus, the link value benefits are great. If you’re in the appropriate niche, BizSugar is one of the websites you should first submit your articles to.

Inbound is a brand new website, but being created by the CEOs of SEOmoz and HubSpot, we’re sure that it’ll soon be the most popular bookmarking site when it comes to sharing Internet Mar-

keting posts. It’s mostly for Internet marketers, but will gladly accept anything about blogging, startups and business too. And in the Internet mar-keting space, this is the front page you should be looking at every day for all your link building and Internet marketing news and updates. It’s a tool that shouldn’t be missed.

My SEO Community is a social bookmark-ing community dedicated to search engine optimization posts, but also fo-cuses on blogging and design too. It’s a great place to start your bookmarking

efforts because it’s a moderated community and if your social media profile is not that powerful, it’s a great place to submit your good content and you will have a good chance for inclusion to the main page. The moderating team is great and the articles accepted are 99% frontpage worthy.

15internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

MMO Social Network is focused in the general niche of making money online but also accepts articles about blog-ging and web design. It’s also moder-

ated so it’s a good place to start submitting your helpful articles if you think that they belong to what the site wants in terms of content category.

Blokube is a Social Media oriented so-cial bookmarking website that ac-cepts everything from SEO to Word-Press, design and technology articles.

It’s traffic is quite good and you should invest some time and connect with its members.

Serpd is all about Internet Marketing and Blogging. If your website is about some-thing related, Serpd is the place to be. While not having the best traffic on the

planet, Serpd has a very strong community, in fact one of the best, and believe me, that makes up for the lack of amazing traffic. One other thing that I haven’t seen on any other social bookmarking site is that when you try to submit a second link from the same domain it won’t let you, forcing you to submit something else first and then something from the same domain again. This forces spam-mers to leave the site without submissions from the same site again, and at the same time, Seprd wins because of new quality content that they wouldn’t otherwise have. When I need to submit something from my domain again, I just open my RSS feed, get something from my favorites that has provided me with something useful and submit it, waiting 2-3 hours before I submit the next one.

Tip’d is a social bookmarking site that is different from all the rest. It’s fo-cused on a sub-niche, sharing financial posts. While most of us would easily bet

that the site wouldn’t have a lot of traffic, Tip’d showed us that it can happen, having a lot of traf-fic, more than the most social bookmarking sites out there. If your niche is finance and economy related, not only this is a great opportunity for a good amount of visits to your blog but also a great source of information laser-targeted to your niche.

Hacker News is the number one source for programming, geeky, and startup material. Its community is very help-ful and will many times go to great lengths to help a person who has

a technical problem. Even some types of busi-ness articles go very well in hacker news because let’s not forget, programmers also need to pro-mote themselves, their startups and their proj-ects too. Personally I’ll check Hacker News at least once a day to see anything new interesting to read, most of the times spending more than 30 minutes reading great content found on the site.

DZone is an amazing website for any type of developer out there. You will find anything about tutorials, videos, cheat-sheets plus help from the commu-

nity. If you are a programmer, not only you should submit your posts there, but also participate in the community and often check out their hope page for programming gems that can help you in your work.

Design Float is the most popular design oriented social bookmark-ing website on the Internet. It’s a great place for Designers to get feed-

back on their creation and showcase their work or templates; plus it loves programming tools that will help designers make their life easier.

If you’re a freelancer and trying to find more ways to get new clients over the Internet, you should really start promoting your designs and create freebies for other designers and start distributing them through social bookmarking.

The Web Blend is a web designer com-munity that was recently re-designed and has went live for the public. It’s one of the best social bookmarking sites to

promote your articles and designs, plus it allows news about advertising, Apple and programming too. It’s by far the best designed social bookmark-ing site and that’s how it should be, because being a site for designers, it too should have an amaz-ing design! Kudos to the guys who redesigned it.

16 internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

Design Poke is a design oriented social bookmarking site, but also focuses on marketing, usability design, program-ming and WordPress too. It doesn’t have

that much traffic (compared to the two previous sites) but it’s a great place for you to submit your link to. After all, you never know how well it’ll do, plus, when you are promoting your articles, posts or designs, you should think that whoever does the most work will win in the end. (This is not a life lesson, nor an Internet marketing one: please don’t sue me for giving advice that didn’t work out for you.

DeziNews is another design oriented so-cial bookmarking site and a great place to find freebies for your own designs too! Traffic is close to DesignPoke but as we

said before, the links are permanent and you want the extra exposure. In addition, you never know

which social bookmarking site will be the dominant one in two years from now, so why miss the chance to have an account in great standing on the site?

This is not a complete list of the social bookmark-ing sites that exist on the internet. And it shouldn’t be! The rule “the more the better” doesn’t apply to social bookmarking too. Stay away from servic-es that will submit your website to 1000′s of social bookmarking sites, because most of them are not moderated and you really don’t want your links to be placed together with God knows what else. You WILL see an increase in your ranks, but that’s only temporary.

Angelos Papaioannidisis an Internet Marketing Consultant, Social Media Manager and Business Development Expert. You can find more about him at http://moneytized.com

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> BUSINESS SUCCESS

ART OF THE WARRIORWHY YOU SHOULD BE TURNING YOURCOMPETITORS TACTICS ON YOURSELF

Aside from the family home, your biggest asset is most likely to be your business. In fact, rather than relying on the old saying that a “man’s home is his castle”, I prefer to get my clients to think of their business as their most important ‘castle’ – it needs to have strong foundations, kept in good order, and most importantly, remain impenetrable. Your busi-ness protects both your lifestyle, your intellectual property and provides for the welfare of your staff and their families.

When Edward the First decided to tame the Welsh uprisings back in the 1200’s, he had his most trust-ed advisor – Master James – build him a string of castles along the southern Welsh coast. The most impressive of these being castle Conwy at Caer-narfonshire (don’t even bother trying to pronounce it).

Carved into a solid rock base, and with its 3 double gateways and 21 towers, the castle was built as an ‘if all else fails’ place to fall back upon should

the king ever need a handy place to hole up in. As it turns out, the place was impenetrable, and the only time it ever fell was when the Welsh caught the king’s army off guard when they were all out at a Mass in the local town nearby.

But history shows that the reason the place was so impenetrable, was that Master James was famous for constantly putting himself in his enemy’s shoes, by trying to think of ways he could compromise the castle’s defenses if he were on the outside trying to get in. If the water supply could be tampered with, he would have his men dig additional wells. If a gate looked like it could be compromised, he’d add a holding area in front of it (known as the ‘murder hole’) where archers could keep attackers bailed up under a rain of relentless fire, and if he thought some of the terrain looked easy to cross on the outside, well he’d just have his men dig a steep trench that made it impossible for any foot soldier to comfortably run across.

