Tạp trí Internet Marketing Số 26 - SEP 2013

september 2013

> ECOMMERCE
PLATFORM
COMPARISON

JOIN US ON
FACEBOOK

P17

> BOOST YOUR
WEBSITE
PERFORMANCE

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+

> 80/20 OF
SALES
MARKETING

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MANAGING YOUR
SOCIAL MEDIA
CAMPAIGNS

COVER STORY:

P29

THE 2 BUSINESS KILLERS:
PANDA AND PENGUIN - SURVIVING THE STORM

ERIC LANCHERES
>> THE ORIGINAL AND BEST INTERNET MARKETING MAGAZINE
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P7

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

I

f you haven’t got access to the member’s area please feel free
to do at http://internetmarketingmag.net/become-member/ (it’s
free). This month’s complete audio interview with SEO expert Eric
Lancheres has now been added. It has lots of sections in it that were
not included in the magazine, so be sure to check it out.
A special thanks to those who have left reviews in the apple
platforms as it really helps us out. If you are getting good value from
Internet Marketing Magazine and you can spare 1 minute of your
time to click this link to give us a quick honest review that would be
greatly appreciated (click ‘view in iTunes’ then scroll down and click
‘write a review’, thanks :).
We hope you get great value from Internet Marketing Magazine.
Wishing you the best of success online,
Regards,

Greg Cassar is Australia’s leading Internet Marketing Strategist. With

InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com Greg & his team provide traffic, development
and conversion optimization services for medium to large businesses,
enterprises & eCommerce stores looking for serious growth online. You can
follow Greg’s latest updates by subscribing to Internet Marketing Magazine at
InternetMarketingMag.net for the new members area and the latest issue updates.

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internet marketing magazine
september 2013

MEET OUR EXPERT PANEL

CONTENTS

Jon Gregoire

4

Schooled in Psychology and Business at
the University of California, San Diego, Jon works as a content
marketing specialist for CPC Strategy. His focus includes
ecommerce trends, content marketing, business inspiration, and
of course, comparison shopping. You can contact Jon directly at
jon@cpcstrategy.com.
Read his article on eCommerce Platform Comparison on PAGE17

Mitchell Schneider is the Social Communications
Manager at ClickTale. Over the past few years, he has worked
closely with global companies to help each one of them get
more results from social networks. Through vast experience,
Mitch has mastered some of the most powerful social media
websites. He has also guest lectured at Tel Aviv University’s
Sofaer International MBA - Israel’s leading international MBA
program- on the importance of Social Media. You can follow
Mitch on Twitter - @MitchSchneider
Read his article on Website Performance on PAGE 24

Adam Kreitman

Expert commentary
on what are the
big plays that have
recently happened
online and how they
affect you.

6

Internet Marketing
Mag interviews SEO
Expert Eric Lancheres
on how to survive
Google Panda and
Penguin.

17

eCommerce
platform
comparison meant
to provide general
overviews to send
you down the path
best suited for your
business.

coaches business owners on how
to make their websites more compelling to their prospects..
and to Google. He owns Words That Click, a firm specializing
in Conversion Optimization and managing Google AdWords
campaigns for small businesses.Follow him on Google+

24

Read his article on the 80/20 of Sales & Marketing on PAGE27

27

Stuart Davidson

a freelance digital marketing
and web design professional from Cambridge, UK. He has
worked with over 50 businesses to establish brands and
maximise online potential. You can find out more about Stuart
on his website, www.thesocialshark.co.uk. He blogs at www.
stuartjdavidson.com.
Read his article on Managing Social Media on PAGE32

Know the four
simple steps to
boost your website’s
performance.

Understanding
the 80/20 of
Sales and Marketing so
you can work less and
earn more.

32

Tips on how
to save time
managing your social
media campaigns so
that you can free up
time for other activities
adn keep your business
streamlined.

september 2013

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>

INTERNET UPDATE

THE
STATE OF THE INTERNET
>

1/3 OF THE WORLD ONLINE
– MARK ZUCKERBERG AIMING
TO CONNECT THE OTHER
2/3RDS
Currently a staggering one in every
seven people in the worlds uses
Facebook. This is despite the fact
that currently only 1/3 of the worlds
population is online.
Now Facebook Founder and Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg is leading
a push to get the remaining 4 billion
people connected to the web and
ultimately Facebook as well.
Heading up a new partnership called
Internet.org Facebook is aiming
to drastically cutting the cost of
delivering basic Internet services
on mobile phones, particularly in
developing countries.

Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericsson
and others have agreed to work
with Facebook as partners on the
initiative.
Transmitting data such as a text

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september 2013

message or a web page requires
bandwidth that is scarce in many
parts of the world. The partners
will invest in tools and software
to improve data compression
capabilities and make data networks
and services run more efficiently.

>

FACEBOOK CHANGES THE
RULES AND THE GAME ON
PROMOTIONS
With recent announcements in late
August Facebook has made it easy to
run contests.
Running contest promotions was more
difficult previously because Facebook
used to require that you run
promotions through an app, which
meant going through a development
cycle.
Facebook is now allowing businesses
to collect entries for contests and
giveaways by having users ‘Like’
their page or update, post on their
page, or leave a comment. For
instance, ‘Likes’ can now be used as
a voting mechanism in promotions,
and marketers can now ask people
to submit names of a new product in
exchange for a chance to win a prize.
Here is an example of a promotion
that is within Facebook’s new
‘Facebook Promotion Guidelines’.

Facebook is concerned with its
environment becoming ‘contest
spam’ so the contest is not allowed to
be about encouraging people to tag
themselves or companies or products
that they’re not actually depicted in.
For example
It’s OK to ask people to submit names
of a new product in exchange for a
chance to win a prize. It’s not OK
to ask people to tag themselves
in pictures of a new product in
exchange for a chance to win a prize.
We’ll watch this space and let you
know how it evolves.

In this section of Internet Marketing Magazine our editor Greg Cassar cover’s
the facts and provides expert commentary on what are the big plays that have
recently happened online and how they affect you.

>

YAHOO TRAFFIC HIGHER
THAN GOOGLES FOR THE
FIRST TIME IN YEARS
For the first time in more than two
years Yahoo web sites were the most
visited from desktops in the USA in
July. This is according to a recent
report from comScore, which tracks
unique visitors to U.S. properties
across the Web.

With 196.6 million visitors to Yahoo
sites and 192.3 million to Google
properties, Yahoo traffic was higher
than Google’s for the first time since
May 2011. Yahoo’s traffic continues to
rise with unique visitors up by roughly
20% compared to July of last year.
Not surprisingly Yahoo’s stock is up
more than 80% from a year ago.
In search Google is still very much
the top dog as it controls a 67% share
of the U.S. search market, according
to data tracker comScore. Microsoft’s
Bing search engine controls about 18%
of the U.S. search market. Yahoo,
which uses Bing for its search results,
has an 11% share.

>

ANDROID REACHES A
BILLION USERS

drawback, as other smart watches
work the same way.

A recent Google announcement in the
last month stated that Google has
now licensed over a billion instances
of its Android mobile operating
system.
The race to a billion was first won by
Microsoft with it’s Windows Operating
System on PCs. Facebook was
second with reaching 1 billion users
last year.
Google’s Android platform was the
third to reach the milestone. It did
it in just over half the time that
Facebook took to reach the billion.
Apple’s IOS platform is the next one
predicted to reach 1 billion as a
result of the popularity of iTunes, the
iPhone and the iPad.

>

SAMSUNG ANNOUNCE
NEW ‘GALAXY GEAR’ SMART
WATCH
With Samsung’s soon to be released
new Galaxy Gear smart watch you
can make and receive calls, send text
messages, download apps and even
capture photos and videos.
It’s designed as a “companion
device”, meaning that it has to
be paired with a smartphone to
function properly. This isn’t a major

