Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

£50 voucher for Google AdWords (UK Only)

If you're based in the UK, you may be interested in a Google AdWords incentive which gives new companies who sign up for the service £50 worth of Google AdWords for FREE. The offer lasts until the 15th August. You simply need to type in your company name and address and wait for a voucher to come through by post.

Update
For a limited period (in November 2007) Google is now offering a £30 AdWords Voucher 

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Google AdWords - Useful Tutorials

Writing Good Web Copy

Internet Marketing is not JUST about search engine optimisation and submission. So many people focus on how to get to visitors to a Web site without thinking about what you, the site owner, are going to tell them or expect them to do when they there. Writing good copy that forces your visitor to act takes a long time to get right – here are some good tips to get you started from Gwyneth Dyer in an article entitled Writing Web Copy That Works, from MarketingProfs.com. Let me list her top 10:

1. Connect with readers immediately
2. Use the tenets of good persuasive writing
3. Write in the first or second person
4. Find an authentic voice
5. Use an inverted-pyramid style
6. Write in self-contained, clearly labeled blocks
7. Write so readers can scan
8. Apprehend suspicious sentences
9. Be consistent
10. Finished? Read your copy aloud!

B2B websites - help your fans help you!

This is a great article to help companies focus their attention on what B2B websites should be aiming to achieve. In short, Jakob Nielsen in B2B: Help Your Fans Convince Their Bosses has identified three 'big' goals and they include:

Survive the screening process - help your target audience get through the search engines, be attracted to the home page and offer the right content.
Support your advocates - give them the tools they require to convince their peers and superiors
Build a reputation for being easy to do business with - this includes post-sales support.

The logic behind the approach that he advocates is this: if you do the homework for your target market, they can win over their peers and bosses and hopefully select your company from the others.

As Jakob Nielsen says,

Advocacy kits are rare on current B2B sites, but they're a great way to leverage the Internet's one-to-one ability to reach directly inside a customer company and connect with people who are eager to help you close the deal.

Survey Monkey - Allowing you to get closer to your customers

Today, I received an email from Six Apart, the people who provide the technology for this TypePad blog, inviting me to take part in an on-line survey. The email took me to the website of Survey Monkey, the people who provide the on-line survey technology. The survey took a very short time, had a nice look and feel and was easy to use. The objective of the survey was to ask me questions on how I found the TypePad service, what improvements I would like to see and what new features I would like to see to the service.

One of the keys to a successful website is the ability to collect timely information on your website's performance. For all those with websites, this is a neat tool to help you work out what users think about your site, whether you are addressing their needs, identifying issues with functionality and asking them how you can improve the service. The pricing appears to be very good, too:

Professional Subscription - $19.95/month for up to 1,000 responses.
Basic - maximum of 10 questions and 100 responses per survey.

Google Adwords - useful tutorials

If you've thought of using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site, you really should have a look at these on-line tutorials at the Google site. They cover virtually everything you need to know to get an AdWords up and running. Before you start, it may be an idea to type in some keywords into Google that you expect your target audiencce may use - just to get an idea of what your potential opposition is using and to get you in the right frame of mind.

• Getting Started with Google AdWords
• Keyword Matching Tutorial
• Understanding Conversion Tracking

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Google Adwords Tips from the Google team

Web Analytics - some interesting observations

I just downloaded a pdf entitled: 25 Real Stories of Better Results through Web Analytics, from the NetIQ site. Though it is obviously trying to promote Web Trends and its new WebTrends 7 product, it does have some interesting insights into how web analytics can help flagging websites. Though some of the functionality can be found from current statistics packages, other advanced features would have to be acquired through purchasing this product, entry level prices start at $495.

Here's one such story:

"We used to send a hint of the Tip Of The Week to our partners on Fridays, with a click-through rate of 23%. The landing page contains a full text of the Tip and a mini-survey checking how valuable, innovative and applicable the Tip is to the reader, providing us with useful input. Last September, after viewing our reports, we found that Mondays have more intense traffic than Fridays. We started sending the Tips on Mondays and almost doubled the click-through rate to 44%!"
Raphael Barki, Marketing Research, Senior Manager
RAD Data Communications