By Tony McAuslan

19internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

Now fast forward to your mod-ern day business. Whenever I have a client who is trying to get a major uplift in their share of a market, I like to suggest an ex-ercise that goes like this – “What would be the most disastrous thing a competitor could do to undermine your business?”

And I don’t just mean something as simple as cutting the current market price for a certain prod-uct or service by a small per-cent. I mean let’s think some-thing radical. I try to get them to imagine they’ve just logged into the latest edition of what-ever trade news site they sub-scribe to, and there in big bold headlines is the announcement that their major competitor has just done something so radical, dastardly and rat cunning, that their particular industry will never be the same again.

For instance, what would be the effect on your business if you’re trying to sell software as a ser-vice (SaaS) on an annual basis, and your major competitor an-nounced that they were going to give their software away to ev-eryone in your industry, for free for a whole year? It would make it pretty damned hard for your own salesmen trying to pitch for the same business, while waiv-ing around a price list and a con-tract.

It may be something quite radi-cal, or it may be something sim-ple and bleedingly obvious, like poaching one of your key staff. I once had a big client that had just spent over $50m acquiring a competitor, just so they could

get access to a very small, but important group of developers with unique skills. When I ar-rived on the scene, they had got themselves into a right tangle trying to merge all of the oth-er (redundant) staff and divi-sions into their own corporate culture, and there was a bit of a “DOH!” moment when I sug-gested to them that it might have been a whole lot easier to just offer the 4 key staff they wanted, a ‘sign on’ fee of $2.5m each. $10m verses $50m for the same result. Obviously, no one was on the outside of the castle, looking in.

What if a competitor suddenly partnered up with a major super-market chain or bank, thus giv-ing them unprecedented reach and distribution? How would you feel if you had to look at your competitor’s brochures every time you went shopping or did your banking? Or if they part-nered with a big finance compa-ny in a way that allowed them to

offer low interest terms? If your selling high-end capital equip-ment, a few percentage points can translate to thousands of dollars, which can look very at-tractive to some Purchasing Of-ficer under orders to cut costs.

In the luxury goods market- What would happen if your com-petitor suddenly partnered up with a premium product pro-vider – like QANTAS or American Express, and suddenly they had major reach via a massive email list, which then allowed them to offer their product directly to thousands of pre-qualified fre-quent fliers, while you’re still relying on Google Ad words?

It may be something simple as bundling some of your products, or it may be something radical that involves some product in-novation. Who would have ever thought 20 years ago that the mobile carriers would give you the phone – as long as you bought the air time from them?

Ideas such as these can prove to be ‘game changers’ for many industries, and if you’re think-ing “That would be great, but we’re not big enough to ever get through the door with someone like that” – think again.

If there’s one thing big business-es love more than getting new customers, it’s getting MORE business out of the customers they’ve already got. And more importantly, big businesses have big competitors – who are con-stantly looking for ways to tun-nel under their castle walls. So your product or service, if

20 internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

presented properly, could be just the ‘game changer’ they’re looking for also.

The great thing about many of of these partnership deals, is that there is rarely a lot of investment needed up front (i.e. they’ve got the client base, you’ve got the product), so they tend to be a win/win for everybody.

And even if your big idea does involve investment, there are plenty of venture capitalists and angel investors out there who would love the thought of investing in an idea that’s going to be a ‘game chang-er’ in a hot market.

So next time you’re sitting around on a Friday afternoon with some of your key staff, play the “What could our competitors do to ruin us?” game. You may be surprised at what they come up with. But having identified your greatest weakness – you need do it to your-self before your competitors do it to you. It’s nice to sleep at night, knowing the castle walls are secure.

Tony McAuslanis the epitome of a modern day ‘ E n t r e p r e n e u r ’ . After working for some of the world’s largest companies in Advertising and then Gaming, Tony launched his own start-up business in 2001. Starting from a base of only 3 staff, Tony raised over $25m in venture capital and grew his company to over 80 staff with offices in Sydney, Los Angeles and London. After exiting the company in 2005, Tony went on to work as a Business Development Manager for one of Europe’s largest private VC firms, where he helped raise over US$80m for a wide range of start-up ventures. He now splits his time between mentoring various start-up firms, and consulting for clients who are seeking venture capital funds. He is based in Sydney and can be contacted by email at tmcauslan@hotmail.com

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THE KEY PLAYERS OFMOBILE ADVERTISING

> MOBILE ADVERTISING

It is projected that we are rapidly approaching a time when billions of consumers will be connected with their mobile devices for up to 16 hours per day. We’re close as it stands now.

So where does that leave marketers? Instead of rushing out to tailor all ads to be fit for mobile, there has been a slow build in terms of adaptation on the marketing side, but with no clear reasoning. As a result, it’s hard to project exactly where mo-bile advertising will be in years to come.

Where We Are Today

As it stands now, the overview of the major players in the mobile advertising ecosystem looks some-thing like this*:

• Mobile ad networks: Mobile ad networks ag-gregate advertising inventory and match it with advertisers, much as online ad networks do. Networks build up ad inventory, analyze its po-tential, and sell it by matching it to advertisers’ needs. Where networks differentiate is in value-added services, such as aggregating buying power to strike better deals, or improve targeting. The largest ad networks have their own sales forces reaching out to advertisers, as well as their own

campaign optimization technology.

• Demand side platforms (DSPs): These func-tion similarly to ad networks, in the sense that they help match advertisers with inventory, but tend to work hand-in-glove with brands. DSPs are complementary to the ad network business because they more richly describe mobile audi-ences. But once DSPs start hiring their own staff to sell ad inventory, the complementarity could end, and DSPs would compete more head-on with ad networks.

• Mobile ad exchanges: Exchanges automate many parts of the mobile ad process, and can connect publishers with multiple ad networks. Ad exchanges are primarily supply-facing at the mo-ment, and have relatively few interactions with mobile ad agencies (even less so with brands). Agencies are disincentivized from using exchang-es because they threaten their lucrative role as the brands’ media buyers.

• Mobile Ad Agencies and Mobile Marketing: One of the gripes you often hear around the mobile ad industry is that agencies don’t get it. According to the U.K.’s Association of On-line Publishers, 55 percent of publishers blamed “agencies’ attitude” for low mobile ad revenues. That may be changing. Several people we talked to said agencies are doubling down on mobile, and competency is improving.

