The 5 Commandments of Internet Marketing

It is one thing building a website and quite another getting it to work for you. The children of the earth, you and your customers, see countless websites everyday and regardless of what you show and tell them, they already have a fully formed idea of how a website should be. You MUST, therefore, make the best first impression you possibly can.

The following, transcribed from mysterious stone carvings, is a simple guide to make sure that you get the best possible Genesis for your e-commerce website, from its design and layout to your sales and continued marketing, to give you the best possible chance of e-commerce success, to make sure you do not find yourself wandering in the wilderness. As Moses guided his children out of Egypt, we too shall guide you… Go forth and be prosperous!

1. Thou shalt ALWAYS think like your consumers. You are a consumer as well, so you know just how important it is to be able to easily locate the product you are looking for when shopping online. Organize your site into relevant categories and put your products in more than just one category, so that there is more than only one way for a consumer to find what they are looking for.

2. Thou shalt use really good photos to illustrate your products and keep the photo headlines brief. A photo can tell a consumer a lot about a product instantly and it has been proven that most consumers only scan the descriptions, so keep each sentence short and the detailed summaries to no more than 25 words.

3.Thou shalt resist the temptation to overload your website with media and fancy transitional effects. Flashy is not always better. These, actually become distractions, and your website will be less effective at keeping the consumers attention. Most snazzy website effects add to upload time and delay the consumer’s product search, commonly causing them to abandon a website altogether…which would be bad.

4. Thou shalt not complicate the process with unnecessary steps or pages. Purchasing should be easy. Make sure your check out procedure is simple and all pricing and shipping information are displayed clearly. You should always include a phone number and a return policy. This will help reinforce the consumer’s confidence in their purchase and in you.

5.Thou shalt continually promote your online business as you would any other. A website DOES NOT market itself. Make the effort to stay in touch with your customers, perhaps via newsletters or special offers. Always keep an open mind. There may be many types of markets available to you that you are not reaching, or have not considered. Think outside the box. Try targeting new markets and optimizing your content as you grow… and grow… and grow!

…and then there was your e-commerce website … and it was good.

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Shoreten your URLs with someone you trust. GOOGLE!

Shoreten your URLs with someone you trust. GOOGLE!

Short URLs like http://WeBlog4u.net or http://occasionalblogger.com are easy to remember and are easy to tell people about but with the Content Management Systems of today’s Web 2.0 where each URL can represents a data hierarchy, a command structure, a transaction path and/or session information, URLs can get quite long, complicated and ugly.

It would be better for everybody if you could shorten this and other lengthy URLs to something that is easier to communicate, say if you happened to be telling a neighbor over the fence about a website you had discovered earlier in the day.

Thankfully though, as of September 2010, everybody’s favourite web giant Google are now offering
an URL Shortening Service.

Basically, what the URL shortener does is make a URL shorter and using Google’s is incredibly easy.
Check it out at: http://www.goo.gl

1. Go to goo.gl and paste the long URL you wish to shorten into the input box at the top of the page. Click “Shorten” and to the right of the box you’ll see a short goo.gl URL that can be copied and pasted anywhere you’d like to share it.

2. If you’d like to track the analytics of your shortened URL, please sign in to your Google Account before shortening your URL. Your shortened URL will automatically be added to your goo.gl history.

It really is as simple as that. One thing is clear. It is easier and more useful to copy a short URL from an e-mail or blog post than a URL that is hundreds of characters long. It’s easier to read out loud too., easier to tell people about. Putting shortened URLs in your website can save on space and make your website load faster which means a better experience for your visitors.

The really great thing about this service being offered by Google is that it is assured. Suppose that you had created loads of short URLs and posted them all over the place and then the service offering the URL shortening service shut down. All the links that you had spent time creating and posting would be lost and purposeless.
I think we can all agree; Google isn’t going anywhere fast.

Shortening a URL is really useful on a service like Facebook and Twitter or any other social bookmarking service, where your tweets or posts have to be a certain length. There is every probability that you might want to tweet about a URL you’ve found than is actually longer than the  amount of characters you are allowed to use to tweet about it.

