The Members Area is coming along at a pace. We are covering all aspects of Internet Marketing in there with videos explaining the simple stuff like “How to Set Up Your Adwords Account In Your Favour, Not Google’s” and “How to Set Up A Simple Wordpress Blog On a Keyword Targeted Domain” and “How To Use Facebook Marketing To Generate Low Cost Leads” and much, much more.

Here’s a sample video, you will have seen more if you have been to one of my Internet Marketing Clinics) discussing and illustrating how to re-write articles for SEO Article Marketing for maximum link juice…

You are welcome to join my Inner Circle, or at least test it out for a fiver: it’s ridiculously cheap (but not for long), so check it out by clicking here.

When it comes to video marketing, it’s horses for courses in terms of what level of quality is needed to represent you. One thing that is utterly clear is that if you are NOT using video to market your business, you WILL be left for dust.

One of our clients, Stephen Thompson, is the Managing Director of Brass and Traditional Sinks Ltd. We have recently rebuilt their website, Sinks.co.uk, to be fully-SEO friendly from the ground up and enable people to buy their sinks online anytime. A big part of the strategy is to use video to capture not just SEO territory but to also assist with Conversion Rate Optimisation.

One of the critical elements to all online marketing is to let your character be represented by what you do on screen. This is why we have created this video featuring Stephen himself to represent his brand. Notice the choice of music, the words used in the copy, the style of the camera work. None of these elements are left to chance.

More detailed information on how to really get leverage from your online video marketing will be found in our Members Area.

In the name of market research, your comments on these two videos we’ve produced for kitchen sink specialists Sinks.co.uk would be very much appreciated. The only difference between them is the choice of music.

Sounds like a small difference, doesn’t it?

Each element of everything you put on a website will have an impact on your conversion rates. All of these add up to have a profound effect on how many visitors convert to a lead or a sale. This is a simplistic test, and also a bit of fun. It’s really to get you thinking about your own site and how you can break down elements to test people’s reaction. And the simplest way of doing that is to simply ask them (so watch the video and leave your comments below. Ta!)

I’ve been working very closely on relaunching the kitchen sinks website for Brass & Traditional Sinks Limited. It launched today at last!

One small factor that I have proven increases conversion rates (although I’m not going to disclose here by how much :-) is the use of a photo by the telephone call-to-action, typically top-right on most “money” sites.

The majority of websites will use a stock photo of a girl with a headset on. Since reading “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell a few years ago..

.. I have been intrigued by the idea that our subconscious makes the right decision (am I going to buy from this person? is this a genuine work of art? do I fancy this person?) etc. but then our conscious mind spends forever procrastinating about that decision.

I’ve taken this into website conversion rate optimisation by the testing of this one factor – the call centre girl picture – by varying the positioning and the “reality” of the photo. I have found that the very best converting picture is one of a real person that works within the business. Add to that the need to look into the eyes of the customer – pictures of people looking down or at a computer screen really suck.

If you check our skip hire or portable toilet hire websites, you’ll see that I’ve added a red pencil “This is Louise. She really works here” with an arrow pointing to Louise – who really does work here.

This makes us stand out in a number of ways. It breaks convention. It adds authenticity. But the real killer, for me, is that this is a genuine photo and I believe that visitors to the site can subconsciously tell that it is a genuine picture, and that helps overcome the number one barrier to conversions – trust.

I’ve not got them to add the red pencil stuff yet, but the picture of a girl on the sinks website is of Vicky who – guess what – really works there! I took the picture with my iPhone whilst filming the videos for their website (still editing them). It’s not a perfect picture in terms of resolution and composure, but it’s completely real and that’s what matters online.

This theme was discussed at length at my last internet marketing course – if you’re in a market that is dominated by companies full of cash (like the travel industry, for example), it is far better to use your actual personality, your “voice”, to create a brand that no-one can compete with (because no-one can be you) rather than looking like a low-rent corporation copycat.

I’m writing this post whilst testing the new SEO Blogger Firefox Plugin from Wordtracker Labs. It’s a free plugin that is running alongside me writing this…(click to enlarge screenshot)

I am usually very careful about which keywords I include in any page and will go to the lengths of keyword researching around a particular subject (usually by popping over to the google keyword tool), so I think this is a very cool idea if it delivers quality keyword results. As this is my first go using it, it’s not a conclusive test of it’s power but, in prinicple, another great idea from Mike Mindel and the London Wordtracker crew.

I guess this is a handy tool for writing any webpage copy (not limited to blogs). I just tested this on some of my niche’s and the number of results given were far fewer than I’d expect from Google or Market Samurai but, as always with Wordtracker, it did throw up some nuggets that you can’t usually seem to find elsewhere.

Some of the keywords it threw up for me for this blog post were:

wordtracker 121 searches
wordtracker free keyword suggestion tool 2 searches
wordtracker keywords 6 searches
free wordtracker tool 4 searches
free seo blogger templates 1 search

Download yours here.

Another cool tool for any internet marketers’ arsenal. I’ll let you know how I get on with it.

Great news! Ken McCarthy is coming back to Blighty to do another System Intensive following last years’ mega-successful event.

The System 2009 London UK Intensive is a fantastic event to go to if you have any interest at all in Internet Marketing.