• Natives: Other companies are emerging that don’t neatly fit the established categories. They resemble ad networks in that they connect ad-vertisers with publishers’ inventory, but they ex-press disdain for the traditional mobile advertis-ing model. These companies are trying to find a native approach to mobile advertising that will break through consumers’ apparent disdain for mobile ads. We call them “the natives.”

By Mick Armstrong

23internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

Other current trends to keep in mind

As seen in the chart reflecting the % of Companies Building Sites For Mobile:

• More and more, companies are now design-ing their site for mobile. However, many are not even testing how their sites look on mobile de-vices. • According to Econsultancy’s Conversion Rate Optimization Report, the proportion of or-ganizations designing their websites specifically for mobile phones has increased from 25% to 35% since 2011.

As seen in the chart reflecting the % of Compa-nies Still Not Building Sites For Mobile:

• 61% of companies are still not designing their sites for mobile• 55% of companies who do design their sites for mobile, do not do usability testing specific to mobile phones or tablets.

Optimizing for mobile works; 62% of companies that designed a website specifically for mobile and 64% that designed a site for tablets had increased sales.

Sources: *Business Insider, “Here Are the Major Players in Mobile”; Business Insider, “BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: Mobile Marketing Stats You Should Know”

Mick Armstrongis from the Performance Marketing Specialists at GlobalRevGen.com

24 internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

There have probably been a thousand articles written detail-ing how to get more Facebook fans – half of them are sales-oriented trying to encourage you to ‘buy fans’, the other half are simple fluff pieces that don’t give you any real practical ad-vice. Only my article, and mine alone, will actually help you im-plement real, actionable strate-gies to boost your Facebook Page with relevant fans – not random people who don’t give a fig about what you have to say. OK to be fair there are quite a few other articles out there that probably do this too, but since you’re here you may as well read mine. En-joy.

1. Add a Facebook Like box + links to your contact and homepage.

Make sure you have a Facebook ‘like box’ on your homepage. I know it doesn’t always ‘fit in’ with everything else, but seri-ously this is what is going to drive people to your Page. The bigger and more prominent, the better, but Facebook gives you a number of options. For example, if you visit the Social Skinny homep-age, you’ll see I have a small version at the top of the page (but underneath the header). Facebook makes it super easy to get the code for your like box in HTML5, XFBML or iframe format by visiting https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/ and inputting your preferences for style.

Also make sure you add links to your Facebook Page on your con

tact page, so that people know that they can get in touch with you there (they will also like your page!).

2. Set up Facebook POS signageIf you have a store or some sort of physical presence, be sure that you have signage that encourages people to like your page – and be sure to include a reason. Special promotions, new products, up-dates, industry news… whatever it might be, tell them what they are going to get from liking you or else they might not bother.

3. Run a Facebook competitionThis has to be one of the most popular methods of getting more Facebook fans. Run a competi-tion that has a valuable (and rel-evant to your business) prize that you will give to people if they like your Page and go through some sort of entry mechanism (eg. a form). You do need to be aware of what is required for a Facebook competition and this includes the fact you must use an application. If you’re not that Facebook or tech-savvy, you can use a third-party service like Shortstack or you can speak to someone like me, who will come up with the strategy, put it to-gether, do all the graphics and implement on your Page for, say, a few hundred dollars.

10 QUICK & EASY WAYS TO GET MORE FACEBOOK FANS

> FACEBOOK

By Cara Pring

25internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

4. Implement a Facebook advertising campaignI know when you’re a small business implementing any sort of advertising campaign seems pretty daunting. We are taught to expect things to cost thousands of dollars when the word ‘advertising’ comes into play. The good news is that with Face-book advertising, you can spend any amount that you like. I have run a Facebook ad campaign for $50 that attracted over 50 new likes. I’ve also run a campaign for about $100 that attracted over 1,000 fans, which was pretty damn amazing… but it was in Turkey so that might have something to do with it. The point is, if you want to get your community started (and advertise your business at the same time), Facebook advertising might be a great way to go. The ability to target your desired market is unparalleled.

5. Send an EDM to your customer baseIf you have an email database, make sure you send out an email letting everyone know you have a Facebook Page, providing them with a reason (or incentive) to like your page, and obviously di-recting them there. Your customers should have a direct interest in your business, so they are the second people (after staff) that you should get on board.

6. Ask your staff, friends, family and your social networksAsk your employees, friends and family to like your page to help spread the word. When people like your page, their Facebook network can see this and are prompted by curiosity to see what the

Page is about – if they see it may be of value to them as well, they might like you too. Plus, your friends and family are likely to ‘like’ the content on your page too, which helps with your post rank-ing in others’ newsfeeds. While you’re at it, share your Page with your social networks (even outside Facebook) – they might be interested to like your Page too.

7. Include a link to your Facebook Page in all sta-tionery, business cards and your email signatureThis one is a no-brainer. Remind people at every chance you get that you have a Facebook Page, and make it easy for them to find it by providing the link. Don’t just have a ‘Find us on Facebook’ badge, but put the link in there so they don’t have to waste time searching for your Page on Face-book. It’s crucial to include a link in your email signature (though this can just be an icon as long as it’s hyperlinked), because you know people are already online when they are viewing it, so the chances they will click through to your Page are even higher.

8. Comment on other Pages’ posts as your PageThis one can be quite effective, but granted it’s not as simple as the others. If you’ve got a bit of time, you can ‘use Facebook as your Page’, like other similar or related Pages (or those who share a similar customer base) and interact with their posts. By doing this you’re getting exposure on their Facebook Page too, and others who are read-ing the post might be prompted to click through to your Page to see what it’s about.

9. Encourage check-ins (plus merge place/nor-mal page)If you have a physical presence, make sure you own your Place page, and that you merge this with your normal Page (or just use the Place page as your normal Page to begin with). That way you have a branded place for people to check-in to. They may also then like your Page from their mo-bile. Even if they don’t, the check-in is displayed to their friends (even on a nice map to show where you are located) which not only promotes brand awareness and effectively an endorse-ment for your brand, but also allows them to click through to view, and hopefully like, your Page.

