Thank you to Mitch Joel of www.TwistImage.com, Background of Jay Berkowitz, LiveBlogging from the Ten Golden Rules team, Google Universal, Captcha, Conservapaedia, YouTube and instructional videos, What’s Hot Facebook, Golden Rules 1 through 5, Search Engine Optimization and more.

Read the transcript…

Transcript of 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast – Episode #1

Aired – 6/26/2007

JAY BERKOWITZ: This is episode one, the premier of THE 10 GOLDEN RULES OF INTERNET MARKETING PODCAST.

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FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Welcome to THE 10 GOLDEN RULES OF INTERNET MARKETING PODCAST. Featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into sales. Now here’s the CEO of  www.tengoldenrules.com, Jay Berkowitz.

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JAY: Well good morning, good afternoon or good evening. Whatever time this podcast finds you, welcome to our premier episode. In this podcast we’ll share case studies and examples of what’s working online we’ll interview some of the top minds in internet marketing, we’ll share what we learn from top industry trade shows and we’ll film live presentations and events which we will give to you as videocasts.  One of the things that will be a big part of this podcast is you. I want to invite you to participate by sending comments and questions. Each week we will feature listener emails and recordings, so please take part. Send comments and questions by email to podcast@10goldenrules.com. And please send us recorded audio, or use our simple call-in line at (206)888-6606. It’s just like calling a voicemail, it’s really, really easy. Just call (206)888-6606 and leave a message. The system automatically digitizes your voice and I will play your comment next week.

In this episode I will talk about how we started the podcast. I want to send a couple big thank yous out to some friends who helped us get it going. I’ll share a little bit of my background and news about industry events that we’re involved with, some trade shows we’re attending, speaking engagements and other events that we recommend. I’ll play some recordings from the team at 10 Golden Rules and they’ll share a few highlights they have discovered this week and some cool things that they are blogging about.

We’ll also have two features each week. The first one is called “What’s Hot” where we’ll look at a trend or a technology or a website that’s a buzz in the blogosphere, or something that clients are asking us about. We’ll also feature a “Ten List.” This will be a list of ten tips or ten golden rules or ten things we learned from a guest on the show.

Now before I get going I’d like to extend a virtual tip of the cap to some of the people who’ve inspired this podcast. Every week I listen to Mitch Joel’s SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION and Joe Jaffe’s ACROSS THE SOUND. And as often as I can I play, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson’s FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, The BusinessWeek CEO GUIDE TO TECHNOLOGY, AMERICAN COPYWRITER, INSIDE PR, NEW COMM ROAD, and Danny Sullivan and Daron Babin’s DAILY SEARCHCAST, just to name a few.

Several weeks ago I saw Mitch Joel speak an event. Mitch challenged the audience to participate in new media and to raise the bar. I’ve been working on the technical aspects of getting this podcast ready for several weeks and Mitch has been a huge, huge help in sharing with us some of the tools and techniques we needed to get this thing going. So a big thank you to Mitch. Please help me pay it forward by visiting http://www.twistimage.com . Read Mitch’s blog, subscribe to his podcast and join his community. And to all the inspirational podcasters, I’ll do my best to add a little value to this community.

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JAY: And now, here’s our news and events portion. Last week we presented at Search Engine Strategies in Toronto. This week, June 18th and June 19th we’ll be at the Search Engine Strategies Latino. And next week on June 27th I will be moderating a panel at ad:tech Miami titled “Blogs, Podcasts and Vidcasts.” On the panel will be Jesus Hoyos, the managing partner of Solvis Consulting. He has a great Spanish blog on CRM, customer relationship management, athttp://jesushoyos.typepad.com . We’ll include all these links in the show notes. Julio Vaca is a senior product manager at PodZinger and he’ll be on the panel as well. PodZinger has speech to text software that can turn your podcast into words. We plan to give it a try. And Diego Naranjo is a director of Latin3. And he has a really solid blog at www.miamiadguy.com. So check those guys out and we hope to see you at the show.

In July, on July 9th we’ll be at Affiliate Summit 2007 East and I will be presenting a keynote presentation called “Web 2.0 – The Ten Critical Strategies for Affiliate Marketing.” If you’re planning on attending one of these events, please get in touch. We will be organizing a meet-up and I’d love to meet you in person. Also, we will be doing live recordings with other presenters at the events and we’ll share those recordings on future occasions of this podcast.

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JAY: Now I’d like to share a quick background, my personal history. In 1994 when the first graphical internet browser was launched and the internet became a marketing channel, I was running a marketing group for Coca-Cola. We were challenged with figuring out how to position our brands in this new and emerging media. I went on to manage marketing departments for Sprint and McDonald’s Restaurants. Then I moved on to the successful diet and fitness website eDiets.com. Virtually everything we did at eDiets was online. We were one of the top five internet advertisers in the world at that time, spending 25-30 million a year on banners, landing pages, email and search marketing. At the same time I was working with my wife’s small business. She manufactured baby blankets and we were testing out marketing programs, with a much smaller budget than eDiets. In the summer of 2003 while I was working at eDiets I was asked to speak at the Direct Marketing Association Summit. I wrote a presentation called “The Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing.” My goal was to share what my associates and I had learned the hard way about the internet. Before there were any books or any courses, we had to do things by trial and error.

