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.

The Real Deal at Sinks.co.uk - click to enlarge

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.