At the moment it’s designed just to
be coupled with a restricted subset
of Samsung Galaxy smartphones
but that may change over time
as a planned software upgrade in
October will extend the Galaxy
Gear’s compatibility to the Galaxy S3,
Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Note II.
Other smart watches such the Sony
SmartWatch, Pebble and WIMM One
aren’t tied to specific devices, and
can therefore be used with any
Android smartphone or tablet. This
certainly limits the Galaxy Gear’s
appeal, but it also allows for tighter
‘apple-style’ integration.
Whether or not the smartwatch or
the smartglasses are set to be the big
breakthrough that the smartphone
was to the world is still to be seen
- however it does make for an
interesting future in tech and the
web. For web developers it may make
for one other device that websites
need to be formatted for.

september 2013

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

ALL ABOUT
ERIC LANCHERES
• Eric Lancheres is an SEO expert of the very
highest magnitude on the global stage.
• Eric has been an SEO expert since 2002, and has a
track record of success providing SEO solutions for
medium and large businesses throughout the world.
• Eric is often referred to as ‘The SEO Doctor’ as a
result of his abilities to recover sites from the ‘SEO
Dead’ and bring them back to life again.

september 2013

“

“

Panda really looks at
the user experience. If
your users are coming to
your site and then leaving
right away - that’s the first
thing Google doesn’t want.

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

ERIC LANCHERES
SURVIVING THE STORM
An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar
How did you get started in this world of SEO?
and then go on to be known as ‘the go-to guy’
in this Panda and Penguin area?
ERIC: I started through desperation. Everyone
has a story, and mine isn’t a glamorous one. I
was an affiliate marketer, and I was doing really
well. Like a lot of other people, I had recurring
revenue. I was doing SEO full-time to power
up my affiliate marketing efforts. Then Panda
came along, and I basically lost everything.

I was already really good at SEO, and I thought
that I understood everything. I was a little
cocky back. That was really a humbling
moment where you realize that the landscape
has changed. Everything that you knew before
about search-engine optimization doesn’t
necessarily apply any more.
So I lost everything and I went to work on
figuring out the algorithm on a whole different
level: what was happening at Google? why had
some sites got penalized? And why had other
sites not?
I started doing test after test after test, and
after about a year I finally had results. I did my
first Panda recovery, and then I did a second
one and a third one, and then I started putting
that all together and I came out with what is
Panda Breakthrough today. Since then, we’ve
done hundreds of recoveries for our clients.
What happened is that I was thrown into the

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world of SEO. I never really meant to be there,
but because of a need, I fell into it. Now that’s
what I do full-time and I love it so much.

What would be your quick definition of SEO
and also quality score?
ERIC: SEO stands for search-engine
optimization, and it’s really just building a site
that will do well on search engines. Once you
know what search engines look for, then SEO is
just designing your site so readers like you and I
could go and have a good time on your website,
and also search engines can crawl and see
that your website is worth indexing and worth
showing to other people.
Quality score is how good Google determines
your site to be. I use a figurative scale, just to
paint the image. Google might work in a slightly
different way, but I say on a scale of 0-10 how
good does Google believe your website is? If
Google says you’re a 10, they’re more likely to
show your website to a lot of people and you’re
more likely to rank really well. If Google thinks
you have a crummy website, let’s say a 1 or a
2 out of 10, it’s going to be really hard for your
website to get any exposure because Google
won’t want to show it to their users unless they
have absolutely nothing else to show.

> COVER STORY:
GREG: Can business owners see their quality
score?
ERIC: No, that’s the biggest issue. You can see
it for Adwords but not for organic search.
Google works in a similar way for their
algorithmic and organic traffic quality score,
which just means that when they look at your
website they determine, “We’re going to give
you a score from zero to ten.” But they don’t
tell you, and the reason they don’t tell you
-- actually Matt Cutts, the lead spokesman
for Google’s algorithm, said explicitly, “We
don’t tell you because we don’t want people
manipulating the search results.” It’s a score in
the background.

EXPERT INTERVIEW

Before 2011, every single page was considered
unique and on its own. If you built a lot of
backlinks to a specific page, it didn’t matter if
the page beside it was full of spam or selling
ads. It was really on a page-to-page basis.
When Panda came around, they started looking
at the website in its entirety. If 90% of your
site is what Google calls “low-quality”, then
that will affect the other 10% that might be
excellent. That’s one of the reasons why some
people had some really good content, but the
whole website when Google looked at the big
picture and considered it bad they lost traffic
for absolutely everything, even the good
articles.