Shortening URLs are great for affiliate marketing too, so that you can disguise an affiliate marketing link and make your page look less like a sales page. Of course, Google offers protection against links to spam pages or anything that may be dangerous so your safety is in good hands.

Twitter Advice

by Amber Naslund

Ah, Twitter. I keep seeing all these people saying “Yay! 1,000 followers!”. And then I get sad, because I think they’re really missing the point. Connecting with people is great, but don’t you want to connect with people who will enrich your experience overall?

Everyone uses Twitter differently and I get that. But I know what’s worked for me. Much of it hasn’t been deliberate or engineered, it’s just what makes natural sense to me. But in case there’s a tip or two in here, I agreed to post about my thoughts on building community on Twitter. Here’s my take.

1. Start With Twitter Search.

Go to search.twitter.com and type in a word or phrase that represents something you’re interested in. Try something like “I’m reading” to home in on people sharing the books they’re reading. Or how about “foodie” to find other culinarily-minded folks? Be creative. Try a bunch of different words. Then follow people who are talking about subjects and areas of interest for you.

Oh, and emphasis on talking; if they’re just dropping links and rarely carry on conversation with anyone, you aren’t going to get much out of the interaction and you’ll end up disappointed.

Go ahead and follow some of the usual suspects if you like, or find “recommended” follows from Twitter, but I’m much more of a fan of finding the like minds than the notable ones. They’re harder to find, but can really be the lifeblood of a great community. Many of my favorite Twitter friends aren’t on the big radar screens (and I hope they never are, lest I have to stand in line to talk to them!).

2. Tweet, even if no one’s watching

When people visit your profile page to decide whether or not to connect with you, what you have there gives them some dimension and perspective, even if only a few people are officially “following” you. Oh, and don’t forget to put up an avatar (of your face please, not a logo, my .02) and fill in the bio stuff. People notice, and it makes you instantly feel and seem like a real human who’s on Twitter to get to know people. That’ll attract like minds to give you a chance.

3. Look at other people’s lists.

Once you find a handful of people that you enjoy following, check out their lists. See who they follow. Look on their profile page and see who they’re replying to. Follow a few more people that look interesting, conversational, and engaged. You don’t want to mass follow hundreds – Twitter will suspect you’re a spam artist – but get started with 20 or 30 and get chatting. Already have a solid following? You need step 4.

4. Jump into conversations that look interesting.

The way Twitter gets good: you have to talk with people. The way to talk with people is to start interacting with them. If there’s an interesting or fun discussion going on, jump in! @ reply someone that you’ve never chatted with before and offer a contribution or a funny. Sometimes you’ll get ignored; that’s part of the deal, I’m afraid. But often times, folks on Twitter are very open, conversational, and eager to meet new people. This is public discourse, not a private chatroom. Consider yourself welcome.

There are tons of Twitter chats that happen regularly; find one in an area that interests you and jump in. They’re fast moving, but you’ll undoubtedly meet people and make some connections.

By the way, I’d hope it goes without saying, but “jumping in” doesn’t mean “hey I saw you tweeting about lawnmowers and I wanted you to see my new website! Check it out!”. That’s just irritating. If you don’t recognize that or see why people would find that annoying, your problem is more complicated than Twitter.

5. Lose your obsession over who’s following and who isnt.

A long while back, I talked about the fallacy of tools like Qwitter (those that tell you who stopped following you). There are some different perspectives in the comments, but overall I don’t recommend you waste too much time and energy over that part. It’s just a follow. A click. Not some demonstration of your worth as a human being. Twitter also does a good job of automatically and misguidedly unfollowing people when they clean out spam and such, which means some unfollows are totally unintentional.

I never, ever notice or pay attention to who unfollows me. I focus on participating in the community that wants to be there. If someone valuable goes away, I’ll notice and track them back down.

As for how many followers you have, remember these things. Twitter has a massive abandon rate, which means that many people will follow you and never return, never say a word, never see a thing you post. Twitter is also thick with spammers and auto-follow bots, so a good chunk of any of our follower counts are made up of complete garbage.

