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Internet Marketing for Lithuanian Business
A 120mph Seminar of Internet
Marketing for Busy People!
By
Kieron Lyons
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Copyright © Kieron Lyons 2006
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The right of Kieron Lyons to be identified as the author of this course has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2006 by Kieron Lyons
Email: kieron@kieronlyons.com

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a license issued directly and in writing by the copyright holder and publisher.
Such requests should be emailed directly to the publisher at kieron@kieronlyons.com.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this course are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Introduction

It is unlikely that you will find another course that is this short, covering the diverse subject of Internet Marketing.
Clearly, in such a short time, everything you should know about Internet Marketing could not be covered. The objective of the course is to get you to a point where you have a big picture understanding on many of the aspects of Internet Marketing in an extremely short space of time!
By attending this half day course, you will be equipped to intelligently engage any conversation about its subject matter. Perhaps more importantly, you will also be equipped to initiate any of the initiatives its suggests, and to fully brief any outsourcing internet marketing service provider on exactly what it is you want them to accomplish!
That alone will save you money, and more significantly, will improve the effectiveness of your outsourced internet marketing project through the establishment of a solid common understanding.
Each lesson will take us somewhere between thirty seconds and ten minutes to work through. The information is very specific - no padding! It's truly valuable information. It is my hope that it will remove a few myths associated with internet marketing and bring you to realise its ultimate goal which is usually either overlooked completely or forgotten - to significantly build your sales pipeline and be directly responsible for boosting your trading position.
I firmly believe that all forms of marketing exist to support the selling initiative. It is sales that is the measure of a company's success – not marketing.
The use of internet marketing to support a "brand" is a secondary result. The primary result upon which it should be measured is sales. The step before that is the extent to which it contributes to the qualified sales pipeline.
How can sales prospects be generated and qualified using purely electronic means? If you're asking yourself this, I think you'll enjoy the seminar!

What's Possible?

So why do you need an internet marketing strategy? Maybe you've been getting along fine without one! Or maybe you think that you already have one in place - it's not up to much and you're wondering what the big deal is!
Maybe you actually have a functioning internet marketing strategy in place already and are here just to validate it (that's fine too!).
If you're like most, the probability is that, if you have one in place, its focus is to build traffic to your site. Is it working? Are you measuring it?
Most importantly, what are you doing with the traffic when it arrives?

What you should be doing is:

Engaging it - keeping its interest by maintaining valuable or compelling sales copy.

Capturing it - incentivising it to register on your site based on a piece of information, or better still, a sequence of information, that will contribute value.

Designing and executing an electronic follow-up campaign that is not sales oriented. It should be continually delivering value, building credibility, "serving" your suspect or prospect. Free? Yes free.

Putting the entire process on auto-pilot until such time as you or your prospect decides that it's time to make personal contact.

By that stage, if you've done it right, your credibility will be surfing on the waves, your prospects will all ready be appreciative of the unique value you can bring to their table and they're ready to engage you in some "real" business.

The Process
Too many internet marketing strategies stop at the traffic building stage. This is only the beginning.
Your core process should be:

Definition of your "web market"; what they search on, what they look for.

Definition of how you can access this "web market".

Definition of electronic value you can leverage.

Preparation of your website for key statistics gathering and value provision.

Design and set-up of on-site list building.

Multi-pronged traffic building campaign.

Test and evolution of web-site copy and auto-pilot effectiveness.

Engaging your prospects, tracking closure and setting future expectations.

Is this what your existing strategy looks like? If so, good stuff, you're pretty much there - a few tweaks perhaps and you can fine-tune it.
If not, you're about to experience an avalanche of interest in your company's products and services that you probably never knew existed!

The Components

Each component is a “lesson” that should take us no longer than five to ten minutes to work through.
Here's the lesson list:
Lesson 1: Collecting Statistics from your Website
This lesson could have been included at the end of the seminar. However, I think it makes a great start to give a understanding of what is actually possible in relation to collecting specific pieces of information on your website, interpreting it and reacting to it. I'm sure you'll agree!
Lesson 2: Introduction to "Optin" lists
Every internet marketer knows that the term "opt-in" list is used to describe people who've given you permission to send them emails. What many don't tell you is that waiting too long for people to opt-in is a "go-out-of business- fast" strategy!
Lesson 3: Keywords and how to find the best ones
Many companies have plastered their websites and "tags" with as many related keywords as they could come up with. This is a misconception! Understanding the significance of keywords, finding the best ones and how specifically to use them is what this lesson is about.
Lesson 4: eZines & Newsletters
Some believe that having your own eZine is a good idea (it can be, but not necessarily). Others believe that understanding the role of eZines in your industry and feeding the right articles strategically to third party eZines is a better way to go - I agree.
Lesson 5: Sequential Auto- Responders
Not using one? Shame on you. You need it and you need it now!
Lesson 6: Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
A great way to hit the ground running if you haven't already explored it. If you have, and its not working, then you're doing something wrong - because it always works!
Lesson 7: How to build and develop your opt-in list
OK, so you know what an opt-in list is - but how do you build it? What are the different ways of building it and once you have it, how do you really use it?
Lesson 8: Test, Test, Test
A fantastic feature of the internet is the ability it gives you to try things out, test different website copy, conduct market research - completely free of charge and practically instantaneously! So if you're not benefiting from this by using it, you're missing out.
Lesson 9: Introduction to Search Engines
Yes, they're still very important. A big percentage of your traffic will come from search engines - but of the dozens available, there's only two you need to be especially concerned with as they feed 80% of the remainder.
Lesson 10: Introduction to Search Engine Placement
A moving goal-post. The placement rules change every month. If you really want to stay on top, you need to constantly monitor and react to those changes. And that means having people in your team who are "in the know"!
Lesson 11: SEO Tips I:
Despite the ever-moving target, there are some core fundamentals that you just must have. Without them, you can never get to the top in search engine placement.
Lesson 12: SEO Tips II:
Here's the rest of the core SEO fundamentals.
Lesson 13: Email Marketing I
Understanding the dynamics, pitfalls and opportunities of email marketing techniques is a crucial skill in your wider internet marketing initiative. There's a lot to know and insofar as it is possible to cover it in overview form, this is your summary lesson.
Lesson 14: Email Marketing II
Continuing my overview of email marketing, the second part gets into some of the subtleties of smart Campaigns.
Lesson 15: Joint Ventures and Co-Registration
An increasingly popular way of building a sales pipeline on the internet is to link up with synergistic product or service providers in a way that proactively leverages each others new and existing lists. There are smart ways of doing this and not-so-smart ways!
Lesson 16: RSS feeds
Now considered an essential element of internet marketing, RSS offers a way to significantly improve visibility of your content.
Lesson 17: Forums
What are the key forums, lists, blogs etc... in your served market? Are you contributing? What's in it for you? Why you might consider it.
Lesson 18: Toolbars
It's amazing what you can find out these days about your competitor's websites and their businesses! While there are several potential additional components that could be covered, it is not the intention of this seminar to cover all the options.
However, it is hoped that it will serve you as a “place” from which you can explore an almost unlimited number of additional possibilities.
Throughout this course you will find references to external resources which will allow you to further see into individual details as you require. The course is not just designed for those who operate in the marketing front line. It is also aimed at any person working at any level in any organisation!
No matter who you are, these short lessons give you “just enough” information to let you decide if a particular component is for you or not. As you learn, ask whether your company is all ready engaged in this activity or not. If it’s not – are you ready to be the champion?
Get involved. Become a leader not a follower of internet marketing in your career – no matter what it is you do. It will serve you well!