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10. Create a Welcome PageIt’s one thing to get someone to your Facebook Page, but it’s another thing to convert them to a fan by getting them to click that ‘like’ button. You have to give them reason to want to receive updates from you, and the best way to do this is by creating a Facebook Welcome Page. The best tactic is to not just say LIKE US, but provide some form of detail about what they will get from liking your page. Will you be posting exclusive special of-fers? Letting them know of sales? Sharing important updates and/or info on new products? It doesn’t have to be rocket science (and in fact, it shouldn’t be too complicated), but make sure you’re giving them some indication of what you have to offer – even if it’s pretty pictures and/or a few words.

Implement these strategies and you will get more Facebook fans. Just be careful not to get too ob-sessed by ‘numbers’, but focus on getting those who have liked your Page engaged with your content.

> CHARITABLE GIVING

Building a School with World Teacher AidIn August 2012 Armand Morin and his wife Marianna had the unique opportunity go with World Teacher Aid to Rongai, Kenya in Africa to help build a school and a high school.

The trip was organised by Amy and Stu McLaren of World Teacher Aid.

This is the very powerful video they made.

Visit www.WorldTeacherAid.org for more Information on how to get involved.

www.WorldTeacherAid.org

Cara Pringhas enjoyed extensive experience in social media strategy and campaigns for businesses of all sizes - from small startups to multinational corporates like Qantas and Bupa. Her focus now is small to medium businesses who are looking to expand their social media activity and generate real return for their efforts and spend. She has her own social media blog at www.thesocialskinny.com, where this article originally appeared.

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ACTIVE AND PASSIVECONTENT MARKETING

> CONTENT MARKETING

According to the latest research from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 91% of B2B marketers have embraced content marketing. In fact, on average, B2B marketers are now allocating 1/3 of their budget for content marketing initia-tives.

Marketers are making a big bet that content mar-keting tactics will deliver the outcomes they need: brand awareness, customer acquisition, and lead generation. These are their top organizational goals:

Brand awareness is important, but hard to quantify. However, customer acquisition and lead generation can be quantitatively measured. And indeed, more and more organizations are now tying these met-rics directly to their content marketing initiatives. The top 5 measurement criteria for B2B content marketing success — with the customer acquisition and lead generation metrics emphasized — are:

• Web traffic (60%)• Sales lead quality (51%)• Social media sharing (45%)• Sales lead quantity (43%)• Direct sales (41%)

So how well are marketers doing at achieving their goals with content marketing? Unfortunately, not as well as they would like. Only 36% of B2B mar-keters believe they are effective at content mar-keting — down from 40% last year.

Part of the challenge is creating great content. But great content is only the starting point.

To harness that content for customer acquisition and lead generation, marketers have two other responsibilities: distribution and value capture. Much has been written about how to distribute con-tent with social, search, and paid campaigns. But ways of effectively capturing value with content marketing have received less attention. I’m only half-joking when I say that content marketing plans sometimes look like this:

1. Create amazing content.2. ???3. Get more leads and sales.

When you author terrific content and success-fully deliver it to the right audience, you have accomplished value creation. You have given your prospects and customers something of val-ue. Depending on how it’s presented — do the people consuming the content clearly associate your company with the value delivered? — this achieves the first goal of building brand aware-ness.

But in the crowded and noisy digital market-place, and in the busy lives of most prospects, that brand moment is fleeting. The question for marketers — and frankly, many prospects — is: what happens next?

By Scott Brinker

2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks - North America: CMI/ MarketingProfs

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Active vs. Passive Content Marketing

Answering the “what happens next?” question is the difference between passive content market-ing and active content marketing. With passive content marketing, the content is not attached to an explicit “next step” for the audience. If some-one consumes your content and likes it, it’s up to them to figure out what to do next.

Maybe they wander through your website (and hopefully they can connect the dots with the con-tent piece that intrigued them). Maybe they do a couple of related Google searches (and hopefully your competitors aren’t intercepting those key-words). Maybe they try to find a way to contact you (and hopefully the person handling the contact can provide continuity with the content that intrigued them). Or maybe they simply file that moment away — “thanks, that was interesting” — and move on.

Blog posts are often quintessential examples of passive content marketing. They can build brand awareness, and address goals further down the list such as thought leadership and generating website traffic. But presented in a passive fashion, they may not be effective at acquiring customers or generating leads.

Active content marketing, in contrast, builds cus-tomer acquisition and lead generation mechanisms directly into its presentation and delivery. These mechanisms may be simple email subscriptions or social network connections, or they may be more detailed lead forms or deeper-funnel calls-to-ac-tion. Whether they’re best implemented as re-quired gateways in front of the content or as op-tional next steps surrounding or embedded into the content depends on the content, the audience, and the context.

Many content tactics lend themselves to being framed in active content marketing:

• eNewsletters, both individual issues and on-going subscriptions• Case studies• Videos• In-person events• White papers• Webinars/Webcasts

• Research reports• Microsites• Branded content tools• eBooks• Virtual conferences

The Power of Framing Content

With passive content marketing, the only real content is usually the core content piece itself. With active content marketing, however, there’s often considerable content around that core piece — call it framing content.

A classic example of framing content is the use of a landing page to promote a lead-form-for-content-piece offer, such as a sign-up for a we-binar or a request for a white paper. (And when I say “landing page,” I really mean any kind of highly-targeted, context-specific web or mobile web experience; it doesn’t have to be a cliché landing page.)

All the content on the landing page — its head-line, body copy, imagery, bullets, call-to-action, etc. — is framing content. Framing content is an incredibly important ingredient in the overall content marketing equation. In cases where the respondent is being invited to take an action, ei-ther before or after accessing the core content piece, the framing content can have tremendous influence over the conversion rate for that ac-tion.

This is where the discipline of conversion optimi-zation intersects with content marketing. You can

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run A/B and multivariate tests to find which framing content is most effective in achieving your customer acquisition and lead generation goals. You’re able to hone the value capture compo-nent of your content marketing.

But framing content is also valu-able for the respondent, as it helps explain the relevance of the core content piece to the context from which they arrived.Using framing content for rele-vance is especially helpful when

you distribute the same content piece — say, an expensive report that you sponsored — in multiple campaigns or to multiple audi-ence segments. It’s advantageous for you to reuse that report in as many contexts as possible, but the most intriguing aspects of it may differ for your differ-ent audiences. By using separate framing content — e.g., separate landing pages — for the presen-tation of the core content piece, you can make clear and compel-ling cases that perfectly match each context.

By using framing content to ex-pand the reach of core content pieces, making them more rel-evant in more contexts, you can increase the ROI on the invest-ment you made to produce those core content pieces in the first place. This enables you to invest

more in the quality of individual pieces, rather than just continu-ally increasing the quantity of new pieces. And the quality of the core piece is, at the end of the day, the heart of all great content marketing.