The numbers are inflated. They’re inaccurate. And while reach can be important depending on your goals for participation on Twitter, relevant reach is what matters, and that is only ever built with time and concerted participation.

6. Think farming.

Jay Baer wrote a good post about how social media is like farming. Twitter is very similar. The problem is that too few people have the patience to be a farmer. Cultivating the seeds of relationships and trust takes time. And you can’t shortcut it; if you don’t sow the seeds at the beginning of the year and tend to them properly, you’ll have nothing to harvest at the end of the season.

And there’s no last-minute shortcut that will fix that. You can’t just throw $99 at it and buy a field of crops to harvest, much less one that will support a crop the following year. Try to treat Twitter followers like bargains on a WalMart shelf, and that’s exactly the quality of the network you’ll end up with.

7. Don’t namedrop.

You don’t need to fish the pools of the “popular” to get people to notice you. Calling out celebrities or the Twitterati to bait them into some kind of conversation or to look at your blog isn’t going to do you much good. Bragging about the recognizable people you know or talk to or just had coffee with can easily come off as very (very) thinly veiled self-importance. Be gracious. Be humble. Be real and genuine. Focus on making real connections with real people, no matter who they are.

It’s easy to tell the difference between someone who really has their head in the game, and someone who’s just trying to get people to notice them. Really. We can tell.

8. Share stuff.

Some of my favorite follows on Twitter are people who mix up conversational updates and back-and-forth with others with links to great stuff. Sometimes it’s a thought provoking blog post. Other times it’s an article, or a video, or something just to make me laugh.

Twitter is like this micro library of stuff wandering around for the finding. Share the stuff you find (in moderation). Being a resource to others is a great way to find common ground to talk about, kick around ideas, or open up new dialogue.

9. Have some personality.

The reason things like chat have always been so popular is because you can talk with real, live people over a computer. How cool is that! No crazy phone bills, you can talk to several people at once, and it’s fun to pick out the individual personalities, find the people who like the things you do, talk away about everything from work to life to the movie you just saw and hated.

Twitter is just the new version of chat. We didn’t want people in our AOL chat rooms selling us their “Make Money Online” course, either. With exception I’m sure, we don’t love them in our Twitter stream. We just want to talk and get to know one another. Open doors. Find affinities. It’s really pretty simple at its core, but man do we try to make it way too complicated.

In Conclusion…

I get asked all the time how I “got all my followers”. I didn’t set out to amass a pile of people, but I set out to build a diverse, active network. In that sense, my secrets are these:

• I did all the stuff above. Some I realized I was doing later.
• I’ve never in my life asked for a follow unless I wanted to DM someone and couldn’t. I’ve NEVER begged for followers to reach some kind of “milestone”. It doesn’t matter.
• I converse a lot, and I make it a point to be as responsive as I can. Look at my Twitter page, and you’ll see that the vast majority of my posts are replies to other people.
• I share my own posts about twice a day if I think they’re worth it. I share bunches of stuff from other people that I find interesting, informative, funny. But I’m not a link feed, either.
• I’ve been doing this for over two and a half years, nearly every day. I’m present. I participate.
• I try to be conversational, responsive, engaged, and polite. The same way I’d want people to be with me.
• I started with zero followers, too.

That’s just my method. It seems so simple and obvious to me, but maybe it’s not.

Remember: Twitter is just the medium. These same principles apply across many things, online and off. It all –always – comes down to your honest intent to build a network of people to talk to, to learn from, to share with. ALL of this depends on your desire to use Twitter that way, and not just to amass a collection of people that you can pimp your junk to. Twitter can be a gateway to a much more dimensional relationship with people, or it can just be a means to a rather disappointing end.

Whether you have the patience, time, and desire to invest in it is really up to you.

Does that help? What would you add? What’s worked for you, and where are you still struggling? Let me know how I can help some more in the comments.

Our Twitter Address: http://twitter.com/TheDesert411