Rest well Michael.

P.S. I think its a Pepsi commercial

1. Practice a Purchase – Get one of your friends, and go onto your website and show them how a customer can go through the process of buying an item or getting in contact with you. Note down all of the things they and you notice during the process, the results might surprise you! Usually there will be 1 change you can make that will increase your conversion by at least 10%. For more conversion optimisation, read this great article to on free tools that tell you why people are leaving your website.
2. Ask for Feedback - Add a button that says “Can’t find what you are looking for, email us your question”. You are not your customer, let them tell you what they want.
3. Add more keywords to a webpage – Some of your pages may be lacking in keyword density. Login to your CMS and just add a paragraph of text to the pages that are looking a little empty. Remember: Google can’t see images but it can see text, so tell Google what your page is about. Even Google change their logo on their homepage!
4. Change your homepages main image – Make the image users see when they first hit your site something a little fresher. If they are coming back for a second time, nothing is more persuasive than seeing a website is changing and evolving. Its a signal that the website is alive and that the company is reputable.
5. Offer an incentive to your affiliates – Offering an incentive to your affiliates might just give them that extra 10% motivation to spend more time promoting your program. More promotion means more sales.
6. Add a page of content – Write an article and add it to your site. The more pages Google can see on your website, the more chances you have of ranking for any particular keyword. I call this “Buying more tickets to the Google Lottery”!
7. Change the colour of your buy now button as a test – This button might be your main call to action button like “Apply Now”. You are trying to get a bump on your websites conversion. Red = Stop and Green = Go. Are your buttons telling users to stop or go? Copy the best in the business www.amazon.com
8. Invite your staff for a website feedback day – Sure its going to be a little political, but you are going to get 2 ideas that will be brilliant and easily actionable to increase sales.
9. Update your about us page with your latest info – Most people ignore this page although users want to know who they are dealing with. If your about us page still has the 2005 press release you added, remove it and update it with something new. Sell yourself.
10. Call every phone number listed on your website – If one doesn’t work. Update it.
11. Convert PDF’s into HTML pages – This is an easy win to get new content on your site and give you a few more tickets to in the Google Lottery. This will work especially well if your PDF’s are behind a secure area that Google cannot index.
12. Update your news section – Add your latest news. If you have no news. Make some up!
13. Add a second picture to your product pages – 2 images are more persuasive than 1. Potential customers want to see what they are buying and if you were to show the back of the product aswell as the front it may overcome some of the objections that have held some of your potential buyers back from taking immediate action. Tip: If you can only do 1 image. Make 1 image ½ the front and ½ the back! The images will be slightly smaller but you will communicate more information this way. www.newegg.com do an amazing job with their product imagery.
14. “Oh by the Way…” – Add a little upsell to your thank you page. Think of this like the confectionary at your supermarket. Right next to the cash register before you are about to pay you can just throw in a pack of gum. Its not sold in a big way, its just “Oh by the way, if you want a pack of gum i’m $1.00.” Add gift wrapping, upgrade, upsell or promote an affiliated offer. Their credit card is out on the checkout page, its time to get them to throw in that pack of gum. You can be really creative here! The best in the business at this are www.vistaprint.com upselling you from FREE business cards to a DVD subscription!
15. Update your 404 page – This page always gets traffic. Does your page look horrible and nasty or is it helpful and informative? Here are some good 404 pages to model.
16. Add misspellings to your Paid search campaign – There is a huge amount of misspelt keyword traffic out there. Its time you cashed in on it.
17. Protect your brand name – Type in your brand name into Google. See who comes up, if competitors are camping on your brand, politely email them and ask them to take it down.
18. Review your sitemap – Your sitemap is used by both Google to help index your website and by some users to browse your site. Check to see what Google can see on your site and navigate to your sitemap to see if its usable or not, check out some google Sitemaps.
19. Fix the top 404 pages – Ask your web master or web hosting company to send you your top 20 most 404 pages on your website. Fix them. You might get a bump in traffic
20. Ask a friend in another industry to shadow shop on your site – Give them 5 things to do on your site and get them to just send you their feedback on their experience. Ask them if they would go back to the site without you asking them to? If they would, you are in the money. If not, you have some work to do. The ultimate test of your website is: “If you didn’t own it, would you go to it?”
21. Read the last 100 contact us forms – Read what users are sending you. You will find 1 core insight to your customer that just might help you improve the site dramatically.
22. Ask a taxi driver what their top 5 websites are – Taxi Drivers meet a lot of people everyday and learn about a lot of websites. They are generally quite basic in their use of the internet. (Ouch that is a big generalisation!) Whatever sites they are visiting right now are ones that you need to review and strategise about.