Lesson 1: Collecting Statistics from Your Website

If you've received a thousand visitors to your site and no-one has opted in to your list, how do you know you actually had a thousand visitors? More importantly, how will you ever
know what's wrong with your site or value proposition that resulted in a zero opt-in rate?
It may strike you as being somewhat strange but you need to fail a few times with your internet marketing campaign before you get it right! But you need to know that you're failing and what exactly it is you need to change.
There are many website statistics packages and services which you can use on your site – some better than others. One of them is http://www.statcounter.com another is http://www.hitslink.com/account.aspx Getting started is free and you can upgrade for a nominal monthly fee as your traffic builds. Statcounter works in real time - so you can see visitors as they "hit"!
This is particularly useful in providing immediate feedback on new campaigns.
Now that’s talking about visitors to your website, but what about “Visitors” to Lithuanian websites a very useful tool for understand the numbers of visitors looking at Lithuanian websites is Ranking.lt. This tool will provide you with detailed information about internet traffic and visitors to Lithuanian websites, make user you use this information. Here’s the link http://www.ranking.lt

Statistics you can gather may include:

Total number of visitors, repeat visitors, first-time visitors within a period length of visit

Pages visited during the visit

Referral source of the visit (which search engine etc...)

Keywords searched on to have arrived at your site.

Visitor paths - if available, you can actually see the server information related to a particular visit. In many cases you can tell exactly which company or organisation your visitor is from even though they did not register for anything on your site!

Graphical split between search engines so you know which is being the most effective.

Running totals for individual keyword searches so you now which keywords are working best

Your most popular pages being visited

Entry and exit pages

Individual page-to-page navigation for each visitor

Visitor breakdown by country

System statistics showing visitor browser type and version, operating system

I still find it astounding that you can capture this level of information on a visitor from the moment they arrive at your site to the moment they leave! But most astoundingly of all is what you can learn from this information.
Through careful analysis of your statistics, you will be able to tell if your website copy is sufficiently engaging (from the length of time your visitors stay on the page), what's causing them to leave (is there an approximate "average stay time" - if so, read down your page at average speed - at what point did they get bored?).
Lets take a look at another free resource you can use!
htp://www.google.com/analytics/index.html

Other things you can watch for are:

• Your most effective pages.
• Your most and least effective keywords.
• Whether your competition in looking in on you!
• Whether someone is close to buying (repeated visits).
• Whether your visitor to opt-in conversion ratio is above or below par.
• Whether a particular email or advertising campaign is effective or not.
• The response from a particular press release.
• Peaks and troughs for traffic ... and so on.

It's like having a "graphical control panel" on your desk! A good statistics solution on your website will put you in absolute control of your internet destiny!
Also it is really important to know where traffic comes from! Take a look at http://www.ranking.lt

Lesson 2: Introduction to Opt-In Lists

Spam has a lot to answer for - not just because of its nuisance factor, but because it is the cause of extremely sophisticated "spam killers" being put in place by practically every Internet Service Provider (ISP) and corporation that
exists. Where's the problem with this? Because in many cases, corporations and ISP's end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater! That means that millions of innocent emails and genuine contacts are being unceremoniously
"zapped" by systems such as "Spam Assassin" without a 'by your leave'! If your email(s) is zapped, you've no way of knowing.
Under my section on email marketing, I'll talk a bit more about this, but for now, suffice it to say that if your receiving party isn't expecting your email, there's a possibility that it could be zapped. Even if they are expecting it, it can still
be zapped!
Significant legislation has been introduced in many countries especially to deal with the huge volume of spam that is clogging all our inboxes. Such legislation mandates for example that all emails in a batch necessarily include a valid postal address at the bottom and an "unsubscribe" option within the email.
With the spam prevention initiatives that have taken place, came the concept of an "opt-in" list. This is where the receiver has given you explicit permission to send emails to him or her, having subscribed, registered, signed-up or requested a service or specific information from you. By sending out emails in volume to your opt-in list, you cannot be accused of sending spam. However, just because you have permission, does not mean that your email(s) will necessarily be delivered!
It’s a really good idea to include an Opt-in name and email address on each page of your website, allowing visitors to sign-up for whatever you are offering at the time.
Irrespective of whether you have permission or not, if your email breaks a few basic rules - you're zapped. See the lessons in this course re email marketing. The one exception to this is where you are specifically "white-listed" by the receiving party. More on this too in a later lesson.
The good news is that building your opt-in list electronically from your web-site can be an automated process. You can set it up once and it builds itself. There are several ways of doing this which I'll cover in other lessons. This lesson is just to get you to understand what an opt-in list is.
If you are executing your web marketing well, a certain percentage of your website visitors should be "opting in" to whatever it is you are offering. If they're not, then you need to change something. Either you're attracting the wrong type of visitors, your reason for opting in is not compelling enough or you are not giving your opt-in "form" sufficient profile on your site.
Actually, unless you are pursuing a specific branding initiative, the main function of your website should be to generate sales leads. Your opt-in list is your first step in this process, What you do after you've captured your visitors name and email address (or more information if you wish) will determine how you qualify that suspect into a potentially buying prospect. Several of the course lessons will relate to this. Got the idea of Opt-ins?