After I spoke at the conference five or six people came up to me and asked me if I did any consulting. I realized there was an opportunity in the marketplace for a consulting agency that specialized in the internet and 10 Golden Rules was born.

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JAY: This section of the podcast is called “Live from the Blog.” Each week the team at www.tengoldenrules.com blogs about trends they’re uncovering. The blog is located at http://tengoldenrules.com or you can click on the blog link on our homepage at www.tengoldenrules.com. Here’s some of the top things that the team has uncovered this week. First up is Margie.

MARGIE: If you’ve noticed things like Google Maps, froogal listings and videos at the top of Google’s search results, you’ve noticed their latest innovation, universal search. It’s a massive change for our industry and it’s impact is only starting to be felt. I appreciate the richness of search results as a regular user of Google, and feel energized by the possibilities for our clients. Recently a client video we uploaded to YouTube and Google Video almost instantly infiltrated the Google universal search results, making a big splash for our client. Goggle’s innovation is already challenging the way we approach search engine optimization and the end result, if you apply the appropriate creativity and strategic thinking, is another doorway to social media marketing.

JEFF: This is Jeff. Last week I bought a Palm Treo and went to the MyPalm site to register my Treo to get free updates and free software. While I was there I had to register and part of the registration process is proving you’re an individual, a real person, not an automated bot. That little system is called a “captcha.”  It’s that little four or five or six letter code that is generated, that you fill in, that a bot doesn’t recognize, that shows you’re a real person. Well when I went to MyPalm and registered the captcha that came up was a curse word. Not your random four-letter word that many people would be offended by, but it was still, I won’t bother saying it on this podcast but I’ll spell it out for you. It was a-n-u-s. Many people out there would probably be offended by that. At first I thought it was kind of funny but the more I thought about it, the more offended I was. So if the vice president of marketing or customer relations of Cingular, or AT&T or Palm is out there, you should be careful what’s going on. And if you want to send me a free palm, that’d be great in the process.

SUSANNA: Hi, this is Susanna and lately I’ve been watching the growing trend of how-to, do-it-yourself and instructional videos booming across the internet. Many of us, including myself, search for these videos regularly. Whether we want to learn how to do magic card tricks, boil an egg, open a stuck drive in your PC or learn new hula-hooping techniques, we can find a video, usually a plethora of videos, on the internet. Here are a few sites that are aiding us in our search for these videos. YouTube, purchased last year for 1.6 billion dollars by Google, is the most popular and widely-known video viewing and sharing site. ExpertVillage, recently purchased by Demand Media, contains how-to videos and articles from credentialed experts. And VideoJug provides how-to videos by experts and users. So what sites are you using to satisfy your how-to craving?

KATHRYN: Hi, this is Kathryn. Touting themselves as the “trustworthy encyclopedia” Conservapedia is rapidly getting noticed in the media as the conservative online encyclopedia that is taking on Wikipedia, the number 9th ranked site on the internet. In a stroke of brilliance this little encyclopedia that could has gotten our attention with its rather alternative viewpoint. Unlike Wikipedia, it’s not trying to claim it’s unbiased. This social networking site revels in its narrow viewpoint of the world, claiming that its contents are educational, clean and concise. I foresee in the next couple of weeks as being very busy for Conservapedia. Bloggers will either vilify the conservative viewpoint or support the conservative view with almost a religious zeal.

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JAY: Well thank you very much to the team. That’s our first time out and I think everyone did a great job. This next section is called “What’s Hot”. Each week we’ll look at a website or a trend or a technique that’s got a lot of buzz on the internet. So here’s the “What’s Hot” intro.

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JAY:  One website is incredibly hot right now, seems like everybody’s talking about it, and that website is Facebook. Until recently Facebook was the MySpace for University students.  The business community preferred a website called LinkedIn. Right now Facebook is the hot site for social networking at any age. The site Facebook was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard University. Initially the site featured student photos and information Zuckerberg hacked out of the Harvard student records. After some resistance from the Harvard Administration, the site was re-launched as a student directory. The students filled in all of the information and the site took off. Soon friends at other schools including Yale and Stanford wanted a version of the site. After his sophomore year Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California for the summer. Once he landed some VC funding he took the advice of another Harvard drop-out, named Bill Gates, and he deferred his schooling. He hasn’t gone back. By 2005 there were over 5 million active Facebook users and in September of 2006 the site was opened up to absolutely everyone and the thing absolutely took off. A cover story on Fast Company Magazine in May seemed to propel awareness into the stratosphere. Seems like everyone is talking about Fast Company now.

We recently met with John Donovan, he’s the COO of Lending Club. This is a great concept. It’s person to person lending and the website launched their product, in beta, on Facebook. There’s no dot-com for this site, it’s only available on Facebook. And Mitch Joel from SIX PIXELS formed a Facebook Group. It’s called “The Six Pixels of Separation Podcast Society.” Just three weeks ago he started it up and there’s already almost 400 members on the society. Now if you’re on Facebook or LinkedIn, please search for Jay Berkowitz and send me a friend request. I’d love to connect with you.