You’re probably already engaged in both passive and active con-tent marketing already, maybe without distinguishing them this concretely. My hope is that by un-derstanding the unique aspects of active content marketing, you’ll be able to systematically increase the efficacy of that set of content marketing tactics.

Scott Brinkeris the co-founder, president and CTO of ion interactive, a provider of post-click marketing and conversion optimization software.

Need More Traffic? Need More Leads? Need to Reduce Your Adwords Cost Per Click& Cost Per Lead?

CLICK HEREto touch base with Greg Cassar and the team at

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Adwords Consulting with a real focus on ROI

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> ADVERTISEMENT

30 internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

Last month Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba shocked the web with news that its subsidiaries Taobao (like a Chinese eBay) and T-mall (like Ama-zon) sold a massive $3.06 billion in product in a single 24-hour period.

Three billion dollars is almost triple the entire 2011 Black Friday sales of e-commerce sites in the United States, and this is a testament to both the growing maturity of the Chinese online market and the central position Alibaba holds in China.

So how do you do $3 billion in sales in a single day? I interviewed an Alibaba spokesperson, who pre-ferred to remain unnamed, to find out.

Almost as many users as TwitterFirst of all, it helps to have users — lots of them.The two sites, Taobao.com and Tmall.com, share a combined user base of half a billion registered users. That’s only about 30 percent of the total Chinese population, which means that Alibaba has a long runway for continued growth as the Chinese middle class continues to grow — and suggesting that a $10 billion day is not out of the realm of possibility in years to come. (It also means, by the way, that it might be crazy for Yahoo to sell its stake in Alibaba now. Yahoo still owns 23 percent of the Chinese e-commerce giant after pocketing $7.6 billion U.S from sell-ing almost half its original stake. Down the road, however, it might be like owning a 23 percent of Google, or Facebook … times 10.)

Both Taobao.com and Tmall process payments via Alipay, Alibaba’s payments processor. Alipay has over 700 million user accounts, presumably all

with credit card payment information, as of mid-2012.

A cultural sea changeWhen you’re looking to scale quickly, it helps to be a high-growth company in a high-growth industry in a high-growth country.

But while a huge number of users is necessary, it’s insufficient to generate such massive cash flow. Just as important is a change in Chinese consumer behavior toward e-commerce “increasingly be-coming a primary shopping channel,” according to Alibaba. The entire industry has had double-digit growth year-over-year — since 2010 e-commerce in China has enjoyed an average 10 percent quar-ter to quarter growth rate — and Alibaba is outpac-ing the industry.

In addition to a general acceptance of e-commerce as perhaps the first option for shopping, Chinese consumers have been increasingly prone to spend big on “double sticks day,” 11/11. Also referred to as “singles’ day,” Nov. 11 has taken on a rough

HOW A CHINESE E-COMMERCECOMPANY RACKED UP $3 BILLIONIN SALES IN JUST ONE DAY

> ECOMMERCE

By John Koetsier

Some of the goods for sale on Taobao.

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similarity to our Valentine’s Day. Singles try hard to not be single, couples celebrate that they are couples, and probably many more people are simply happy to dog-pile any opportunity to shop big and save big, much like Black Fri-day in the U.S.

Stores galoreUsers and demand are great, but you need supply. That is not a problem for Alibaba, as the repre-sentative said that Tmall hosts e-commerce operations for 50,000 companies, while Taobao manag-es online sales and payments and “several million,” most of whom are likely individuals buying and selling much as we see on eBay here.

Of those stores, 10,000 took part in the 11/11 festivities with spe-cial sales and promotions. That’s five times the number that partic-ipated just last year, which gave Chinese shoppers “access to an even wider range of products.”

Promotion helped too, Alibaba says:

“We also offered new functions, activities and games via the event landing page beginning mid-Octo-ber and noticed that many online shoppers were visiting the site and browsing through participat-ing stores and available products as well as adding products to their shopping carts.”

Let’s get technicalWhile I generally like to ask com-panies for technical details about their server setup, Alibaba was anxious not to share too much information that might be con-strued as proprietary, saying only that Alibaba Cloud Computing manages all Taobao and Tmall’s infrastructure from three data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou and California.

It also preferred not to disclose what kind of servers it runs, in-cluding operating system and webserver details, but a quick search reveals that Alibaba uses Tengine for webserving, which is a 100 percent compatible fork from the increasingly popular Nginx server, and that Alibaba runs, as expected, on Linux.

Mobile buyers figured prominent-ly in Alibaba’s monster day, with one in four Taobao users access-ing the site from a smartphone or a tablet. That compares to one in six last year.

Summing upA $3 billion day doesn’t happen all the time, even in the world’s most populous country. And it’s a huge proportion of Alibaba’s an-nual goal for Taobao and Tmall, which was one trillion RMB in 2012. That’s closing in on $15 bil-lion U.S., which is serious money.

Given Alibaba’s trajectory and China’s growth, it would seem that a $4 billion or $5 billion day would not be out of the question in 2013.

This article originally appeared on VentureBeat.

Photo Credits: dcmaster via phot-opin cc, Autorun! via photopin cc

John Koetsierrun websites with millions of monthly visitors, built mobile apps with hundreds of thousands of downloads, created online learning communities with over half a million registered users, and eaten a 24-oz peppercorn steak in one glorious sitting.He has led product management, spoken internationally at conferences all over the world, blogged for over a decade, and built his own CMS. He lives in Vancouver, Canada, plays ice hockey, and subscribes to the VentureBeat statement of ethics.

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> SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS

SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS IN 2013: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

If you’re like most marketers, you’ve been using social networks to push out your latest messages – promotions, sales, thought capital, etc. – and may-be have occasional interactions with customer and prospects. You’ve probably also been working hard to increase your followers and likes. And as more social networks such as Google+ and Pinterest have emerged, you’ve likely established a presence on these sites and begun pushing out your content on these platforms too.

These are all good and necessary first steps for so-cial marketing. But ah, there’s so much more. In

2013, consider looking beyond social as a stand-alone channel and beginning to consider how social can be integrated into ALL your channels. For start-ers, just put yourself in your customers’ shoes:

• They’re more social and mobile than ever• They view their experience with your com-pany holistically

Now imagine they see a Tweet from a friend about your cool offer and click through, only to arrive at your page and find a bunch of corporate-speak and a 15-field form. Talk about bringing your relation-ship momentum to a screeching halt.

