Met up with some interesting intruiging and exciting peeps last night in Cardiff  #cdfblogs meetup with @getgood @hrwaldram @carlmorris @stuherbert @GlynTansley Am excited again about the concept of local online. Might even do something like a “secret swansea” facebook group.

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So here, I’ve brought together some of the real world examples of psychological tricks people use in the real world attention locations that translate superduper well to landing pages, and are things that you should definitely consider on your landing page design.

Shopping channel heaven

Watching those muppets on The Apprentice (last night) try and sell on home shopping tv was a hoot. One trick that proper shopping channel pro’s use is rather than saying “call now, our operators are ready”, they use “If our operators are busy, please try again”. It’s a subtle difference, but embeds in the viewer that other people are ordering, and that they shouldn’t miss out, without explicitly stating so.

On your website landing pages, is their subtle wording you can use that implies that gazillions of other customers are buying your product or service right now?

*example used taken “Yes! 50 Secrets from the science of persuasion”, by R. Caldini & friends.

My local coffee shop

I like my local coffee shop, it’s not a Starbucks, it’s run by Adam, a guy like me trying to make living for his family. Recently, he had a promotion day, where he had his baristas out on the highstreet handing out mini-lattes, and a buy-5-coffee’s-get-1-free loyalty card, with 3 of the places stamped already, so only 2 left to get.

Who doesn’t like a free coffee on their way to work? I certainly do, and I like Adam’s photo on the flyer, I want to go to his coffee shop.

If you deconstruct Adams’ offer, he’s giving you a mini coffee, yet that not’s the full product, so you probably will still need your morning cup, but you’ve got the flava now.  He’s doing his offer at walk-to-work time, so the freebies match the customers normal requirements, their daily cup, let’s start the habit.

And the loyalty card, being pre-stamped, is f**ing genius. People see that they are more than half way to a free cup. This is so much more effective than giving them a two-stamp loyalty card.

So Adam identified the walking-to-work crowd, and built the components of his campaign around this, rather starting with the incentive first, he looked at mechanisms for creating habits.

Your landing page should start foremost with the potential customer, where have they come from?, what are the thinking?, and then once you understand the customer plan offers, and incentives around this.

Checkout impulse buys

A few years ago UK supermeerkats moved the chocolates away from the checkouts much to the joy of parents who are now not pestered “Muuuum I neeed this Mars bar, and I neeeeed the Skittles and I neeeeed the Snickers …”.

Still, the checkout is a location where supermarkets have your attention whilst you are loading your foodstuff and dog onto the carousel. So now at the checkout the sweets have been replaced by a raft of financial products, credit cards, pet insurance, car comparison insurance, mobile phone offers and more to tempt you.

So I recently paid more attention, in the stats, to the length that a person was spending on one of my client’s websites pages. I was surprised to find that the staff profiles pages had a significantly longer page viewing time than other pages. The profile pages are attention locations, just like the checkouts… Armed with this information, we created a series of product intros, different for each member of staffs profile page, so each member of staff in effect is introducing a product line. Guess what happened to sales, with these super personal product introduction?

Where ever you have someone’s attention, it is a potential selling point. Rinse it baby.

Rip off farmers markets

There are ton of things you can learn about marketing from seeing some farmer flog you overpriced locally grown organic vegetables. My friend Anthony runs a heirloom organic vegetables stall, which in itself is a good idea, as people are intrigued by white sprouting broccoli, purple carrots, and other funny vegetables.

But! What is more interesting is his constant incremental marketing and that he writes notes on in. One week his wife wrote careful titles of products rather than the computer print outs – Sales increased. Next week, he put his products in wicker baskets rather than cardboard boxes – sales increased. The following week, he wrote cooking/serving suggestions alongside the vegetable – sales increased

Guess what? Doing incremental changes to your landing pages works. In its nature, spending time tinkering and getting into the mind of your customer really f***ing works. Building a landing page and hoping for the best doesn’t.

You really have to test, report, try a new thing, test, report, try a new thing, test, report, try a new thing.. And then you’ll have the highest converting landing page possible.

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Next time, I look at some of the tools you need to do this landing page milarkey effectively.