Go on! Add any other tips you have as a comment.

P.S> Checkout my upcoming online marketing workshop. Its $66 for 3 hours of chock filled actionable tips and tricks to supercharge your online marketing. This seminar isnt really for the hardcores its more for people who need some help.

URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT

The Sky is falling,

Trees are dying,

Banks are failing,

At precisely 12:34 on the 19th of April 2009, thundering blood raged hordes of people will appear at your door with golfclubs, axes and baseball bats demanding answers. Answers that you aint got right now. The tougher these economic conditions get the more questions you are going to start to get. Questions like?

• “Where is my money?”
• “Why aren’t we selling?”
• “Where are all the new customers?”
• “Why isn’t anyone calling?”
• “How do we get more for less?”

What are you going to do?

Over the next 2 weeks I am going to be giving you some immediately actionable tips that you can do now to get better results with your online marketing to bring in new business.

Where can I start?

The first step you can take to improving your results online is to start converting more of the traffic already going to your website into customers.

Tips to increase your website conversion

I have put together a FREE 4 minute audio snippet from one of my past seminars with tips on improving your wesbite’s conversion.

Download Audio Website Conversion Tips now

Download the file to your desktop and play it with your favourite music player.

P.S. I am having an online marketing workshop at the end of April.

1. Engagement over content – Having just a great piece of content on your site that pulls in visitors once and then they just leave was fantastic. Although your bounce rate was shot and your web hosts can get annoyed. Sure the new links you got were great but if you could get 1/10th of the traffic but they stayed and interacted and they told 2 more people each because your site was more engaging that just another internet meme, you will be better off.

2. Fast – Faster – Fastest = Google, Blog Search, Twitter Search. Its all about the speed that information gets to a person now. Google takes hours to index content, blogs are almost immediate and twitter is in the moment that you tweet it. The trend to timeliness of information has created new platforms to communicate.

3. Socially inappropriate – Imagine you were at your Christmas dinner with your family and you were handing out pieces of Turkey and everyone was chatting and enjoying themselves. Now imagine if someone came waltzing in with a massive sandwich board with a huge ad on it and asked you to chat with them because you were their friend. The same response is being felt by corporate who attempt to use social media as an advertising channel. Pubs, Events, Concerts and Music are all social things and are perfect for social media, the lowest mortgage rate is not part of this social conversation.

15 brilliant tools to test your blog/website - Test your accessibility, browser compatibility, how commercial your site looks to MSNs search engine and if you can see your site behind the great firewall of china and more. These tests will help more visitors have the potential to see your website which will mean more engagement and hopefully sales.

How to dominate a market online - A brilliant picture demonstration of how you need to approach and dominate any market. I especially like this part: “It is not easy to become the winner in a saturated marketplace. You have to help a lot of people out.” This concept is brilliant and aligns well with the fundamental core of the internet. Helping other people out not for financial gain is where the internet came from and has been the basis of a lot of the big internet success stories. At the beginning these sites helped a lot of people out and then formed it into a financial model where the users where happy to pay because the value was right. Great examples include: Ebay (Was free in the beginning but needed to pay for bandwidth and decided to charge a fee), Google (The best search engine but had no business model until adwords was introduced) and Hotmail (Free email but the most magnificant source of customers and email addresses for MSN Media sales reps).