By Bryan Brown

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Today, an “antisocial” feel on ANY of your channels can hinder your marketing efforts, so it’s smart to evaluate the social component of each one. To get you started, here’s a look at four key channels so-cial is impacting today, along with some quick start-er ideas for how you might approach them to enable a more relevant customer experience:

1) Search: In the constantly evolving world of search, it now takes more than a few strategi-cally placed keywords and inbound links to move you up in the rankings. As social has exploded, search engine algorithms have shifted to place more weight on social media. The number of peo-ple who retweet your content or the traffic driven to your blog post via social, for example, helps determine where you rank. Similarly, video is popping up more in search results. The takeaway? Your content (see #3 below) must be conducive to social sharing for you to thrive in search.

2) Website: Many sites have been loosely con-nected with social in the past – a social “follow” icon here, a “share this” graphic there. In 2013, try bringing social data into your website to build trust. For example, you might include info such as number of downloads, user ratings and customer comments beside your content or products. True, you lose some control of the message, but by sharing the opinions of other buyers you’ll en-hance the visitor experience and ultimately build trust in your brand.

3) Content: Think about what drives social shar-ing of your content. It’s likely that one of the biggest factors is how uniquely relevant it is to each of your customers and prospects. So, make it a point to brainstorm new ways you can drive personalization – perhaps by adding more behav-ioral marketing elements into your campaigns – and connect your content with social conversa-tions. If you’re not already doing so, take a look at embedding content with social sharing options and consider building campaigns around sharing in 2013.

4) Apps: Does your company have a mobile app to help increase engagement with the growing num-ber of smartphone and tablet users? Smart move. Once you’ve got your app, though, it’s time to

think about the biggest factors in whether a cus-tomer downloads it. In most cases, the number of people who downloaded an app and how they rated it are the most critical drivers of future downloads. So, think about how you as a mar-keter can best respond to what people are saying and how they’re engaging with your app. Perhaps an app email welcome program that educates us-ers on how to get the most out of your app might increase customer satisfaction and boost ratings.

So, what new social strategies do you think are crit-ical to success in 2013?

Bryan BrownAs the director of product strategy, Bryan Brown is responsible for defining the broad strategic vision of Silverpop’s family of products and helping marketers grow revenue. He is a sought-after marketing thought leader, having helped hundreds of businesses adapt and thrive in the ever-changing digital age of marketing.

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Make Your Website Easy to Read& Effective on all Mobile Phones

37internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

> PANDA & PENGUIN UPDATES

By Robin Gupta

GUIDE TO BUILDING QUALITYLINKS TO WITHSTAND GOOGLE’S

PANDA & PENGUIN UPDATESGoogle has become more strin-gent on the web owners about ranking the websites. It has come up with various updates on im-proving the quality. The major effective updates are panda and penguin.

While Panda puts more emphasis on the quality of content, Pen-guin has given an alert to the web owners who used a lot of links to get traffic on their sites and the low quality links are considered as spam. Due to this, various web-site owners had to face difficulties because their website started to rank lower in the search engines and some of them even got their website banned permanently.

After the updates, there has been a debate on what website owner can do to improve the rankings on the search engines. Link building has contributed greatly to market the products and services in the web world. It plays an important role in search engine optimiza-tion.

However, after the Google’s up-date, it has become more chal-lenging for link building team to meet the requirements. Here, we will discuss a few effective tech-niques of link building which candefinitely help web masters to im-

prove the rankings on the search engines:

Get quality links from Press Re-lease

Mainly, there are two ways to get the links from Press Release. You can either create your own press release to do the link building or you can get your links placed on someone else’s press release. Creating your own press release is a more effective way. The quality of the content is the most impor-tant factor after Google has re-leased its update. You must write a quality Press Release which can grab the attention of the readers and offer valuable information. You can enhance your writing

skills to write a quality Press Re-lease or hire a skilled writer who can do this job for you in an orga-nized manner.

Below mentioned are some of the techniques to create an im-pressive Press Release:

• Attention-grabbing head-lineWe all are aware of the fact that headline makes an impact on the readers. We only read the information which we get attracted to. For an instance, a newspaper has various news but we only tend to read the entire news which has an atten-tion grabbing headline.

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In the same manner, the headline of the Press re-lease must be very catchy and holds the meaning of the entire content. It has also been noticed that some headlines are very attractive but they are not relevant to what has been written in the PR. This leaves the readers very disappointed.

• Share unique ideasIf you want that people must read your press release, you must give the unique ideas in your write-up. You must ask your content writer to use his skills to put together a content which is not just the copy of the information already available on the internet. It is recommended to research a lot before actually writing a press re-lease.

• Address Reader’s ProblemsOne of the best ways to engage the readers is to offer solutions to their problems. This way, they will find that they have utilized the time in a better way and would visit the link presented in the Press release. You have to assure them their problems are real and they have solutions too.

Placing Links in a press release

You must follow the below mentioned trend in placing the links in a press release:

• It is strongly recommended not to use too many links as it will look promotional. These days, Google has started penalizing the websites containing a lot of links. The website either ranks lower or is completely banned.

• Link all your links in a strategic manner so that they should not appear forced. You must not start linking the content and the web pages from the beginning. You can use an effective strategy to get better results.

• Use different URLs for linking press release to the website. It is important to understand which the home page is and which one is the landing page. You must not direct your visitors to the same page only. You can link some of them to the home page and some to the other pages such as landing or inner pages.

• You must place keywords within the content

to make effective links. You should not use an-chor text such as “read more” and link it to the home page. The relevant anchor text placement will increase the traffic more.

Know the Importance of image links

The readers get more impressed by the images of the product & services. Getting links from these images would be the better option. It has been ob-served that people overlook the technique of link-ing images to the site. However, they should know that it can bring more traffic because people would view the pictures and eventually visit your site.

Below mentioned are some of the best practices of image link building:

• High quality imagesYou must get the images on the website which is more professional looking. Apart from that, you are needed to know that the pictures must be of high-resolution because blurry images will not be viewed by the visitors anyway. It the images are good, a good link building can be implement-ed. You can even hire graphic designers who can work on the high quality images and put on your website.

• Add images more oftenIt is strongly recommended to add the images to the website more frequently. This is because people love to view fresh content and the pic-ture. This is the best way you can grab the at-tention of the visitors. You can even schedule the updation on the image such as weekly basis.