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twitterpunch

Ever wondered why you tweet pictures of your cat, tweet about the cost of organic food, or tweet about your social incompetence? Help is at hand, this app will punch you every time you twitter; not just when you do lame, naval gazing tweets.

boat

Useful if you are stuck on an island based reality tv show with 12 muppets and a conflict-baiting camera crew.

ipillow

Really fricking handy when you are on long flights, or pesky train-replacement buses.

vegitracker

Grr! Rip off farmers markets. Simply take a photo of the offending £7 organic vegetable, and this app simultaneously gives you its real supermarket price and tells you what it is; ‘purple sprouting broccoli’ ah!

shawifezam

Make ill communication between you and your partner an historical footnote, by holding your iphone up to your wife/girlfriend mid rant, even 2 seconds is enough, and it will translate to what they really mean. “babble babble babble babble”, ah shawifezam says: ‘Pay me more attention rather than wanking over that fucking iphone’.

catnav

Ever wondered where Flossy goes in the day? Does she really shit in your neighbours garden, as per their allegations? This app tracks your cat’s position on Google maps and publishes it to other catnav users, so you can see your kitty neighbourhood and perhaps impose a curfew if she is fraternizing with that unsavoury tom from number 57.

iphone pro app

This app increases battery life, gives you a 5mp xenon flash camera, enables MMS messages and gives you the connectivity of Bluetooth all for $4.59.

bushcutter

Ditch dragging that epilator on holiday, this app makes light work of even the most forest-like unsightly bikini line.

twat tagger

Take a photo of any twat, any where in the world, and this app will automatically geotag the photo and adds the person to an online facial recognition database so other app users can be alerted when they’ve enter a neighbourhood with a high propensity of twats.

owl unlimited

Having a problem keep track of all your owl’s? This app brings owl management to a whole new level. With geo-owling, feather tracking, and falconry glove care tips all in one place. Solving life’s little problems one app at a time.

Feel free to add your suggestions for iphone apps that money can’t buy in the comments…  Until next time.

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1. Adwords, position #5

If you’ve got an eshop you’ve probably got a Google Adwords campaign running and you are constantly monitoring and re-selecting keywords and bid prices you are paying.  In an expensive keyword niche (bids over £2.00 a-plenty) for a client of mine, I’ve been targeting position 5 with some success.

I’ve not been paying the ludicrous amounts that others are bidding on in this niche. But been tidily mopping up customers for my client at a decent pay-per-click rate. The theory is that your competitors want the top spots, and ad results results 1-3 appear in the main pane, making result 4 the top result in right pane, and a natural psychological target to aim for. However others may be aiming for this right-side top spot, so you can get much better value being position 5, one below this… Try it you can only save money.

2. The more of the internet you own – the more traffic you’ll get

Why not add product reviews and FAQ’s to each product? The more pages that you have on the web, that are related to each product, the more perceived relevance to the topic/item Google will adorn you with.

It’s fairly simple to add a product FAQ module to an eshop, if you have Magento or Oscommerce there are modules for this already. Writing FAQ text should be straightforward, what are it’s uses?, who else uses it?, things to consider?, etc, and it will extra keyword filled pages to your shop. Lovely.

Product reviews, likewise. You can get modules for your eshop and they are fairly easy to set up. But this time you’ll have to ask some of your trusty shoppers for feedback. If they’ve found your shop efficient, they will probably be ok with adding a product review, especially if you direct them to the right page, and thank them, and then you’ll have loads more google indexable lovely content.

3. Google Local

The increasing importance of the Google Locals results (those that appear as  a block in the natural search) can’t be underestimated. An sure you’ve seen them (if you haven’t just do a search now for “plumber <your local city>”). This means that you really must spend some time getting your local listing right. Add photos, opening times, customer reviews, It will all help you. If you have offices/home that is fairly central do add a place mark, it will also do you a favour.

4. Youtube product reviews

Google is integrating video results from Youtube (Google owns Youtube), into it’s search engine results pages (SERP’s). So if you’ve got a cam, and have time to add a short video reviews/road tests of several of your products, then do it! It’s all going to help add to your branding and number of results you have on page 1 of your keywords SERP’s.

Don’t forget to add an ident/branding to your company on the video so people can type the URL in afterwards.

5. Livechat

Am sure you’ve seen the “to speak to a live person click here”, and if you click, a dialog opens with a salesperson from the site. If you’ve paid for Adwords visitors you really want to be converting as many of them as possible into purchasing customers not throwing your money away.

There are several systems out there and they are all fairly easy to integrate. They could increase your conversion rate dramatically! Got to be worth a shot.