Twitter Strategy - A great diagram explaining twitter strategy and how you should approach it for maximum effect on your business. I am super sceptical about corporations entering twitter. I think its more for sole traders, freelancers and small businesses. I just don’t think you can boil twitter down to a single person in a big corporation, its just not efficient. I think corporations should stay out of those conversations and instead focus on listening to them and making better products that are good enough for people to talk about them.

Advanced SEO - The internet is a massive network of websites (nodes) and links and search engines organise this into a meaningful way to navigate this. The challenge of making your site the node that the search engines display over others is actually very unfair as the sites with lots of links continue to get more links. The rich, get richer. This article details really well the higher level picture of SEO and provided me with some really great insight as to the bigger game.

Honorable Mentions
10 Harsh Truths about Corporate Websites - Thanks to Glenn Murray Copywriter

Original Banner ad

Bloopers of Banner ad

“When you think of Telstra, Think of the future of Australia and Your wallet.”

Why is Telstra crucial to your future?

Where do the profits of Telstra go?

Telstra is 83% owned by the Australian public = You and me.

The other 17% = The Australian government.

So when Telstra makes profits where does it go?

To Australians in the form of dividends cheques and to the Australian Government’s Future fund which will provide superannuation and pensions for Australia’s public servants. In other words it stays in Australia.

So what?

Well if Optus owned our broadband network this would mean that that would earn more profits. Where would that money go? To Singapore. So Singapore would own our broadband network. Do you want the Singaporians to own more of Australia and the backbone of the future of our economy “The Internet”?

I still don’t care?

Well if you don’t want to get paid more healthy dividends cheques from Telstra then give the network to Singapore. Also if you want more service contracts to be outsourced to Singapore, give it to Optus.

Telstra = Your Wallet and The Future of Australia

Fred and Politics
I am the last person on earth to be a politician but because the internet is my friend I feel very strongly about this.

1. Who are you and how did you get into online marketing?
Ross Kilpatrick - CEO & Founder of StreetSmartShopper.com.au - Australia’s No1 Online Appliance and TV SuperStore.

I have been running my own advertising and marketing agency Huntingdales Brand Builders and Advertising for the past 19 years.
Prior to this, I worked on the client side of marketing in senior creative and marketing roles for leading retailers like Grace Bros,
Angus & Coote Jewellers and Traveland as General Manager of retail. So I have done the hard yards in marketing and retail.

At Huntingdales we have built a number of websites for clients and we decided why not have our own online shop to join the revolution.
I felt in the late 1990’s that the web was way too slow a beast to even entertain promoting. Thankfully the speed has picked up.
Believe it all not, I did predict the first collapse in 2000 because of the internet speed issues.

2. If you run more than one website. What is the name and URL of your primary website?
Our key focus is www.StreetSmartShopper.com.au

Our tagline is “Never Pay Retail Again.”

We sell only top branded quality fridges, freezers, washing machines, dryers, ovens,
stoves, vacuum cleaners and big screen plasmas and LCD televisions. Our USP is selling at lower prices
than any bricks and mortar stores. We provide killer service on a very secure shopping site nationally.

We have been voted in the top 5 shopping sites by The Daily Telegraph only 3 months after we kick off in 2006.
A Current Affair recommended Street Smart Shopper as a Gold Metal Winner as one of Australia best Shopping sites in August
2008 and devoted a whole segment to Street Smart Shoppers. We gained over 30,000 unique
visitors to the site that week.

Ultimately, we are waiting until more than the current 6% of people buy online in Australia.

So our site is a long term strategy where we are working on referral business from delighted customers
who are keen to tell their friends they save their pressure time, fuel and money by shopping with Street Smart Shopper.
Sure, it is a basic marketing strategy, but most great ideas are very basic.

I don’t have the brain power to come up with Google. I wish I had. Google currently makes half of all income online globally.