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• Compression of imagesThe speed of the page can be suppressed by large images. This is the reason why it is im-portant to compress the images. The huge library of the images can really slow down the speed of the site. You must optimize your images. There are a lot of tools available which you can use to perform the compression of the images. The platforms like WordPress offer free and paid plugins to do this work ef-ficiently.

The images can make a great dif-ference in the rankings of the website and you can use them to get enormous visitors. The visuals make more impact on the users than the text and getting traf-fic with images is easier than any other way.

The power of social media links

These days, everyone loves to get associated with the social net-working websites such as Face-book, Twitter and Myspace. Get-ting links from these platforms would be a great idea because you will get quality links along with millions of visitors. Social signals have occupied a special place in the search engine optimization technique because it can fetch you the visitors which you might not be able to achieve otherwise. You must follow the below men-tioned tips to get the quality links from the social media plat-forms:

• Use relevant platformsIt is suggested to create an ac-count on those platforms which offer the same business

purpose and ideas such as Triberr. Whatever you publish on such platform will automatically be shared among others. In the web world, you will find the like-minded people very on these sites easily and make the maximum use.

• Make the most of social sharing buttonsOne of the best ways to share your content with others is to use the social sharing buttons. To make it more effective, you can make them available at the end of the post because people would read the information and act positively if it is impressive enough. They will even recommend others to view your information and buy the products and services offered by you.

• Encourage others to shareYou must encourage others to share your content or like your post. This will build your online reputation and you will not have to do much to bring a lot of visitors to your website. It is suggested to send them emails to share your content with others. You might not be sure if they will do it for you but you must put in efforts to do it. In the social networking site like Facebook, you can invite others to join groups and participate in the events. This will bring you tremendous traffic.

• High quality contentIn the web world, you have to be true and offer the content which contains the quality. The videos, images and information must be up to the mark; else, you will not be able to get the desired results. Some of the content which makes an impact on the read-ers include info graphics, blog posts and interviews. Getting links from high quality content is one of the ways to comply with the Google’s latest guidelines. Your website will improve the rankings in the major search engines.

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The Anchor Text

Many a times, SEO specialists ignore the importance of anchor text in the link building. This may result in the serious consequences. It has been noticed that appropriate anchor text can direct the visitors to your website very easily. Most of the web owners do not pay attention to the anchor text and they just place the links and make the wrong choice of anchor text. Below mentioned are some of the tips which you can use to diversify the anchor texts:

• Make the links on your brand nameIf you want to highlight your products & services and the brand, one of the best ways is to get the anchor text of your brand name and create a link to your official website. This is the most effec-tive way to get the potential customers for your business. For an instance, any product from Ap-ple can include iPhone, iPad and Apple as anchor text to visit the web pages of the Apple website.

• Exact match the keywordYou must match the keyword with the anchor text. This way, you can optimize the blog or ar-ticle in a better manner and create links using the diversified anchor text.

• Match the keyword partiallyGoogle has started penalizing the websites for over optimization. In order to avoid it, you can match the keyword partially with the anchor text and get the visitors as well as better rankings on the search engines.

• Non-Descriptive linksYou can include the anchor text such as ‘Read more and Click here to get more traffic on the site. These links have zero keyword value and would be quite beneficial if the content is of high quality. It has been noticed that website own-ers place these anchor texts in the wrong places. You must not use them in the beginning unless it is required. This will allow the users to read the information till the end and they will be able to get familiar with the services of other details offered by you. On the other hand, if you place these links in the beginning, the readers would leave the current page and jump to another.

• The links same as the page titleIn order to be more specific, you must use some of the keywords as the page title. It will make the readers clear on what they are going to view in the next clicks. This is also one of the user-friendly way to bring interact with your custom-ers.

Conclusion

We must agree on the fact that the link building is a great way to become popular in the web world. However, it is equally important to adhere to the guidelines of the search engines which would even-tually rank the site. If we do not improve on quality and do an effective link building, we cannot expect search engines like Google to help us promote the business and brand. Above mentioned techniques are really helpful for web masters who are consid-erate about bringing their website back on the top positions on the search engines.

Robin Guptais an SEO expert authority who also has strong knowledge of online business. He writes experts blogs on online business and SEO. Robin runs an SEO Agency at www.robingupta.co

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> ADVERTISEMENT

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TOP 7 WEBSITESELLER MISTAKES

> WEBSITES

By Danny Batelic

I’ve been buying and selling web-sites for a few years now and I continually see sellers on Flippa make the same mistakes, so I thought I would share my top seven with you.

Mistake 1: Poor Record KeepingLet’s start at the top, as this is the number one offender when it comes to selling.

Buying and selling is a numbers game and “potential” really means nothing. It’s all about the proof.

There is no excuse for poor re-cord-keeping.

When you sell your website, the onus is on you to tell an authen-tic story and backup any claims you make with proof. If a seller can’t prove any claims, then as far as I’m concerned, the claim never happen. If I can’t get the information I need, I’ll just walk away. There is so much oppor-tunity online that I’m not going to waste time on something that triggers alarm bells.

When I buy a website, I like to see at least six months worth of traffic stats. The simplest way to keep traffic records, is to install Google analytics. This should be installed as soon as you either build a site or take ownership of

any you have purchased. There is no excuse for not having analyt-ics installed.

Then there is proof of income. You’d be amazed at how many sellers can’t substantiate income claims they make.

If your site has been making money through AdSense, affiliate commission, or from your own product, most sales will come via PayPal and you should be able to show buyers the PayPal history. If there have been sale spikes through promotions you’ve run, explain that to buyers, don’t wait for people to point it out to you in the comments section. Being transparent helps remove suspicion, which can hurt your auction, particularly if you have a string of comments pointing out any irregularities.

Mistake 2: Not Knowing What Your Site is WorthA lot of sellers simply undervalue their sites and consequently so many sites are undersold.

Flippa is a relatively new mar-ketplace and as a seller, it’s your job to understand how to value websites and then convey that value to potential buyers. The best place to learn valuation is on Flippa itself. Study the “just sold” section and develop a feel

for what people are paying, but more importantly look for pat-terns. I learnt this from bricks and mortar real estate, where any new investors are encour-aged to study at least 100 auc-tions before they even think of buying property.

The more you understand why sites sell for the prices they do, the easier it will be for you to educate buyers as to why they should pay the price you are ask-ing.

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Mistake 3: Weak Sales CopyThis is where you get to tell the story. You want buyers to feel comfortable, knowing that they are buying the real thing. The number one fear buyers have is being ripped off and it’s your job to remove those fears.