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JAY: For our first “Ten List” I wanted to share the ten golden rules of internet marketing. Today I’ll cover the first five golden rules, with examples of how they work in the market. Next week we’ll review rules number six through ten.

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JAY: Golden Rule Number One – There are no rules. When it comes to internet marketing you want to block everything you think you know about marketing because traditional marketing is much more predictable. On the internet the best practice is to test, test, test and test again. It’s inexpensive, it’s fast and you can test different offers, different designs, different webpages to evaluate consumer response. When I first joined eDiets we had a six-step sales funnel. That’s six pages you needed to complete to purchase our diet program. It was also a bit technical looking and a bit male-oriented. I suggested a shorter, three-step sign-up funnel with a softer, more feminine color scheme, as over 90% of our audience was female. The tech team rolled their eyes a little bit; they’d done a lot of testing on the six-step funnel. But the company loved testing so we built my three-step design and for a couple of days we sent half of the traffic to the website to the six-step sign-up and the other half saw the new three-step funnel. It was no surprise to the tech team that the six-step funnel was the winner. It had more sales at the end of the test. But the new three-step funnel had one winning element, more people signed-up for our email newsletter. So next we created a new test version of the six-step funnel with a page similar to the page on the three-step that acquired the high number of newsletter sign-ups. We tested the old six-step against the new six-step, and the new six-step won. We had a new winner, or a new best-operating landing page.

Now this golden rule applies for everything you do on the internet – website design, banner ads, email marketing, pricing and offer testing. And it is the absolute rule with what is now the most important category on internet marketing, which is search engine marketing. Ad copy that works well for an attorney in Chicago can be a dud for someone in New York. A style of landing page that works really well and breaks sales records for a vitamin company can perform very, very poorly for a diet product. What we think should work sometimes does, but sometimes it bombs. So the moral of the story is we test everything and we test often. We test keywords. We test ad copy. We test landing pages. And we constantly adjust bids. Its fast, it’s easy and testing is critical to success in the critical search engine marketing environment.

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JAY: Golden Rule Number Two – The internet is not television. A common mistake made with internet marketing is to use a television strategy. The worst homepage design you can make is to play a flash TV commercial. Consumers’ patience online now lasts less than four seconds. When they click to a website they want to know who you are and what you offer, fast or they know how to hit the back button and return to the Google search or the website that referred them to you. From a strategic perspective internet marketing is really direct marketing.

The Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, says that 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your customers. On the internet this rule is hyper-exaggerated. Often 90% of your revenue comes from 10% of your customers. Or in many cases, only 1% of the visitors to your website will complete a contact form. IDIC – Identify, Differentiate, Interact and Customize – comes from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers who wrote the great ONE TO ONE direct marketing books. This rule is very, very true online. Amazon does an excellent job at IDIC. When I come to their site they identify me as a customer and welcome me back. They differentiate the experience for me with my name. And they have three or four areas of the site I can interact with that feature customized offers based on my previous shopping patterns and items bought by other customers who’ve purchased the same items I have.

As with direct marketing, we can measure everything we do on the internet and improve our programs by following on our successes. We can measure the cost to acquire a customer. This is what we call Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA. For example, if we spend $1,000 one month on Google and we acquire 100 customers, our Google CPA is $10. Next we can accurately determine what a customer is worth through their lifetime relationship with our company. We call that Lifetime Value Analysis, or LTV. We measure how much revenue we generate from an average customer over an extended period of time.

The third thing that differentiates internet marketing from television is push versus pull marketing. Television pushes messages to consumers. On the internet, consumers are actively searching for products and services. Each month over 46 billion searches are being conducted. And approximately 55 – 60% of these searches are on Google and the partners they provide results to. Over 80% of purchases are now being researched online. We will devote entire episodes of this podcast in the future to natural search engine optimization, explaining how to design your website so that it comes up on the left-hand side results that are generated by the search engine algorithms. And we’ll spend a lot of time on strategies for success with pay-per-click search advertising. That is the little text ads that appear on the short, right-hand side of search results.

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JAY: Golden Rule Number Three is Create a UVP, a unique value proposition. That’s a free tool to engage customers in an interactive relationship with you. This strategy works in every category on the internet. In business-to-business advertising you can offer a free white paper download in exchange for a customer’s name and email address. Or you can promote a free newsletter, such as The 10 Golden Rules Newsletter. On consumer sites we often develop a free calculator, such as a free mortgage savings calculator on financial website, or a free health profile on a vitamin website. One of the most simple and successful UVPs we ever developed was for our first client, Annie’s Costumes. Four years ago we ran a contest. We offered site visitors a chance to win a plasma-screen television in exchange for taking our Halloween survey. A simple contest with a hot prize can help you build a database of interested customers. When the customer completes the contest entry, simply ask them to opt in to receive special offers...