Lesson 3: Keywords

Keywords are both tactically and strategically important to every internet marketing initiative. You would be truly astounded at the number of companies who close in on the wrong keywords because they were the "obvious" ones! Do this and you'll reduce the market available to you to
a fraction of what it should be. Get them right and you will be able to leverage them to build large amounts of traffic to your site. Wordtracker.com
Importance of Keywords
Intelligent use of the right keywords is a major factor in search engine placement. Although there are several other factors also, proper use of your keywords is one of the fundamentals that, if you get wrong, you will not get good
placement.
Good placement in my course means getting into the top 5 or certainly on the first returned screen of results following a search on those keywords. As a large percentage of your site traffic will come from search engine placement, getting your site positioned in this way will dramatically improve the traffic volume to your site.
It doesn't guarantee it though. Just because you've got the right keywords and are using them in the right way does not guarantee you top placement. I will discuss the other factors in another lesson.
You can bid on particular keywords for "sponsored" placement in the major search engines. This is called a pay-per-click campaign and you will receive a separate lesson on it. The two big ones operate in quite different ways and
it is important to understand each.
What makes a good keyword?
Remember that a keyword can actually be one, two, three or more words together. Actually, it is known that multiple word phrase search tend to have a higher sales conversion rate than single word searches.
So if you can identify phrases that your served market is likely to search on, go for it. You'll also find that single and two-word "keywords" can be quite competitive when it comes to search engine placement or pay-per-click bidding.
A good keyword is a balance between the number of searches that have been done on that keyword recently, the number of companies or bidders competing for them and
the uniqueness of the keyword to your specific target audience. For example, take the word "Tennis". There are millions of search results. "Tennis Racquet" still has lots, but a bit less search results. "Tennis Racquet Weighting System" has a lot less search results but if that's exactly what you do, you've found a captive keyword (phrase) that is unlikely to be competed for by many competitors!
Another great tool you can use for testing and selecting keywords is Google AdWord Keyword tool . This is free service and will give you things like historical search results on particular words over the last sixty days, competing bidders etc.. for each of the search engines!
Another free site you can use for a test of recent Yahoo searches is: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Lesson 4: eZines, Newsletters and Articles

OK, so we all know that an "eZine" is simply an electronic form of a magazine. But why bother with one? Firstly, for the sake of this lesson, I'm going to use the words eZine and Newsletter interchangeably. They're basically the same
thing although they can be different. Unless your business is specifically to run an online magazine, then like most of the rest of us, your eZine (if you have one) which you will be
sending out to your opt-in list has one overriding objective.
That over-riding objective is to keep your suspects, prospects and customers engaged through a sustained and high quality "presence", albeit an electronic one, such that
they will ultimately buy or continue to buy from you. This of course means keeping your customers updated about new products, services or changes at your company, providing
valuable information specifically of interest to them and linking back to your site for further details. Links in your newsletter is your way of expanding the "mind share" your
prospects or customers give you. The more you engage them with valuable content, the greater visibility you will get - your prospect's understanding of your solution improves and your chances of a sale increase.
So a supporting objective of an eZine or newsletter is to "pull" prospects and customers back to your website so you can sell them something - or at least, in the immediate term, move them closer to buying!
OK, so you're clear on the obvious reasons for an eZine - no big deal there! Let's assume that your newsletter each month has articles penned (typed) by your best business and technical personnel - perhaps even your CEO. These are articles which clearly demonstrate that your company knows what it is talking about and that you are the ones to do business with.
Why limit these articles to your own newsletter? Why not standardise (assign it to someone in marketing) the task of having your articles, with links of course, distributed to every relevant corner of the internet each month so that it can be published in other company's eZines, links intact, so that it can pull new traffic to your site? New traffic which of course you can hopefully engage, capture, sustain contact with and ultimately convert to a customer.
The fact is that there are boatloads of eZines out there in every industry - both company ones and general industry ones, that are crying out for quality content! Availability of your content for their eZine will very probably be welcomed
with open arms.
There are two pieces of good news here: (1) There are well proven ways to distribute your articles for maximum exposure (including the increasingly popular RSS on which there is a specific lesson), and (2) This works!
For now, if you would like to learn more about RSS, have a look at . This website includes some excellent freely downloadable material that gets you up to speed on RSS in no time! http://www.nooked.com/
Efficient and regular distribution of your specialist articles will bring lots of new traffic to your site when done properly and regularly. It is well worth putting in the research effort to identify each of the various eZines that serve your target market. These will range from a number of very popular ones (which will obviously generate more traffic for you) to a
number of very specialist ones (which may bring you higher quality traffic). Linking your articles, perhaps through a BLOG (future lesson) to RSS, will allow your articles to be picked up by eZines you will never have heard of - from some of the most unusual places!
A final note on this. Remember that people who click on a link in one of your articles are already in the qualification pipe - they've shown enough interest to want to know more.