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Hope you have a few more ideas  how you can improve your eshop, and make it a success (when the high street  is suffering!)

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Brainstorm

So first, keep a notebook and brainstorm ideas that come to you as you are going through your day. Your goal is to think of niche’s within bigger search groups, or emerging markets that are likely to be bigger in the not-to-distant future.

Over 12 months ago, I could see that netbooks were emerging on the scene, and I thought, ‘well people are going to be searching google for these little things’. Rather than a site on the perhaps larger search term “netbooks”, I targeted a similar meaning but nich-ier target “lightweight laptop”.

So collect your ideas, whether they are “Scottish antiques”, “costa tropical hotels”, “washroom hand dryers”, “garden hoses”, “shitake mushroom kits” or “selvedge jeans”, Really think about anything and then think of a sub-branch of that idea.

Research

So you’ve got a list of say 15-20 ideas to look at. Your goal is to now find out 3 things:

1) Does the niche have traffic from google?
2) Is it crackable? In other words: is it possible to get to first page of google?
3) Would it be possible to monetize, once you have visitors

So let’s take “washroom hand dryers” and type it into google’s keywords tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

It says that there are an average of 73 searches a month, and 210 searches last month for this keyword. However, it now identifies related keywords, that might be worth targeted. It illustrates that “hand dryers” has 9,900 searches a month. A worthy target!

So then we go onto checking in it’s crackable. We do 2 basic things, first we check how many results it returns in your countries google. E.g Make sure you select “results from pages in uk”. Put the term in quotes (“hand dryers”) to limit the results to more relevant sites, and you get 38,400 results.

And also we get the web page result that’s 7th- 10th on the 1st page of google, and paste it into yahoo’s site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ ). This will then give you a guide to how many sites link to this site, and approximately how authoritative google perceives it. In this case, the 8th result in google (www.o3solutions.com/) has 71 inlinks from sites other than itself.

Is it worth it?

Now assuming that you got the traffic, is it possible to monetise this “hand dryers” niche? You could check out affiliate sites like affillatewindow.com or tradedoubler.com to see if there is a commercial vendor offering an affiliate scheme for commercial hygiene equipment. Or you figure, that once you’ve got the traffic you will approach independent retailer, and offer them your leads, for a commission.

Either way you gotta do the math. In the case of “lightweight laptops” 5,000 people a month searching generates 5-10 affiliate sales a month. So that’s a particularly low 1 in 500-1000 visitors produces a sale. So with hand dyers, if you sold 5-10 products a month. Would that be worth it if you were getting 10% from a sale? A hand dryer costs £200, so 10% is £20 x 5 to 10, so between £100-200 a month revenue.

Compile and compare

So you should create a table, or an excel spreadsheet of all your targets and new ones you find as you go through it, and you can then compare and choose:

With all your 20 keyword targets side-by-side, and the new related ones you’ve found, it should be clearer which one to target.

Of course there are some nuances to the tools mentioned above, but they are fairly easy to get to grips with.

So buy a domain & build a website

Now you’ve chosen your target, you should think carefully about the domain, and include the keywords in it if possible. Perhaps handDryersReviewed.com might be a good choice. You then want to set up a site, Wordpress is a good CMS that’s easy to setup, and choosing, and customising a relevant template is easy.

It’s worth at this stage knowing more how google ranks content, this is the best snapshot guide that tells you all about what’s important from title tags to image names: http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php

Don’t forget to add google analytics, and a sitemap registered with google webmaster tools.

What’s your content plan?

So, blimey you’ve got a niche a domain and are ready to add content. You could write it all yourself, or perhaps you can place an ad on www.getafreelancer.com, and find someone on the other side of the world that will write for you for $6 an article. So best start as you mean to go on. I mean, are you really going to have the time to write 2-5 articles a month? Best just for you to plan the articles and outsource them to someone else.

Also remember, that genuine content brings genuine visitors. So really do think of real content around your topic.

Link build

You’ve got to now build links. I reckon the best way to start of with is to this yourself, aim for 2-5 links a week and you’ll soon build up inlinks. Some of the easiest strategies are, commenting on relevant blogs and forums or adding your site to relevant directories. Also look at your competitors sites via yahoo site explorer, where are they getting links from

You can then outsource this to someone on getafreelancer.com once you’ve got a style of link building.

Wait….

