Steve Mills – Online Marketing

Like many entrepreneurs, I knew from an early age that I wanted to work for myself. I saw my Dad start to build his business up from scratch during my early teenage years, and this was a big inspiration to me. He was stuck in a 9-5 that he didn’t really enjoy, and kept him away from the house for long hours during the week. I had a number of small money making ventures through high school (as well as heaps of holiday jobs, which is another blog post unto itself), but I remember deciding in my first year of University that I was going to own and run my own company one day. I made the decision one day after much thought to start a couple of businesses once (call me crazy) to test the waters and see where the demand was.

Back in 1997 I was working for the local pizza shop, the late nights driving around pizza for minimum wage, using my own money for petrol was looking less and less attractive as the weeks wore on. That, and also the fact that my car, clothes and even myself started smelling like burnt mozzarella and tomato paste. It was time to make a change, so that’s what I did.

The two businesses that I started were IT Support / Tutoring, and then in addition a Web Design business. I had the skills and expertise for both, and was moderately good with people so the customer service aspect came naturally to me. In fact to this day, I would recommend that young people in or just out of high school with moderately good computer skills give one of those business models a go just to wet their ears in the business game. Do it while the stakes are low and you can afford to fail. Failure in business should not be seen as a sign of weakness, but of a valuable lesson learnt.

Both of these business models have incredibly low outlay, but also a low barrier to entry which makes them a great training ground to get the fundamentals down. It is however a hard long term proposition to build a significant business around these models without radically ups calling the business or knowing about outsourcing. For my 18- 19 year old brain, it took a while to get my head around those concepts, and the marketplace soon caught up with big players moving into town.

The two businesses started off quite successfully, due more to incredible market demand at that time, and I worked really hard to get the first clients through the door. I started up volunteering for a couple of local community websites, made friends with a few local traders and business groups and spoke at their meetings. I also placed fliers up on some local message boards at the supermarket and in shop windows. Business started to do well, although i was massively undercharging for my time.

As time went on, I faced all of the challenges that a solo entrepreneur in a new field will come across. Offline business that are time dependent and not set up correctly from the outset are hard to grow, and hard to acquire new customers once you get to a certain level of being ‘flat out’ busy. I was young, and because I was not really charging a huge amount for my services it was hard to employ others and still maintain any level of profitability. I was also getting tied up in client management, non paying clients and very long sales cycles which put pressures on cash flow. Juggling all of this with full time University studies taught me some great time management skills, but also the importance of knowing when to concentrate your resources on the most effective course of action. Something had to give…

The Service / Tutoring business was the first to go, as being onsite with clients was less cost effective than doing web design and development from my home. Once that work was gone, I concentrated on getting more web development clients. By this stage (around 2000) things were getting tougher to find new clients. Every man and his dog was a “web designer” by that stage, so the quaint marketing methods that I initially used were not as effective. Leaflet drops did nothing, and cold calling did yield some results (and develop some great sales skills) but was very time intensive.

These days cold calling is an even harder game. You are trying to cut through the noise and deliver the signal that your offering is worthy and better than the last 10 jokers that called them and promised the earth.

The jobs that I was getting were from word of mouth referrals, direct enquiries from my website ( I had some great SEO rankings in those days for web design and development terms) and through some of the business associations. These were good, but not enough to make the level of income that I really needed to set me up in life. The kind of web design and development work I was doing were one off contracts for full sites or site makeovers. I did not have a large number of regular clients on recurrent billing like I do now.

What we really needed in those days were social media and decent PPC marketing like AdWords. With those tools, and the availability of reliable outsourced workers my business would have thrived. Sadly, these first few forays finished around 2001 when I sold the web design part of my business, and went into the corporate world for the next 5 years.

But that is another story for another day….

So what are the takeaways from this rambling tale of early business fortune and misadventure?

1) You now have massively useful marketing tools at your disposal, with the opportunity to get in front of thousands of targeted, hot, ‘ready to buy’ prospects every day. Don’t forget how lucky you are to be starting out now.

2) It is easier than ever to utilise traditional sources of leads and sales (networks and referrals) due to social media and the power of blogging

3) Everything is a test. If you are in doubt about your business idea or model and being held back by inaction the best thing to do is start. Don’t die wondering, get out there and give it a go. The marketplace will soon tell you how good your idea is, and how viable the business model is. While a lot of business success is about planning and developing a deep and comprehensive strategy, the most important thing when just starting out is view everything as an experiment. It is important to test and measure everything, and if what you are offering is not finding an audience, then consider that market research and bring out version 2, or start completely from scratch.

Til next time,

Steve Mills

Former Web Designer & Tech Support

For a lot of people, marketing products and services online is done without a lot of planning. You have something to sell, and you think you have an idea about how to sell it, so using your previous life experience and skills you develop a website and online marketing campaign.

You wait a week…  a trickle of traffic comes through, but no enquiries. You wait another week, watching the PPC bill start to climb, and the visitor numbers on your site ticking over at a snail’s pace.