Lesson 5: Sequential Auto- Responders

Auto-responders have been around for a long time. They automatically send a pre-defined response to any email received at a particular address. A "sequential" or "smart" autoresponder can be set-up to deliver a pre-defined
sequence of emails with pre-set intervals between them. This is useful, since the frequency of contact between you and your customer is a key part of relationship building.
Although electronic contact will never replace personal contact, it is a major advantage to be able to automate much of this early-stage contact in advance of a sale being made.
Every e-mail sent by a sequential autoresponder
is an advertisement for your company, whether explicitly intended or not. It is your opportunity to impress your prospect through the value you provide, the integrity and
format of your email (working links etc...) and is an opportunity for you to draw your prospect towards your intended "next level" sale. By "next level", I refer to your company's sequence of what is known as "back-end" sales.
For example, my first level sale may be attendance at one of my seminars. My next level sale after that may be to have my customer retain me to personally to train its inhouse marketing team on internet marketing techniques. My next level after that may be to have my customer retain me to build an explosive internet marketing strategy and oversee its execution, and so on.
You should always have a back-end product to sell irrespective of what you have thus far sole. A back-end auto-response sequence set-up once is an extremely efficient way of following-up your pipeline as it builds.
Most sequential auto-responders worth their salt these days, have additional capabilities built into them including:

Automatic management of opt-in lists

Broadcast e-mail capability

Opt-in form generators for inclusion on your website

Link-tracking / e-mail campaign tracking

Automatic parsing of e-Payments

List management with subscribe and unsubscribe facilities

Verified opt-in options

All this adds up to a very powerful means of following up your early-stage prospects whom you "capture" onto your opt-in list as well as your customers who “switch” into a back-end sales sequence. An amazing thing about smart auto-responders is that they are a cinch to set-up and incredibly low cost! You don't need to know things like HTML or what CSS is!
Smart Auto-responders may be either set-up directly on your web-server or may be purchased as web-based application services. Web-based application services have become extremely popular with companies who do not have significant in-house technical capability.
As practically no technical competency is required to set up an externally hosted smart Autoresponder, it is a service that is freely available to everyone irrespective of what industry they are in or what degree of technical know-how exists.
The ability to easily integrate with e-Payments truly brings the idea of on-line e-Commerce to the masses as minimum cost.
Here is a good link http://www.aweber.com/features.htm

Lesson 6: Pay-per-Click Campaigns

A frustrating (and often annoying!) aspect of internet marketing is the length of time which Search Engines take to pick-up changes to your website and re-position your website accordingly. Google for example can take up to
60 days! So you don't find out whether something you've changed actually had an impact until two months after the change has occurred!
You do have an option to pay Google to "spider" your site (assess and reposition), but how many times are you going to pay without knowing for certain that the impact will be as you had hoped? Or to be knocked off your top position
the following week?
To make matters worse, the major search engines constantly change their positioning algorithms, making "search engine optimisation" (SEO), the act of refining your website for the highest search placement against particular word or phrase searches, an ever-evolving and engaging task!
The answer for many has been "pay-per-click" (PPC) campaigns. Focused in the correct keywords, PPC campaigns are proven to be effective time and time again. But as with
everything else, there's a science to PPC! There's a few basics you need to know.

1. Google and Yahoo (recently acquired "Overture", the biggest PPC engine outside Google), between them (and the other engines they directly feed) have 80% global search coverage.

2. MSN gets its search results from Yahoo. So a PPC campaign with Yahoo, will also cover all of the other search engines that are fed from it, including MSN.

3. Use a tool like www.wordtracker.com to close in on keywords with a high "KEI" index. This is a theoretical measure of the attractiveness of a particular keyword or phrase which is based on the "uniqueness" of a keyword, the number of historical searches done on it, and the number of sites competing for it.

4. Shoot wide initially, with many related keywords. Through analysis, close in on the most effective ones and focus your investment there.

5. Monitor your statistics on conversions of particular PPC-driven clicks so that you know what your paying customers are searching on. Know your break-even cost per click and adapt your campaign accordingly.

6. PPC campaigns are auctions. You "bid" on positioning against other companies who want to be positioned against those keywords. If you're lucky, you'll find a keyword that directly relates to your business which no-one else is bidding on.

On Yahoo, the minimum bid is US0.10 (ten cents). Google used to be US0.05 -but as I write, they're considering
matching Yahoo!). Google and Yahoo operate quite differently in relation to the number of characters you can include in your "sponsored advertisement" title and main body.
You are strongly advised to incorporate your keywords and phrases in both the title and body of your advertisements as these will be bolded when displayed following a search on those exact words.
PPC campaigns typically involve paying at least ten US cents per click, and can go up to $20+ for a single click. So it is easy to see why you need to know your "cost per conversion".
A simple way of thinking about it is "If I make a sale to one out of every one hundred visitors to my site, and my average profit per sale is €100, my break-even per click is €1.
If I've got to pay more than that, it's not worthwhile. If I pay less, it's worth doing".
That just about summarises PPC campaigns. There is more information about PPC on http://www.kieronlyons.com

Lesson 7: How to Build and
Develop Your Opt-In List

People give you permission to send them emails in many ways:

• They can register their name and email address from a form on your website

• They can send a blank email to one of your auto-responder addresses

• They can ask you by 'phone!