Ken has been a teacher of mine for over 4 years. I’m a massive fan, and a lot of my internet marketing success was down to visiting his System Seminars in Chicago. It was there that I met the likes of Perry Marshall, Dave Bullock, Dave Taylor, Howie Jacobson, Glenn Livingstone, David Rothwell, and a bunch of other people that are all right up there in the field.

Last year’s intensive was one I went to as a visitor, but Ken got me up to introduce him without warning me beforehand. I was hungover and a bit nervous, but I did the job okay. Later in the day he got me to join in with a live workshop ripping into websites of people in the audience. It was amazing (and my favourite sport) especially as I was sharing the stage with some other highly distinguished people like the legendary Drayton Bird (who I now quote in all my talks), the conversion rate squirrels Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson, wordtracker founder Mike Mindel and Ben Hunt, the web design genius.

If you’ve not heard of Ken, he’s the guy who first realised that the internet is a direct response medium when he held the first Internet Marketing seminar way back in 1994 in San Fransisco. Check it out:

I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be running events like this. I suggest you get yourself booked onto the System UK Intensive as soon as you can – I might even be there to meet you!

Just got this email from Martin Holling, who came to my Internet Marketing Course on June 12th/13th:

“Subject: Your Marketing Clinic has worked a treat already!

Dear Mark,

Just to let you know that following your Internet marketing Clinic we have already had significant improvements within 10 days!

Even though I had put lots of effort in writing a page on the resort of Almerimar in Spain, loaded it with keywords and updated it regularly the google bot just ignored it, with a bit of your magic and link from your blog it appeared within 3 days and with a few more enhancements it has now arrived on page 1 I never thought we would see anything like that so soon its incredible!

We have written a few squidoos and got a few directory links going and are implementing lots of the things we learned over the weekend, Google seems to be taking more notice of our site and even more good news the only page that remained unindexed by google has also today been indexed! YES!

Just the sort of thing to keep our enthusiasm levels up and incentive to carry on internet marketing (good name for one of your DVD’s?)!

Can’t stop now I’ve just seen some anchor text……

Thank you once again!

Kind regards,

Martin K Holling
Director
Travel Empire Ltd.
Disneyland Paris Specialists”

It’s just the beginning Martin….(and thanks for the kind words)

I’m very excitedly playing with the new Rank Checker feature inside Market Samurai. If you haven’t got Market Samurai, don’t just sit there with your finger up your bum – go and get it now!

Here’s my online buddy Brent Hodgson explaining how it works:

AWESOME WORK GUYS!

Heading off for a video shoot in Shropshire yesterday, I saw a bus with a large T-bar advert on the side for Unwins Seeds that got me so mad I had to blog about it.

Are these guys stupid? Where’s the web address? Where’s the phone number (“National SeedLine” anyone?).

(If this image doesn’t load full size, go here for a better view of the advert)

In the middle of a recession, not outlining the ways in which a customer can get hold of you and buy your products directly is utter madness. I can see the meeting in which this campaign was presented to the directors at Unwins. A “creative” from a media agency in London waffling on about how this enhances the Unwins brand (in a way it has, because I’m talking about it!). Brand Schmand. If you are going to spend a lot of money on advertising anything, for God’s sake give your customers the information they need right away to be able to buy your stuff.

Would the addition of “.co.uk” have damaged the “branding” of this advert? I think not.

Even better than that, use unique phone numbers so you can trace exactly what response your advertising investment gets, as I did with this one we did for Topskips.com (click to enlarge):

By the way, if you work at Unwins you might want to give me a call – your website is very badly optimised for conversions :-)

I had a great time at my June Internet Marketing Clinic in a very sunny Manchester.

We had all sorts of people at this event, from Terry Edwards who owns a southport restaurant Casa Italia (amongst other businesses), to Steve Charlesworth and Martin Holling who run a travel agency that specialises in almerimar holidays and other dynamically generated package holidays to Spain, the Canaries and Disneyland Paris, to Wayne Connors who runs one of the UK’s biggest network cabling companies, ACCL Ltd., to Rachel Elnaugh herself – one of the UK’s most well-known female entrepreneurs, to Chris Peck – a specialist in acquisitions and formerly of British Agricultural Foods, to 19 year old Vicky – just starting out on her business and internet marketing journey with UK kitchen sinks specialist Sinks.co.uk.

The first day was the usual super-intensive brain blowing content I’ve been delivering since I started these clinics in October 08. I started with the question “What is Internet Marketing?” and then unveiled all the techniques I’ve been using to maximise traffic and conversions since 2003 over the next 8 hours.

Day two was completely different in that we took everyone’s online activities to pieces and reassembled them with low-cost, actionable plans to achieve maximum long term success in the shortest time possible. From keyword research, to reassembling web pages with on-page SEO, to getting under the hood of people’s adwords account to enhance their performance, to rewriting copy on the page to increase conversions at the same time as optimising them for long tail keywords.

I was ably assisted by my SEO cohort Steve Wild. Thanks guys for helping make it such a good weekend.

One part of the feedback we got was from people being surprised at how laid back the whole event was. We even took everyone out for dinner and drinks on the Friday night – it’s that kind of event! (I find a lot of the most useful marketing ideas come over a bottle of wine outside of the classroom).

If you want to book for my next Internet Marketing Clinic – click on the link to find out when it is.