09 Aug 08 How To Demo You Startup

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The advice in this is fantastic. I am applying it to mine.

How To Demo Your Startup

The longer it takes for you to show your product, the worse your product is. Folks who have a kick-ass product don’t spend five or ten minutes “setting the stage” or “giving the background.” Folks with killer products CAN’T WAIT to show you their product. Their demos start with their homepage and quickly jump into the users experience. If a picture tells a thousand stories, then a product demo tells a million.

…………

The greatest tech products over the past 10 years would take no more than five minutes each to demo. For example:

a) Larry and Sergey could demo Google search in less than five minutes. Here’s a box, type something in and you get a huge reward.

……….

Weak startups and their leaders seem to immediately start talk about “what’s next,” as opposed to focusing on the core product. Anyone can say we’re going to add: a mobile version, collaborative filtering, an advertising network, visualizations, a marketplace, a browser plugin, a browser and a social network to their product.

Read the entire article. It is fantastic advice. While some may seem like common sense I can reflect back on numerous times in the past when I’ve broken every rule listes.

05 Aug 08 Optimization of Pay Per Click(PPC) Landing Pages By Marketing Experiments

Live optimization of PPC landing pages

The current page is trying to do too many things at once. The objective of this page is most likely to get someone to “search” for the phone number. And the results page (if they find an available number) should be trying to get them to “start their free trial”.

Some of the obstacles and problems I see include:

* Ad copy starts with 800 numbers and a 15 day free trial and landing page starts with “unmatched reliability” and no “real” headline.

* Design does not flow properly and has multiple competing elements and objectives that are not in the proper sequence. Currently visitors are asked to “order” … then to learn “more” … then to “search for 800 numbers” … then to compare plans… but why are there contracts with a free trial?

01 Jul 08 Clarity Trumps Persuasion On Landing Pages

There are so many good things that come out of Marketing Experiments and I am never disappointed when I return to read, listen, and watch. This lesson is no exception. Read the blog post, but then listen to the seminar.

Clarity trumps persuasion — and lifts conversions

The principle: Clarity trumps persuasion.

Sounds simple, right? Maybe even too elementary? Perhaps you’re thinking, “My CEO and six-figure marketing budget don’t need catchy maxims. Give me something I can use.”

Don’t be fooled. There’s a powerful idea hiding in those three little words. But it’s easy to miss because we’ve been trained to persuade. To sell the sizzle, not the steak.

We try to entice prospects into our sales funnels with peppy copy, splashy offers and incentives that don’t cost too much. Meanwhile, behind the curtain of our clever creative, we’re not concerned about connecting with people. We’re chasing sales numbers and revenue goals. So we ignore the fact that our prospects hate being pitched and sold to — just like us, when we’re in their shoes.

30 May 08 Website Grader for improved SEO scores

Search engine optimization (SEO) is hugely important these days, but most small businesses are fairly clueless about how to make their sites look as good as possible to the spiders of the web. An extremely cheap (actually, free) way to see if your site is up to snuff is to go to HubSpot’s websitegrader.com, which gives out useful and detailed information about your site’s SEO juice.

22 Jul 07 Ten Great Marketing Insights From My Summer Intern

Great insights in this piece from Pete.  I feel so far away from these folks, but at the same time it seems like only yesterday….

I can definitely relate to that strange cat John in HBO’s new series “John From Cincinnati” when he mutters, “There are some things I know, and some things I don’t.”

This is reinforced every summer when an intern (usually from Cincinnati) arrives at my desk. I get that anxious, insecure feeling that I’m not moving fast enough, not digesting enough technology, and beginning to drift toward Planet Irrelevance.

Chandler From Cincinnati…and His Insights

Here’s what the little punk has taught me so far:

• Google rocks and scares at the same time. Like so many others, Chandler seems tortured over Google. “Google keeps coming out with extremely useful tools but is walking a very fine line between evolutionary corporation and Big Brother,” he says.

• Facebook trumps MySpace. As far as Chandler’s concerned, “the end is near” for MySpace. Not sure I entirely agree, but here’s his rationale: “The cluttered, spam-filled, and teenager-controlled world of MySpace has been unable to keep up with the nonexclusive version of Facebook, which also has a cleaner interface and controlled ads (no pop-ups!), is organized around real-world communities, and most recently has shown an active ability to continue evolving with its launch of an integrated third-party development platform.” As he sees it, Facebook has successfully built on MySpace’s early foundations to take social networking to the next credible level.
• Friends are social currency. Friends, Chandler insists, are your social currency and the key to your reputation.
• Reputation is earned, never assumed. True online street cred must be earned, says Chandler. “If it happened yesterday and you post it, you’re a little behind the curve. If it happened a week ago and you post it, you’ll lose your readers and be run off the Internet,” he says.
• Simple packaging really matters. College kids seek order, not clutter. “Where do folks find time to do all this stuff?” Web 2.0, at its core, is an organizing principle.
• Your life is your résumé. In the Internet dominated world, Chandler insists your résumé’s always in play, even when you don’t know it. 
• A fine conversational bloom must be groomed. “Always keep the conversation well-managed and fluid,” says Chandler, “and don’t kill the bloom.”