• They can buy something from you and want email follow-up

• They can give you their contact details at a seminar or trade show so you can send them information

They can respond to an advertisement, press release or news article . . . and an almost limitless number of other
ways.
Having gone to the trouble of collecting all of these names and email addresses, you need a consistent way of managing your "electronic" sales leads.
Not to be confused with CRM systems, your various auto-responder sequences should be set-up such that a prospect who becomes a customer (by buying something) is automatically "unsubscribed" from one auto-response sequence (a prospect one) and automatically "subscribed" to another one (customer one)!
By setting things up in this way, you are ensuring that
in purely electronic terms, you customer will receive the best service possible; for example, your new auto-response
sequence may include technical notes on the product they have purchased, a company newsletter or additional useful
information, and II. You are gearing up your customer to
make a new back-end sale.
It is important that you initiate as many coordinated
marketing initiatives as you can manage, simultaneously, so that your opt-in list is not only being fed from many sources, but that each individual prospect is being automatically managed across multiple autoresponders based on their prospect or customer status with you.
Such initiatives may include your newsletter, your BLOG (future lesson), RSS feeds, a complementary e-Course (such as this one), white-paper downloads, pre-defined auto-response email addresses, PPC campaigns, press releases, editorial submissions and so on.
By now, you should be starting to realise that the internet is possibly a far bigger source of qualified sales leads than you may have imagined.
You should now be getting a feel for the possible. Perhaps you can now see that there is a vast untapped resource out there that can make a dramatic impact on your business.

Lesson 8: Test, Test, Test

A very useful feature of the internet is that it lets you try out different things, experiment a little or a lot, see what works and what doesn't work - all for free! It's just as well too! Because the internet is a quagmire for mistakes and a
graveyard for the unresponsive! It is far easier to get it wrong than to get it right. Too many companies have had a vision of their web presence, executed it perfectly and left it to rot in that graveyard. They did this without ever putting in place the measurement and testing infrastructure that would have allowed them to adapt their vision to engage their market effectively.
Before you can test effectively, you need to have your "stats" in place. If you haven't done it already, go now to http://www.statscounter.com and prepare your website for some real analysis. What are you testing for? There are several things you can test and you will probably want to test them all at various times. Remember that the primary purpose of your website should be to generate and ultimately qualify a sales pipeline.
Therefore, the first thing you should test is whether or not you are generating traffic to your website. You may experiment with different PPC keywords, try different email
marketing campaigns, revisit your site optimisation, improve the effectiveness of your newsletter to "pull" prospects back to your site etc...
You can test the effectiveness of the opt-in form of your website. If you're getting the traffic but very few people are registering, perhaps you can test the presentation of your form, your compelling (or non-compelling perhaps) reason
for signing-up. Perhaps the problem might be with the "nature" of traffic that you are attracting.
Is it possible that whilst your initiatives may be generating traffic, that it is the wrong traffic? You can try "splitting" your link pages to see which pages is most effecting at getting visitors to sign-up. You can test different site content and so on. The purpose of this lesson is not to explain everything you can do to test, but more to explain you that this type of testing is possible - and it's even easy! The more you test, the more effective your website will be. It may take weeks or months, but at the end of that time, you will have refined and evolved a major asset for your business.
Lesson 9: Introduction to
Search Engines

Search Engines - they really do rule the internet world! In a nutshell, Google get about 45% of internet search traffic, Yahoo (including MSN and other engines it feeds) gets about
35% and the remainder get about 20% between them. A great graphic showing the links between the search engines (who feeds who) can be found at: http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm
A significant portion of the traffic coming to your website should be directly referred through listings in the Search Engines - both normal "spidered" listings and PPC "sponsored" listings. A search engine uses things called "spiders" to crawl the web, constantly analysing and monitoring websites for appropriate search engine placement. In most cases, a spider may take weeks and even months before it finds your website - which means you better be ready! Being "ready" is a good idea because,
once a Spider assesses you, the Search engine will etermine your position in the search results screen for your keywords - and it could be a long time before it comes back to take another look!
Unfortunately, there's far more to "being ready" than you might initially think. A whole industry has grown up around "Search Engine Optimisation" (SEO). You can pay companies to get you into or close to the top Search engine position for your search terms (meaning you will get more traffic), and you can retain them to keep you there. Note that getting there and staying there are different things! Google in
particular, but also Yahoo, the two biggest, are constantly changing their rules relating to positioning on their search engines. Whilst these rules are constantly changing, there are a few basics which, when followed, will get you a high
ranking.
Here's a golden nugget for you - a "Spider" will only look at the first 27K of your web page.
Here's an exercise for you. Go into your home page, click file / properties on your browser. What does it report as your page size? If it's less than 27K, your whole page will be spidered. If it's more than 27K, only the first 27K will be spidered. So if your website is quite graphics intensive, it may be the case that just the top portion of your page will determine your web position! In the next lesson, we'll look at some of the basics of website optimisation.

Lesson 10: Introduction to
Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO)

It would be a brave (and foolish) person who would claim to be able to explain all you need to know about SEO in twelve minutes (three "Components" of the e-Course"). The reality is that an entire industry has grown up around SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). So, why bother with a few "Component" lessons?
Put simply – in those three "Components", I'll:

Point you in the right direction to get your hands on some key resources

Give you an appreciation for the basics which, if you can do yourself, will save you a lot of time, effort and money even if you outsource the task of SE placement, and

Teach you some techniques as well as things to avoid!

A good starting point is the very beginning - before you even choose your domain name!
Because if you start here, almost every decision you take concerning your website will have a direct bearing on the ultimate placement (and retention of that placement) of your website with key Search Engines - over time! That's a little scary because most organisations and people who decide to learn about SEO, do so long after their websites are finished!
In highly niched markets, good SE placement may still be attainable even for less than fully optimised websites, since competition may be few in number or good keywords may still be green-field scenarios! So before you panic, check the lay of the land - you may have less work to do than you think! The flipside of this is when you operate in a highly competitive market and good SE placement is simply out of reach without major surgery or a complete rebuild of your website.
Before engaging in any major website surgery, consider this. Whilst SE placement could and should generate a significant percentage of your overall website traffic, it is only one, albeit often the primary one, of several potential traffic sources for your site.
So while you're doing it (optimising your site), proactively plan, initiate and execute individual strategies for each of the other traffic sources: RSS, news releases, email arketing, pay-per-click, co-registration, blogging, forums and so on. Not doing this, may be ignoring lower hanging fruit which may well keep you going until your SE placement materialises (can be months) - and well after!
Your internet marketing strategy should be a wide mix of individual sub-strategies which, collectively, deliver a major punch for your businesses. Now, for those of you who are serious about Do-It-Yourself Search Engine placement, here is a link to what I personally consider to be the "bible". It is an e-Course, a newsletter, several password-protected papers plus monthly subscription-based updates on "anything that moves" in the SE and Spider world.
At time of writing, it will cost you US$97 for a six month subscription.
Here's the link: http://www.searchenginenews.com/