If potential customers are not visiting, or if they do they disappear before purchasing or taking action, the answer will invariably be hiding in the numbers. Which numbers? The visitor statistics of your site.

What is the bounce rate for your site? What is the average time on site? Is there a page on the site with a high exit rate. The first thing I can recommend (if your are not already switched on) is to install Google Analytics.

thanks Cludecf

This free tool from Google gets better every month, as they bring more in-depth reporting features into the service, and integrate it more tightly with AdWords and Google website optimiser. By having a clear history of statistics you can easily identified what are the key performing indicators for your site, and track this over time. You may for instance see that the conversion rate for the site is higher on evenings than in the mornings, or that there are higher bounce rates for pages on the weekends. Having good data allows you to make meaningful predictions and strategies on how to run your site, and takes out the guess work.

Here are 4 more areas where numbers should take precedence over opinion

Web Design

The difference between design that looks fancy and design that accomplishes the goals of the site can be immense.

It can be very counter intuitive, but often the less aesthetically pleasing design performs better in terms of sales and enquiries, as well as the time users spend on site and how far users navigate. Once proven design features have been identified for your sites (such as enquiry form structure, or navigation design), these should be further split tested to continually improve performance.

Sales Copy

While all copy should be in correct english, a subtle nuance or turn of phrase can make a large difference in the rate that a piece of sales copy converts into dollars. Once again split testing, either using a professional tool such as Google Website Optimiser or just manually will tell the story in numbers, rather than relying on memory.

SEO

For search engine optimisation, it’s all about finding the right numbers for your site. By looking at your analytics results, you will be able to find the terms that people are currently finding your site for when the search via a search engine. If these are not the phrases you want to be found for, or the numbers are not adequate then you need to look at number of relevant keywords that you have on a page, and the number of pages that you have indexed on Google for your site.

PPC Marketing

The biggest area where everything comes down to the numbers is in PPC marketing. In the AdWords campaigns that I manage, numbers like click through rate, and the number of impressions that a keyword receives are closely watched and acted on. If a keyword or ad falls below a certain threshold, it is instantly changed or deleted. This stops bad parts of the campaign ruining the performance of the rest. If campaigns are being optimized for conversions (trying to get the lowest cost per conversion, and the maximum amount of conversions in total) then keywords and even whole parts of the campaign can be removed if they are producing no conversions, or the cost per sale / enquiry is too high.

Also, when setting up campaigns instead of trying to be 100% accurate on exactly which keywords will do well, I will generally create a large account with almost every term that could be applicable to what is being sold. It’s kind of like brainstorming for PPC, where no idea is a bad one. Then, when the account is launched, I closely monitor which keywords are working well, and those that are not performing. The underperformers are removed, until via a process of elimination a highly performing campaign emerges.

And one area where numbers are not as important :

Social Media

There is a lot of talk at the moment about getting as many followers as possible on social media sites such as Twitter, in order to sell affiliate or self generated product. While having a good number of followers will definitely help, the focus should be on quality. That also goes for the content you push back out onto the social network. Make sure that there is variety and quality in what you post, and most of all show your human side and connect with people. As soon as the message gets too strong, what were once insightful hints, tips and banter turns into spam.

I work with Google AdWords on a day to day basis, and believe me, it can be a very time consuming and taxing activity.

Setting up new client campaigns, making changes across the account and seeing trends in data easily are all tasks that are fairly difficult to accomplish with the standard interface provided by Google.

As with everything in internet marketing, time is money, and being able to perform these tasks in a quick and easy manner makes managing your AdWords campaigns a cost effective exercise.

Tool 1 – AdWords Editor

AdWords editor is a free tool provided by Google. It allows you to manage your AdWords account In much the same way as the standard online interface, but with the advantages of being able to work offline, make backups of accounts, and make mass changes to AdGroups, Keywords, Ads and Campaigns.

The ability to be able to copy and paste AdGroups across campaigns alone makes it well worth the download.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/

And if you want an expert to teach you how to use this amazing tool, please check out AdWords Editor Videos, presented by the very knowledgeable Mike Rhodes from WebSavvy.

Tool 2 – Speed PPC

I don’t know what I did before I was introduced to Speed PPC. This software makes setting up large, detailed and complex AdWords, MSN and Yahoo PPC campaigns a breeze. It allows you to create lists of keywords to be combined together, and then merged with templates of ad copy to produce detailed, keyword rich ads for each AdGroup.

This saves literally days of work on some large campaigns, and performs the work to a level of detail that would be impossible to achieve with AdWords editor or the traditional AdWords interface.

Get Speed PPC Here

Tool 3 – SpyFu

A good intelligence gathering tool is essential if you want your AdWords campaign to go up against the big boys. Although you can do a lot of this intelligence gathering yourself, having a subscription based automated tool makes it quicker, and also shows you keywords that you haven’t thought of that these other players in the same niche are bidding on

http://www.spyfu.com