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Expert Advice For The Digital Marketer

6 Payment Offers That Sell Like Crazy

The way you structure your payment offers can increase your
sales. I’m not talking about the way people pay like credit
cards, digital payments, checks, and cash options. What I’m
taking about is can your customers try before they buy, pay
later, make payments, do they get a rebate, etc. Below are
six payment offers that will sell like your products or services
like crazy:

1. Sample It

Offer your customers a free sample or short version of your
product or service. Your sample should give them only a few
benefits of the full version. This will entice them to purchase
the full version to get the total benefits.

2. Name Your Price

Offer customers a choice of want they can pay for your product
or service. List your original product and price then add another
product with it for a little higher price. Your orders will increase
buy letting the customers choose their price.

3. Free To Try

Offer your customers a free trial of your product or service.
You could offer the free trial for 5 to 30 days. This is showing
them that you have confidence in your product or service and
it will sell itself.

4. Give A Little Back

Offer your customers a cash back rebate after they buy your
product or service. I feel a good rebate would be a least 10%
of their purchase price or higher. This will increase your sales
and, like most of us, they will forget to turn in the rebate.

5. Pay Later

Offer your customers the choice of being billed later for their
purchase. Bill them in a few weeks or a month. This will stop
you from losing customers who can’t afford to purchase your
product or service at that time.

6. Little At A Time

Offer your customers the option of paying you a little at a time
for your product or service. You could divide up the purchase
price into bi-weekly or monthly payments. You won’t lose
customers that may not be able to pay the full amount at that
time.

Quote of the Day:

“A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not
satisfy one friend.” — Henry David Thoreau
By Donohugh Magnus

IAC Pulls All the Right Strings in Spin-off

IAC, the holding company of major online properties like Ask.com, Match.com, and Ticketmaster, announced today that it has completed the much-anticipated spin-off of HSN, Inc., Interval Leisure Group, Inc., Ticketmaster and Tree.com to IAC shareholders and retained the litany of more profitable companies.  According to IAC, the move will be best for all parties involved and let the newly-formed companies blaze their own, independent, paths.

The very fact that IAC was required to even engage in a spin-off underlies the issues many companies are facing after acquiring popular online properties and holding them in the hope that they will grow in popularity and yield a positive ROI.  And although the companies IAC was forced to spin-off were seemingly fine acquisitions, when one consults the company’s latest quarterly filing, it becomes blatantly clear that this move was best.

According to IAC’s second quarter financial statements, the company incurred a staggering $421 million loss, representing a $500 million swing since last year when it made a $94 million profit.  But after the spin-off, the new company is doing much better and according to its financial statements, would have grown by 49 percent and incurred a loss of just $18 million.  More importantly, Tree.com and HSN, the two biggest culprits in the decline in IAC’s value, are left to smolder on their own without impacting the company’s bottom line.

But along with cutting its losses, IAC is becoming a more agile company instead of a media conglomerate that’s trying desperately to stay relevant in a constantly changing Web environment.  Now, IAC has a slew of great properties, headlined by Ask, Bloglines, Collegehumor.com, and Match.com, that more adequately adapt to the changing Web landscape and solve a specific need.

In a Web environment where CPM is down and more sites than ever are battling for your time, services like Tree.com and the entire HSN network are becoming far less necessary.  And in the process, these sites are losing money at an astounding rate and pulling all of IAC down with them.

The new IAC is much stronger without the companies it spun-off.  And although Ticketmaster was still profitable, that too has been losing ground over the past few years and could easily be supplanted by a service that streamlines ticket purchases in a new way.

Kudos to IAC.  For the first time in the past year, it looks like it is on to something with its new strategy.

Will More Companies Hate On App Store Developers?

At first, I thought only Apple would pick on the App Store developers.  After removing BoxOffice, NetShare, and countless others that we probably don’t even know about, I thought for sure that Apple would single-handedly push developers away.  But I guess I was wrong.

According to Ars Technica, an App Store developer called 1337pwn developed an Xbox Live Friends application that lets Xbox Live users see their online friends, what they’re playing, and browse profile information all within the confines of their iPhone.  They can also send messages to their Xbox Live friends and receive Twitter and Google Maps information through the service.  Not bad for $5.

But once Microsoft realized that a developer was attempting to profit off its service, it contacted 1337pwn and told them that because they were valued XCDP developers, they would be allowed to leave the App on Apple’s App Store as long as it was offered for free.

“Microsoft is halting the sale of any XBOX Live related applications in the iTunes AppStore,” the developer said on its blog.  “As official XCDP developers, we’ve always been cooperative as they’ve been consistently great to us. Per a conversation with them this morning, they will let us continue distributing our application for FREE.”

But how long will that last?  So far, Microsoft says it’s fine with developers exploiting its service, but I’m not so sure the company will be fine with that for much longer.

This brings me to another point, though.  Why are companies suddenly getting involved in the App Store like never before?  First, AT&T quietly told Apple that NetShare was persona non grata, now Microsoft is going after developers?  Granted, Microsoft and AT&T had some reasonable cause to go to Apple and the developers, but it makes me wonder if it will stop with this.