Lesson 11: SEO Tips I

Do you remember in earlier components when we discussed the importance of choosing the right keywords to drive your internet marketing strategy? In this lesson, I'll deal with the
principle ways in which you can use those keywords from an SEO perspective.
As you might have guessed, there is no hope of getting through all there is to know on Search Engine Optimisation in a half day seminar! However, the value of having a solid big picture understanding of SEO issues can get you a long way down the road if you engage this activity yourself.
It will also equip you to intelligently brief an external SEO organization you may retain at some time in the future to manage your "organic" rankings. Indeed, it will
equip you to understand their "language" and their response to your requirements!
Keywords So you've found your back-doors, front-doors, side-passageways etc....! How many really targeted keywords do you have? No, I don't mean the one hundred or more in your PPC campaign. I mean the six to ten that are very specific to what you do and which you know will deliver the required search volumes (from your overture and other tools).
A mistake that many companies make is that they optimise only the home page and try to cram in as many keywords as they can! It's a big mistake! Learn the next sentence a few
times! Optimise every page on your website, target no more than two or three keywords per page and split your top ten keywords across your three to five most significant pages.
What I am saying is that it is a practical impossibility to optimise a page for more than three keywords.
This is especially the case when you consider that Search Engine "spiders" will only spider the first (in linear order) 27K to 102K (depending on the spider) of each page. Yes - every graphic you use in the top part of your page can reduce the actual amount of spidered information.

Title and Description

These are the "meta tags" at the top of every page, located in the html page header. Most search engines will scope the "title tag" highly as it ranks your page. The "description tag" may or may not be scored. However, this is where your "sales pitch" should be as it is the description tag that is displayed to the end user in their organic search results.
One tends to often find missing title tags on sub-pages – what a needless loss! One also often sees gibberish or meaningless text displayed in the Search engine organic results of a ranked site. This means that their description tag was missing and the spider arbitrarily chose text from the page body! Shameful!

Keyword Density

A key scoring point! It refers to the ratio between the number of times your keyword appears in the spidered portion of your page relative to the total number of words on the spidered portion of your page. Google likes this ratio to be between 3% and 6%.

Links to your Site and their Substance

Unless you have no competition, you will not succeed in getting a decent Google ranking if you do not have many links to your site (individual pages) from other sites. Your "Link" score is one of the most important Google
ranking factors.
Here is how you check link your own links with Google, go to Google search page and enter link:http://www.(yourdomain) and you will see all the sites that are linked to yours! You can also do this to see who is linking to your competitors!
Google will look at the importance (Google Rank) of the sites and pages linking to you, whether or not you have reciprocal links (non-reciprocal links are given a higher weighting!) and how the actual link is implemented. For example, instead of linking to www.kieronlyons.com., it would be better to display a keyword on the linking site, such as "Internet
Marketing Seminar" with a hyperlink to the kieronlyons.com site.

Lesson 12: SEO Tips II

There are many more ways in which you can use your keywords to improve your Search engine ranking.

Size and substance of your site
Google looks at the substance of your site both at an individual page level (less than 300 words is currently considered insubstantial!) and a general site size level (number of pages). Note that in a 300 word page, to achieve a keyword density of say 5%, a particular keyword would need to appear 60 times! How many keywords to you think you could therefore meaningfully optimise a single page for?

Headlines, sub-titles, bold and italics
Your use of paragraph formatting on each page is scored by Spiders. Most will specifically look for keyword presence in "H1" (Heading) titles, bold and italicised text.

Graphics
Every graphic on every page should have populated "ALT" tags (alternative text - displayed if someone has set their browser to text only!) which describe the graphic. You
should use these ALT tags to hold keywordbased descriptions of the images.

Textual Link to external Sites
Instead of displaying just the URL address, use keywords with hyperlinks.

Downloads
If you are allowing people to download documents, images or software from your site, again use hyperlinked keywords to initiate the downloads.

Sub-Domains
If you are using sub-domains, use keywords to specify the sub-domain. There are so many other factors to consider. For example,

Your domain name itself; if it includes keywords, it can have a powerful influence on your SE rank!

The length of time for which you have registered your domain name (three years or more is advisable) can count!

Whether you are hosted with a shared or exclusively assigned IP address; if you're using an external hosting service, request a dedicated IP address!

The frequency at which your site is updated is a factor.

The existence of and set-up of your Site-Map in a Spider-friendly way can help.

Sometimes it helps just to know how you're doing - even at a high level without drilling into the nuts and bolts. Towards this end, there are a few dummy spiders on the internet which allow you to test a particular page (summary level only) for how well you have optimised it! You might like to try one at: http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/gettarget.php
When all is said and done, remember this – the extent to which you will need to go in order to get high ranking on the SEO's is a direct function of the competitiveness of the keywords you choose! If you find the right keywords, you
may be able to deliver very high, even number one rankings just by following what you have learned here.
A note of caution. If a spider visits your site and finds that your keyword density (see previous lesson "SEO Tips I") is unusually high, it may decide that you are "index spamming" it – trying to fool it into ranking your site highly.
It will then actually penalise you! This can arise when you keyword-pack literally everything and end up inadvertently increasing your keyword density. So know what your keyword density is for each keyword and page - and don't overdo it!