Ten Great Marketing Insights From My Summer Intern

25 Jun 07 Revcube data crunching may be the future of online marketing

Its hard to tell from this article how much of RevCube’s model is human and how much is computer, but if it really works then it has potential far beyond multivariate testing. This is multivariate testing on steroids. I will check it out and write more soon, but keep on eye on this. If you are competing against conversions with this kind of backend, then you may not be able to compete.

Revcube’s technology looks at 5,000 attributes in ads from across the Web — everything from color to keywords to image sizes.

Identifying surfers by their IP addresses, it can grab details such as gender, age, and political affiliation from behavioral networks like Revenue Science and data services like Quantcast. These profiles are then analyzed by Revcube’s proprietary system, allowing the San Francisco startup to predict which text ad, banner ad, or marketing e-mail is most likely to make each potential new customer click.

With client LiveCareer, for example, Revcube designed about 100 different banner and text ads and 40 landing pages (where customers are sent after clicking on an ad) and tested them against thousands of demographic and environmental attributes.

Revcube data crunching may be the future of online marketing: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

23 Jun 07 Tools for those incapable of creating their own quality content

Ahhh… Tools for those incapable of generating their own content and traffic based on the value of that content. This is not marketing, it is cheating. Why is it that some people are too lazy to just put in the work and instead are guilty of cluttering up the web with crap. I am truly annoyed with these products.

Yes, it is easier for a simple online tool to rapidly generate new pages based on 1, but where is the value and satisfaction. You know that people are landing on these useless pages of crap that were created and getting annoyed and frustrated with the net. Those that use these tools are killing the usability of the net and of text. An Internet full of useless information is….

Greed.

Write quality content about how you created software and the underlying techniques for managing large amounts of content, domains, and cloning and generate content and traffic that way.

How about developing a landing page generation system since the functional attributes of your content spinners are are primary components of landing page systems. Why would you create something that helps people cheat. It almost sounds like from their page, that it could become a multivariate testing engine.

The point being - what a waste of brain power.

Jetspinner is a new and free content spinner you’ll love if you do article marketing. I’ve spoken about the benefits of article or content spinning before and explained how to use article spinners in my post, End Duplicate Content Articles.

And just like the software I talked about there (and the other paid solutions), Jetspinner enables you to create hundreds of unique variations of your articles for use on your website and submission to article directories, etc. That in turn means you can quickly and easily establish yourself as an expert in your field and create hundreds of natural-looking backlinks whilst avoiding Google’s duplicate content penalty.

Jetspinner Free Content Spinner » Web Marketing Strategy Update

21 Jun 07 Marketing: Staying Ahead of the Pack on BNET

BNET continues to amaze me with their high quality marketing and business tips and information. I may just need to stop writing this weblog and just post an RSS feed to their posts. The snippets below cannot do this piece justice. The information in this piece is phenomenal. Go read it. The link is below.  

Are marketing principles different for smaller versus larger companies?

The principles are exactly the same. Trouble is, a small company usually manages to stay small by ignoring these principles. Every large company was once a small company that became large—through good marketing. The biggest mistake people at a small company can make is thinking of themselves as a small company instead of thinking of themselves as a big company in its gestation period.

What makes a market leader into a leader?

Invariably, the leader in the category got to be the leader by being the first brand in a new category. Some examples:

• Coca-Cola, the first cola.
• Dell, the first personal computer sold direct.
• Domino’s, the first home delivery pizza chain.
• Gatorade, the first sports drink.
• Red Bull, the first energy drink.

What big companies introduced these brands? None. They were all started by small entrepreneurs like Tom Monaghan of Domino’s and Dietrich Mateschitz of Red Bull.

Some people call this leadership phenomenon the “first mover” advantage. But it’s actually the “first minder” advantage. That is, the brand that gets into the consumer’s mind first is the winner, not the brand that was first in the category. Du Mont made the first television set; Hurley, the first washing machine; Red Rock, the first cola. The MITS Altair 8800 was the first personal computer. But these and many other “first” brands failed to work their way in to the minds of consumers—they failed in marketing.

Marketing: Staying Ahead of the Pack on BNET