Let’s face it — developers on the App Store are rarely as powerful or financially sound as some of the world’s largest tech companies.  Realizing that, major organizations can dictate the availability of applications on the App Store if they in some way pertain to their own business.  After all, if a company like Microsoft doesn’t like a legal application, who can stop it from bullying developers and ensuring that they get exactly what they want?

Bullying is a common occurrence on the Web and it’s certainly not exclusively found in the App Store.  But as Apple continues to take apps down and fails to protect smaller developers, more companies will bully them and in no time, we’ll be faced with an App Store suffering from stymied growth, thanks to the weary eyes of major tech companies.

It’s time these companies leave their hands off the App Store unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Google Penalties : Manual vs Algorithmic

If you need to keep track of all latest news, rumors and (educated) theories behind Google penalties, you should frequent WebmasterWorld forum of course.
Read the rest of this entry »

How to Adopt a Pro-SEO Culture at your Company

The most successful SEO programs aren’t solely the result of a great SEO team. They happen because the entire company incorporates SEO into their portion of a given project, and everyone recognizes when it’s time to bring in the SEO to discussions.

Establishing this level of SEO buy-in throughout the organization is neither a fast nor easy task, but it’s very realistic and the ROI on this level of SEO engagement from the entire company is through the roof.

While this pro-active approach to SEO makes sense for any company, you really know it’s time to take massive action when: SEO is being left out of key decisions and discussions, projects go live without any SEO input until after the launch, or SEO struggles to get changes prioritized and live on the site. When you start to face these obstacles, it’s time to start getting others to do some of the SEO work for you because you are one person trying to push the titanic in another direction - it’s just not going to happen.

• Train everyone on SEO, and how their decisions can make or break SEO. Some companies are going beyond SEO training and creating custom \ SEO Certification programs so that each person understands SEO for their role, and knows how to address certain situations that your website faces consistently, in a search engine friendly manner.
• Take the time to learn the development life cycle in great depth to understand when requirements start/end, when documentation is created and all of the deliverables that are passed on to the development team so that you can identify which portions of the project you need to be involved in - it’s different at every company.
• Set up lines of protection throughout the organization by creating SEO Champions within each team involved in the development life cycle. These SEO Champions are the people that represent SEO when the SEO team isn’t in the room, and act as a liaison with the SEO team.
• Create an SEO knowledge center (an Intranet website) with best practices, standards, guidelines and tutorials for quick-and-easy reference.
• Set up SEO Office Hours, where you make yourself available at the same time every day to answer any SEO questions that come up throughout the company, review wireframes and more. The people that come again and again are likely candidates for your SEO Champions. This is most useful for larger companies with many divisions.

While there is much more that you can do to foster the pro-SEO culture at your organization, implementing these five items alone will make a huge impact on level of SEO engagement you get from the rest of your company.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for SEO site audits, SEO training and helping in-house SEO programs become a well-oiled machine that cranks out profits. The In House column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

Zoho Brings It All Together With Zoho Share

Zoho is pulling together its three main Webtop productivity products (Zoho Write, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show) into a central destination: Zoho Share. Just as Microsoft bundles its corresponding desktop products into its Office suite, bundling makes sense on the Web as well. Zoho already does this with Zoho Apps, as does Google which has long bundled its Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation apps into Google Docs. With Zoho Share, Zoho does take things a step forward, though, by adding social elements and a friendlier user interface.

As with Google Docs, you can share your Zoho docs privately or publicly. And any public Zoho App is automatically posted to Zoho Share. You can also upload documents and PDFs directly to Zoho Share. But the site also includes tabs for finding the most popular public content and people.

Any public document can be rated, bookmarked, emailed, or embedded as a widget elsewhere. You can find related documents by the same author, and any author’s documents can be delivered as a feed. If you don’t know an author, you can add them as a friend, and chat functionality is built in. In this way, Zoho Share is trying to create a more social experience around sharing documents.

Businesses can use Zoho Share to share documents only in private groups, and individuals can use it as a dashboard to manage all of their own Zoho documents, spreadsheets, and presentations (as well as keep tabs on their friends’ documents).

Why Community-Created iPhone Copy And Paste Won’t Work

Software developer Zac White is trying to fill in one of the biggest holes that Apple’s (AAPL) left in its iPhone operating system — missing copy and paste functions — via an open-source project called OpenClip. But while White’s effort is noble, it’s not going to work. And iPhone developers shouldn’t waste their time with it.

Why not? We’re sure there are technical or user interface-related reasons to avoid OpenClip, but we’ll leave that for someone else to explain. Most important: Unless Apple blesses and adopts it, which they probably won’t, it’s useless.

What OpenClip promises — copy and paste between all iPhone applications that use its framework — is a fine idea. And it’s neat that multiple developers are playing with OpenClip. But the most important iPhone apps, such as the phone dialer, Safari, email, and SMS, are created by Apple.