Lesson 13: Email
Marketing I

This lesson deals primarily with the risks of sending unsolicited email. The very first thing you will learn or hear in any programme on E-mail marketing is "do not send
spam". The second thing you'll hear is "build your own opt-in list".
Not sending spam
In its "catch-all" definition, spam refers to any and all unsolicited commercial email. If you do not have specific permission to send someone an email, you are spamming them! Some people have taken it a step further - if you send
them anything other than the specific information they have requested, you are spamming them!
The Internet world has to some extent self-regulated by introducing antispam measures such as black-listing, spam filtering, ISP interception and "black-holing" and even termination of ISP addresses.
Most western markets have additionally introduced legislation to curb the continuing proliferation of spam, including financial penalties and even imprisonment!
Your opt-in list
The term "opt-in" list evolved from Seth Godin's course "Permission Marketing" and describes a context where you may freely send emails only to those who have requested them - they've given you permission! So, building your opt-in list means giving your prospective customers a compelling reason to "sign-up" with you. This could be for customer support services, a newsletter, a white-paper or a complimentary e- Course!
The Risks
If you send unsolicited commercial email, you incur risks on several fronts.
ISP:

May block all your emails permanently.

May close your account - disastrous for your business.

RECIPIENT:

May black-list you - block all emails from your company

May report you to your ISP or other authority

May bad-mouth you in the industry

LAW:

May fine or imprison you That's pretty scary stuff!

The next lesson you learn will be controversial. It is my personal opinion, has not yet been tested in the courts and is based on proven, accepted trading standards. It is the extent of the risk that I believe is worth taking. In my opinion, it is sustainable because it follows normal and reasonable trading practice.

Lesson 14: Email
Marketing II

I did say that this lesson would be controversial. You may decide not to take the risk and that's fine. But at least you will know what I myself am prepared to do based on what
I consider to be a sustainable argument and based on sound trading practice.
The Problem
If your business is a new one or one with relatively few customers, waiting around for the time it takes to build your opt-in list is a go-outof- business fast strategy. Even by the most optimistic of estimates, building an opt-in list of any reasonable size is a long and arduous process. Conversely, "not speaking until you are spoken to" is not a skill for the twenty first century!
Whilst spam is indeed the scourge of the email world, compliance with the literal translation of its "catch-all" definition means that you cannot proactively use email to tell people what you do unless firstly, they already know you, and secondly, they've actually asked you to tell
them! I think that's preposterous, don't you?
Middle Ground?
I'm going to break all the rules and go against many of the internet marketing "gurus" out there. Here's my basis. By the very act of activating and publishing publicly, an email
address, prospective customers are electing to live with both the positive and negative consequences of email. No-one wants spam (in the sense I'm about to describe) and whilst I'm all for fining and even jailing "real" spammers, I do not consider, nor in my opinion will the courts consider, when it is properly tested, proactive, targeted, non-permission based, low volume email to be spam.
I believe that every email should have full contact information including a postal address and a simple, working unsubscribe mechanism. The risk you take however by sending unsolicited email is that your website will be shut down by your ISP pending a legal decision. ISP's will only do this where bulk email and other genuine spam indicators are involved.
I firmly believe that the sentiment of the law in driving anti-spam legislation is more directed at "nuisance" emails that are sent in bulk (thousands or millions), persistent, have no unsubscribe mechanism, are often sent from machine addresses rather than individual personal addresses, have no postal address or contact information and / or bear no reasonable relevance to the receiving party.
In other words, if you sell an amazing new cure for arthritis, you cannot in my opinion be convicted of spamming by letting someone whom you know to suffer from arthritis that your cure exists. If you sell widgets, you should not accuse someone of spamming who has emailed you with a great new idea to sell more of your widgets. That's just the wheels of commerce.
You may decide to take or leave an offer. It does not mean that the person or company who made the offer broke the law in doing so. Unfortunately, there are many people out there who are only too willing to throw you in the heap with the real spammers and couldn't care whether you live or die. Thread the Line
Although you have no control over whether or not you get accused of spamming, I firmly believe that you will not be convicted of spamming by playing to the rules above. I for
one am doing this and am prepared to defend myself because it is a logical part of the wheels of commerce and does not affect the right of individuals to accept or reject, subscribe or unsubscribe and at all times is up-front with my
personal and / or company contact details.
In summary, if I do send an unsolicited email:

It is being sent to a particular individual with a specific reason that is relevant to that individual.

It has my company address and contact information included in the email

It includes a simple unsubscribe link that works

It is sent from my personal email account

Its subject line is relevant to the body of the email

When I use a sequential auto-responder, I regulate the length of time between emails to avoid being a nuisance.

One final note. You will always get a small number of cranky" responses to your unsolicited email. Don't reply to them, just delete them from your database immediately.

Lesson 15: Joint Ventures
and Co-Registration

The key word driving every successful joint venture is "idea". I used to think of joint ventures as big business partnerships where two organisations came together, combining forces towards the achievement a major goal
that neither one might effectively achieve independently. That's still valid. But "JV's" can also apply to smaller scale business-to-business and even person-to-person partnerships. When a JV is driven by a good idea, commitment in the form of two-way, on-the-ground action that is executed with conviction, is the key to success.
What is the role of JV's in internet marketing? With the right partnerships, operated with the right ground rules, they can be an extremely effective way of enticing each individual
partner's "list" or new visitors, to subscribe to the other partner's list. If your partner's list is significant, can you imagine the potential impact of the JV on your business?
A simple form of JV has become known as "Co- Registration". Co-Registration simply means that when an end-user has "opted-in" to your partner's newsletter or e-Course etc..., during their opt-in process, they are also offered the opportunity to opt-in to your newsletter or
eZine etc... Software tools are available to streamline this process into a single click affair. To explore further, check out http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,31
2515,00.html
Another JV example is where you publish say, a white paper or courselet on a subject that is pertinent to one of your popular industry eZines or even print agazines. You can offer the publisher a complementary copy of your courselet to all its subscribers. In exchange the eZine publisher directs all interested parties to your site in order to download the courselet - where of course you collect their name and email address!
Joint Ventures in internet marketing are very regular occurrences and are widely recognised as significant pre-qualified traffic generators. There us an unlimited repertoire of ideas and potential JV partners out there. But you need to
be proactive and action-oriented. Only you can make it happen!