We also run Sullivan Dewing - Buisiness Builders & Chartered Accountants site to grow their new client prospect leads.
www.sullivandewing.com.au and Huntingdales site www.huntingdales.com.au really as a colour brochure online to advise prospect clients of our credentials.

3. The internet provides access to global audiences and markets. Where are you located and is your market influenced by your location?

We are located in Sylvania Waters in Sydney’s south, you could say we are located in the suburbs where the customers are.

Currently we are mastering our online marketing skills in Australia before we launch in the USA, China and India.
I have a number of other online ideas we wish to launch globally so starting here in Australia is a great way to micro manage our online
marketing. Sorry, I can’t tell you about the other ideas, I may have to kill you. My stock and trade is ideas and people could copy my ideas online
in a heart beat.

4. What were the circumstances that led you to start your site/online business?
A retail client of ours had a hobby appliance online site and it was very badly designed, marketed and thought out.
So I invented the name Street Smart Shopper from another idea I had regarding Australia’s largest letterbox catalogue and we joined forces to work together.
But, like a lot of partnerships his contribution was very low and unfortunately his commitment was not there. He eventually bailed out altogether. We now have a better buying supply chain and can provide our customers with even better savings and service.

5. Are you a full time web business person or do you have other income as well?
I work the site 50% of my time and sometimes it goes to 100% like it has been over the last few months as we reinvigorate the product range, design and marketing. I still run Huntingdales Brand Builders and Designers and work on a handful of clients that I like assisting growing their sales and brand awareness.

6. There are many methods of promotion for website. What do you do and which do you think are the most effective?
PR is by far the best way to gain attention. Google Adwords is far too expensive and does not provide a good ROI. SEO is a longer term proposition and needs to
be constantly monitored to gain maximum returns. We also do main stream marketing and advertising on radio, press and outdoor billboards.

7. What techniques did you use in the beginning to launch the site?
Working my initial database really kicked us off to a flying start. As I say, a quality database is a “RIVER OF GOLD”.
You just need to constantly keep mining it.

8. What are your main sources of revenue from the site?
Selling products only. We had a real learning curve when we had affiliate sites linked to Street Smart Shopper to gain
additional revenue. It did not work. Ultimately the commission was too low and we were sending our hard won customers
to other sites. They don’t bother coming back once they start surfing the net. Big lesson learnt.

9. Where do you see key opportunities in the future for revenue?
I wish I knew. In July 2008 I had a trip to Silicon Valley in the USA to attend a week long seminar to see if I could find some other
lucrative ways to earn revenue online. Most rely on advertising. I don’t see this as a long term option.
And for a advertising man that is saying something. So I am still looking for other ways to make money online. Any ideas?

10. Where do you see yourself in a few years time?
I see tons and tons of opportunity online in the future as the online media matures and blossoms.
Currently the net is like an old fashion western movie. We are all pioneers searching for GOLD.
It will only come to a few who are persistent, patient and willing to look for new opportunities.

11. If you could give two pieces of advice to aspiring or new webmasters/internet business owners, what would they be?

1. Don’t do it. Your chances of failure are higher than starting any other business and the learning curve is massive. You’ll need deep pockets and a number of years to become an overnight success. I predict 99.98% will fail online in the next 10 years. Don’t go into a partnership for the safety factor, 99% of business partnerships fail and your ideas will be compromised. If you are game enough go it alone, use your contacts for free advice. But remember it is just that FREE, so only listen to half of it.
2. If you don’t do take my advice to point one. You must devise what is the “One point of Difference” that will make your online idea work over your competitors. Or come up with a low cost Google search engine model that has more grunt and options than Google. Then you will become the second richest person on the planet.

Most of the time you are probably taking something and dialing it up in some way or form. Usually a benefit and then turning it into a massive promise.

The only time you don’t need to do that?
When the offer sells itself.

Checkout the creative above we just did for 3 mobile above. This is hands down the best offer in the marketplace. All you need to do is scream the offer as loud as possible!

Powerful eh? What do you think?

So if you want to follow me, browse through to here http://twitter.com/Schebesta