So you’ll need to keep monitoring your site, adding new content and link building for 4-6 months, but you should see it gradually creep up google, monitor it both in Analytics and Webmaster tools. You can of course start the next project so you are building up multiple revenue streams.

Page 1!

So there, once you are on page 1 of google, it is worth reviewing how you were going to monetize the site. So now plug in that affiliate, or cut a deal for leads from the site, or perhaps even sell it lock stock to a competitor. Good luck.

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Recruitment consultant, and temporary staff

“Companies are not taking on new permanent staff. So we are focusing much more on promoting the flexibility of temporary staff”, says Chris Boskall of a local recruitment agency. “We’ve also taken the measure of guaranteeing our staff, if our staff don’t turn up, we offer compensation to the company. This is a great way of enabling companies to take on staff with minimum risk”

“We’ve been expanding the number of pages in our eshop. Now for each product in our eshop, we have a set of frequently asked questions, this increases the page we have indexed in Google, and the likelihood of our ranking increasing.”, says Tim Taylor, manger of an office communications system eshop. “The second thing we’ve done is started to create a set of product review videos which we’ve put on youtube, as google is increasingly adding video results to its search”

Cornershop, and door drop

“We’ve seen less contractors come in for their morning pasties as building work slows, locals not buying as much bread/milk/newspapers, and even kids not coming in after school for sweets. The recessions is hitting us from all angles”, says Anthony Paul, owner of small cornershop in Swansea.

“We’re only now awaking up to how we can get more customers in. We have some great prices on wine and beer, so we’re starting a local newsletter for the neighbouring street, and we’re adding community news, photos of our friendly staff, and information on our offers”, Continues Anthony, “and doing a fortnightly ‘neighbourhood news’ leaflet drop to our surrounding streets. We are optimistic we can survive”.

Property Solicitors, and open door surgeries

“It was clear to us that property conveyancing would be hit, so we’ve been diversifying our services to include wills and probate, and commercial property -  which we’ve found is still going strong compared to residential”, says Karen Smith director of a Cardiff solicitors. “We’ve started a Google Adwords campaign, and a started a series of ‘open door surgeries’ in surrounding communities where people can drop in and discuss their legal issues. We’ve had some great press of this, and are expanding the number of surgeries we offer.”

PR Company, and e-newsletters

“Having a client list that we keep close contact with, we are in-tune with their sentiments, and try and react to their needs. That said, the recession really has hit the PR industry. Advertising and marketing are the first areas to be cut, where inversely these areas are critical to a companies survival”, says Tom Hall manager of 4 person PR agency.

Tom continues, “Our strategy has to been to reiterate our benefits, namely consistent measurable exposure for businesses, and now push our ongoing marketing tools such as management of company’s e-newsletter and their website content with search engines in mind”

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Apart from meeting some really hot (technically) consultants, some clued-up (and friendly) WAG staff, and having a few beers (at our expense, rather than the tax payer), I’m stoked and ready to move from my role as a consultant and delivering agency, to an objective E-business consultant.

My first impressions are that the E-business WAG team headed by Michael Groves, have really got their onions together. It’s out with all the multiple confusing funding brands inside the Welsh Assembly and they’ve bought in 3 shapes of ICT product that will help business in Wales, in a Flexible Support for Business (FS4B) package:

1) A resource website, which will be going live soon on http://www.business-support-wales.gov.uk/, it will have all kinds of IT and business communication guides. This is designed as an entry level “what is a CRM?”, “how can a network help my business?” or  “what is pay per click marketing?”  This is great for all businesses wanting some knowledge, perhaps before they engage technology companies in helping their business or undertaking an IT change themselves.

3) E-business support. This is where a consultant will be able to help a company research, plan, choose a supplier, hand hold through integration, and guide through company wide roll-out. In reality this could be something small like guiding a small company through installing a network/VPN/email system or something larger and more specialised like installing a new multi-site contact centre or custom built intranet solution. Either way, with support from WAG businesses will have the benefit of having an on-side consultant to ease the pain in any new system integration/

Back to recession proofing your business, it is essential for all companies to examine their underlying ICT if they want to weather the storm of this financial downturn. Having an impartial external consultant come in and help you assess your ICT can only help, and if you need more support having some one on-side, impartial and co-paid for by the WAG, is a step in the right direction for ensuring your business comes out the other side of this gloomy downturn, stronger and happier.

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