Lesson 16: RSS Feeds

To get a decent overview of RSS, you can visit www.nooked.com and download some of their educational papers such as "RSS 101". Here you will find excellent primers on RSS. For now though, here's the overview.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is being described as the last remaining, untapped, major-impact marketing tool available on the internet! Is it? Probably yes! It has massive
momentum from all the major industry players (no exceptions) behind it, is driven and indeed enabled by standards (.xml) and is getting easier to use!
Ease of use has been its stumbling block to date - but that is changing very fast indeed, and when it does, whether you will know it as RSS or some other name, it's going to get very, very big, very quickly!
So, what's the big deal? Take a deep breath - here's a long sentence! The big deal is - you can produce press releases, newsletters, product launches, corporate information, technical white papers, updates and practically any other form of information, and have them manually or automatically "sucked into" the global RSS network, to be picked out, by headline / theme / subject etc... by literally millions of other websites, internet users and other desirable learners of your content. Every piece of your content, whether once-off, hourly, daily, weekly or monthly will "pull" your new learner base back to your website so that you can "lock 'em in for a sale! Oh, and did I mention that it's free or almost free? By creating an "RSS Feed" from your website or Blog, you are making your content available, via third party "RSS Aggregators" to be viewed by anyone on the planet who might be interested in your subject matter.
There are different types of "RSS Aggregators"; websites which "aggregate" content into subject-based "directories" (the end user logs-in, creates an account and selects which subjects or feeds they wish to view regularly) , standalone
desktop RSS Aggregator applications, MS Outlook plug-ins letting you receive feeds as an e-mail and soon there will be RSS Aggregation built into your browser (coming version of
Explorer) giving you single-click access to your "opt-in" information. Why would end users bother to use an RSS
Aggregator? Simple answer - it's a solution to information overload that puts them in control of what they learn. RSS lets them choose the information they want to see. This contrasts with email where vendors are "pushing"
information at the end user. With RSS, the end user "pulls" it.
The Downside for Internet Marketers:
The end user exclusively controls what they want to see - so they'll have to specifically and proactively "opt-in" by selecting your feed on their RSS Aggregator. Most of those you know, will not! Also, it is extremely easy to opt-out by
simply deleting the feed!
So your content will have to be consistently valuable and engaging! - All as it should be when you think about it!
The Upside for Internet Marketers:
It's free or close to free, 100% opt-in, guaranteed delivery (no spam barriers), unlimited by the frequency at which you can send new information and perhaps most importantly of all, gives you access to potentially millions of new subscribers you never new existed or could never before have been able to access!
The bottom line on RSS is that it's going to be very big. Microsoft will include RSS in its coming "Longhorn" operating system. Get in on it now or loose out. A good starting point is www.nooked.com.

Lesson 17: Forums

Previously perceived as a platform for technology or industry "nerds", internet "forums" have become a significant market research and even selling dimension to the web. Forums are
discussions which take place between interested parties, irrespective of geography, in very specific interest areas.
The right forums are superb sources of current issues in particular industries, problems that people in those industries are experiencing and yes, an excellent source of some superb contacts in those industries!
No matter what industry you are in, there is a high - even very high probability that some major forums exist in your space. These are forum that you should not only be regularly
monitoring but actively engaging in. Without blatantly "selling", you should be building credibility for you and your company and networking with industry peers by contributing
to resolving particular issues related to what your company does.
To find all the available forums under your topic of interest, conduct the following searches on Google. You may be amazed at what you will find!
"TOPIC" forum
"TOPIC" bulletin board
"TOPIC" guestcourse
"TOPIC" comment
"TOPIC" add url
"TOPIC" chat
"TOPIC" discussion
Blogs could also be considered as company specific forums. Monitor the blogs (if they exist) of your major potential customers and contribute when possible.


Most of us have experienced those "adware" toolbars that seem to install themselves without our permission and which claim to make our search lives easier! If you're like me, you go to quite some lengths to uninstall these toolbars and do everything you can to prevent further "intrusion". However, if you're in internet marketing, there are two "Toolbars" that I highly recommend you install. Even if you don't like having toolbars displayed in your browser, you can turn them
on or off as you need them.
The first is the Google toolbar: download it from toolbar.google.com This will give you information such as Google "Page Rank" on each page you visit as well as
other information that will assist research and competitive analysis.
The second is the Alexa toolbar; download it from download.alexa.com Now considered as an indispensable part of every internet marketer's armoury, Alexa is probably the single most respected source of detailed site and traffic analysis for sites listed in its directory (most major sites). A superb competitor research tool! You can learn more about what is possible with these toolbars on their respective sites.
In Conclusion

A whole industry has evolved around the general subject of internet marketing. Having learn the course (a few times over is OK!) you now have a competency level that is superior to the majority of business people out there! You
are now able to:

Choose and engage those internet marketing initiatives that are most relevant to you.

Access further specific information in any area using the references you have been given throughout the course.

Effectively outsource any aspect of your internet marketing initiative.

Set expectations, in general terms, for any internet marketing campaign you engage.

Test new ideas quickly and monitor immediate market reaction through statistics interpretation.

Adapt your organisation’s web presence for engaging content and generate compelling reasons for prospects to optin to your “value” programme.

Improve your search engine rankings, and as a result, increase your site traffic.

Build a qualified sales pipeline using focused keyword campaigns and maintain relationships electronically using a sequential auto-responder.

Not bad for what you paid for the course?
If you would like to go a step further, you might like to attend further courses and seminars. You can find more
information about it on my www.kieronlyons.com
website.
All that now remains is for me to wish you every success in your future internet marketing endeavours!
Good luck!