So for copy and paste to work in those apps, Apple would have to like it and install OpenClip’s code. Which won’t happen. Why not? Because it’s Apple’s platform — they’ve been very clear about that — and we have no doubt that they’ll be the ones deciding how copy and paste works on their phones — not some community collective.

So at best, it’s a lame-duck, hodgepodge set of code — not something to invest any energy on.

Microsoft Ad Team: We’ll Sell Vista, But We’re Using Macs

Microsoft has hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad industry’s hottest shop, to improve its battered image. So what’s their plan?

Step 1: A weird candid camera commercial. Step 2: Paying Jerry Seinfeld $10 million. Step 3: Convincing its own staff to use Microsoft products instead of Apple’s. From Fast Company’s Crispin Porter profile earlier this year:

In April 2007, long before the Microsoft account came Crispin’s way, Bogusky had told me that “Crispin sort of exists because of the revolution in desktop publishing that the Mac brought about. You could be a small shop and compete against Madison Avenue for the first time because all the tools were in your computer.” That may explain why Keller and Reilly are today using their team as an early focus group for learning how to persuade Mac lovers to embrace Windows. “You’ve got a lot of passionate Mac people in here, and they’ve got to get their head around this thing — why Windows is genius,” says Keller. He and Reilly have outfitted their shared office (inherited from Bogusky) with an Xbox 360, which they’ve been using as a wireless hub. But their joint desk also holds two ultrathin MacBook Airs. When I ask if they’re making their team get rid of their iPods and PowerBooks, Reilly responds, “It’s not a matter of forcing people. It’s getting them to want to use it. If you can’t, you’re not going to do great advertising.”

Comcast’s Diet For Bandwidth Hogs: A 20-Minute Timeout (CMCSA)

Comcast has already gotten in trouble for secretly messing with its subscribers’ BitTorrent downloads. Its new plan to deal with bandwidth hogs: Putting them in the penalty box for 10 to 20 minutes, regardless of what they’re downloading.

What does this mean? If you’re using too much bandwidth on your “unlimited” subscription, Comcast is going to slow down your connection to the Internet for a while, no matter whether you’re downloading a hi-def movie legally from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes or stealing a season of ‘30 Rock’ from The Pirate Bay. Bloomberg:

In trials, Comcast has found the fair share system to be effective if the slowing lasts for “roughly between, probably, 10 and 20 minutes,” [Comcast online services SVP Mitch] Bowling said. The user’s Internet speed would then return to normal.

“If they continue that, we would have to manage them again,”‘ Bowling said.

How bad is this for consumers? That depends on how restrictive Comcast decides to be. Key information we still don’t know: How much bandwidth you need to use before Comcast thinks it’s too much, and how you’ll be able to measure your consumption.

Comcast hasn’t detailed the “punishment” speed it’ll force on its unruly subscribers, but gives Bloomberg a guesstimate — and pokes fun at its telco competitors at the same time: “A user being impeded would have Internet speeds equivalent to ‘a really good DSL experience,’” Bowling said.

Assuming that’s as low as 1 to 2 megabits per second, that won’t be fast enough to stream a movie in hi-def, but it means you’ll still be able to check email, browse Web sites, and chat without much of a hassle.

The problem: While Comcast has designed the system to only target customers who abuse their service — movie pirates, etc. — and not the vast majority of its subscribers, the reality is that mainstream Internet usage is changing. More people are using the Web to watch TV episodes on sites like Hulu, download hi-def movies from iTunes, or stream video from Netflix, which means more people are going to be using more bandwidth every year. At some point Comcast is going to have to figure out how to adapt to that.

Facebook’s Beacon Coming Back? Sort Of

Facebook’s Beacon ad platform — where some of your ecommerce activity was automatically announced to your friends without your permission — is widely regarded as a failure. But that doesn’t mean that the company is abandoning the big-picture idea.

Yesterday Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, walked AllFacebook through the possiblities offered by Facebook’s Social Ads program — and in doing so reminded us that the two plans work along similar paths. The difference: Beacon was designed to tell your Facebook pals what you were doing outside of Facebook, while Social Ads keeps tabs on things you do on the site. In both cases, the programs allow advertisers to capitalize on that information.

Here’s how it can work: If you use a Ticketmaster app to find a ticket for a concert, for example, Facebook uses an algorithm to figure out which of your friends would be most interested in reading about that activity, and it tells them about it in their news feeds. Under this new program, Ticketmaster would be able to pay so that action gets transmitted across all of your friends’ news feeds.

It’s a great idea for marketers and advertisers — nothing beats word-of-mouth recommendations. But the success of this program will depend on how Facebook implements it.

If users are automatically enrolled without their knowledge and they have to figure out how to turn the service off and on their own, then it’s no improvement. But don’t see that happening — we think Facebook’s learned its lesson: The company readily accepts that it made missteps with Beacon, and we don’t think they’re likely to repeat them.

A better idea: Something that Facebook members willfully participate in, and are compensated for using. Say, a 5%-10% commission on purchases their friends make via recommendations.