You need to talk about the site’s history. How did it start? Did you build it from scratch, or did you buy it as an established site? Ex-plain what you have done to the site and what will be required by the new owner to maintain it.

You need to discuss all features and benefits. Explain the traffic. Is it organic, or is it mainly paid traffic? A lot of sellers will try and hide the fact that they pay for traffic, but if a site is mak-ing more money than it spends in traffic, then that’s a good thing. If I can make $2 for every $1 I spend, I will buy traffic all day long and as much of it as I can.

Explain the monetisation. Show how the site makes money and how the new owner can continue to make money. This is where you need to show proof of any claims you’re making. Proof always trumps potential. Even if your site makes $20 a month from Ad-Sense. As long as you can back it up with proof, your site will be more authentic than one that claims $4000 a month income po-tential, with no proof.

The sales letter is where you get to avoid all those after sale has-sle. You need to clearly outline what happens once the sale is complete. Be explicit with what you are prepared to do from your end as part of the transfer pro-cess. I’ve seen so many disputes

arise here because buyers ex-pected certain things that never happened. The sales letter is the perfect place to explain the whole after sales process.

Another example of why it pays to study a number of auctions be-fore you start to sell, is that you can answer any potential ques-tions buyers might have, in the sales letter itself. Covering po-tential questions helps having to answer question after question in the comments section, which can be time-consuming.

The headline is a great opportuni-ty for you to grab people’s atten-tion and so many people get this wrong. Again, a great tip here, is to study the just sold section and take note of headlines that grab your attention. Avoid head-lines that just sound too good to be true.

Mistake 4: Mismanaging the Whole Auction Process

So many auctions just don’t run for long enough. I know, at times sellers are very motivated and after a quick sell. I think 5 to 7 days is the ideal listing for most sites. You need to consider peo-ple’s online habits. We all access the Internet at different times. Some people are only online dur-ing work hours, others at night

and some only spend time online on the weekends. You want to cast your net as wide as possible, so I recommend including at least one weekend in your listing cy-cle.

A common mistake is not replying to comments regularly and effi-ciently. Once a day is okay at the start of an auction and as things heat up towards the end you need to answer any comments as soon as you can. Answer all ques-tions honestly and if you don’t have information, just let people know that you will endeavor to find out and get back to them. This is where you see so many people caught out trying to cover for mistakes or misinformation. High end sites can run longer, as they have more traction.

A great tactic towards the end of an auction is to post a comment or two of your own, just to alert any watches or last-minute bid-ders that the auction is about to end.

A huge mistake I see in the auc-tion process, is when sellers lose their nerve. This is where mis-takes are made and money left on the table.

The auction process isn’t linear. Things start with a little frenzy in the beginning and then there is always a dip in the middle, with things really heating up towards the end. A lot of sellers get to that dip and panic. This is where reserves are dropped, low BIN prices are put in place and low-ball offers are accepted.

I’ve spoken to so many sellers who have dropped their prices, only to learn that there were

44 internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

buyers waiting to enter towards the end of the auction and were willing to pay top dollar.

“PAY ME THE RESERVE!”

Do this and you lose. You would never go to a house auction and have the seller come out and re-veal to everyone their reserve price. It just does not happen. It shouldn’t happen on Flippa ei-ther. You will be asked this ques-tion and the best answer you can give, is that revealing the reserve defeats the purpose of having one in the first place. Re-member how I wrote about emo-tion earlier? This is the chance to use it to your advantage. People buy on emotion. That’s why the auction process is so successful. No one likes to miss out, so it can become more about winning the auction, rather than buying a website.

Mistake 5: Confused By All Those UpgradesWith all the listing options avail-able to sellers, things can get a little confusing

Upgrades can get a little expen-sive on lower end sites, but using just one or two can really help drive traffic to your listing. Most sellers ignore upgrades as sim-ply a waste of money. No matter what price I’m selling at, I per-sonally always use the highlight option when I first list. It’s a simple way to stand out from the crowd. On mid to high end sites, the rest of the upgrades do help, but it is a matter of using them strategically. It does require a little experimenting on your part to find what works best for you. I find using the featured listing upgrade towards the end of an

auction really helps attract last-minute bidders.

Mistake 6: Not Using VideoThe option to attach a video to your listing is a fantastic selling strategy that hardly anyone em-ploys. With so many free video tools available, it only takes a few minutes to screen capture a walk-through of your website and even your traffic and revenue ac-counts, which is a great way to show proof. A video walk-through is like a guided tour of your web-site and I have had fantastic suc-cess using video.

Mistake 7: No After Sales Sup-portI touched on this earlier, but this is where any disputes will arise and headaches occur This is a trap the new sellers. If you have been very specific in your sales letter as to what happens post sale and deliver on what you have promised, you will avoid al-most all problems. For a lot of buyers, this is probably the first site they will ever own and it can be daunting to manage a website the first time.

It’s important to contact the buyer as soon as the auction has finished letting them know what the next step is and what you ex-pect from them in order to move forward smoothly. I personally never start any transfers until the money has cleared and once I’ve been paid. If this is your approach, remember that it is mentioned in your sales copy to ensure buyers are aware of your expectations – having consistent-ly positive feedback will make this less of an issue. Once the funds are cleared, I work as fast as possible to transfer everything

and finish the process. I’ve heard so many stories of things falling apart at this point, because of poor communication and sellers not working with the buyer to fi-nalize everything.

If a buyer is happy with dealing with you, there’s a great chance that they will buy again. As part of the whole follow-up process, it’s important to ask the buyer’s permission to add them to your email list and then follow up with any future listings you have. Once everything is finalized, touch base with the buyer after a few weeks, and then a few months. Find out how they’re doing with the new site and if they’re ready for another. You’d be surprised at how many buyers become repeat customers.

Andrew Knibbehas held Marketing and Operations Management roles at the Flippa.com website marketplace over a tenure that has seen over $50 million in websites change hands. Andrew authored the popular Flippa Pro Guide to Buying Websites as well as the Guide to Selling Websites on Flippa.Andrew will be speaking at Affiliate Summit West in January 2013.

Danny Batelichas a background in music and spent way too much time writing and programming computer music, never even considering that those computer skills would come in handy when it came time to buy, build and sell websites.Danny has spent the last five years, doing just that, renovating and selling web businesses online and teaches others how to do the same on his Trading Websites blog.

45internet marketing magazinedecember 2012 - january 2013

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