There is one way to know - When you start
changing your website around, and you make
massive improvements, without any new
links you’re going to see your traffic go up
significantly. You know when that happens
that you’ve increased your quality score and
therefore your entire website will rank higher
because Google assumes now that it’s a better
website and should show it to more people.

What is Panda? and how does Google
determine if your site is good or not
according to Panda?
ERIC: Panda is a thing that a lot of people
dislike, but a lot of people think it was
necessary. It all started in 2011 where Google
came out and said we need to figure out how
to show less spam and show better websites for
our algorithm. Over the next few years, and
it’s still ongoing -- Panda is still in the algorithm
today -- they basically developed a way of
checking to see if a site in its entirety is a good
site or bad site.

On a broad level, Panda really looks at the
user experience. If your users are coming to
your site and then leaving right away - that’s
the first thing Google doesn’t want. They
don’t want users to go back. Google really
wants to present the results that satisfy the
customer. That’s the big gist of what Panda is.
To do so they look at some specific
elements, things such as code quality, how
fast the website loads, the user experience
on the site. They look at things such as how
it’s linked together. They look at the type of
content, and they really break it down into
dozens of sections and checks that you need
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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

to do to make sure that when Google crawls
your website they say, “this is an excellent
website, we want to show it to as many people
as possible.” In a nutshell, Panda is all about
making the user happy whenever they search
on the Internet.
GREG: I remember when these changes first
came out there was a lot of was ‘doom and
gloom, they’ve changed the rules again’ talk.
I thought actually it’s about giving better,
more relevant results. So it was a blessing in
disguise, and it forced site owners and business
owners to do more quality content and, like
you say, keep people on the site longer. Once
I got my head around that, I thought they’ve
really done the right thing here, even though
every time they do wholesale changes like that
it causes people a lot of hurt.

affected by Panda would see a severe drop. You
could lose 400 visitors a day, and if you had a
bigger site you could lose 5,000 visitors a day.
You could lose 50% of your traffic in a single
day, and obviously that’s not natural. There
was a change in Google, there was an update
and people obviously figured out it was a Panda
update, and that really sliced their traffic
down. That’s really the biggest and easiest way
to see if you’ve been affected by Panda - Look
at your traffic stats, and if you have severe
drops on any days then you’ve been affected by
Panda.
In more recent times, Google has been
tweaking Panda so the traffic drops have been
less sudden but they’re still very present. If you
look over the course of a month, and you lose
20 % of your traffic over the course of a month,
you might be being affected by Panda. When
Panda was first introduced, it was normal to
see 30, 60, even 90% traffic drops. These days,
Panda is still active, but you might only see a
15-20% traffic drop in a month.
GREG: What’s the high level for turning it
around?
ERIC: If you’ve been affected by Panda, I’m
here to give you hope and tell you it’s possible
to turn pretty much any site around and get
some of that back.

How would the average business or site
owner know if they had been affected by
Panda and what is the high-level process of
how to get things back on track?
ERIC: Most of the time, if you’ve had a
website for a while and you’ve noticed a
downward trend of traffic decreases, most
likely you’ve been affected by Panda. In the
past two years, what was happening is that
when there was a Panda update, and Google
declared whenever there was a Panda update,
you could correlate the dates. People that were

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I’ll be straight up and honest, sometimes
it’s not super easy. Sometimes it’s not a
five-second change, because what you’re
going to be doing is changing the entire user
experience of your website. It’s not just adding
a button, adding a piece of code here and
there. There are methods, and it’s all about
presenting to Google what Google wants to
find. One of the things that Google wants to
find is supplemental high-quality supplemental
content. This is one of the dozens of things
they’re looking for. If you don’t have any of

> COVER STORY:
that, what you would need to do is identify
that your website is missing the supplementary
content.

EXPERT INTERVIEW

ERIC: The way Google views subdomains and
domains is completely different. If you have
the structure blog.yourwebsite.com, or you
have www.yourwebsite.com and you have
members.yourwebsite.com, all of those are
considered different domains in the eyes of
Google.
If your blog gets penalized, so say blog.
yourwebsite.com, it won’t affect your www.
version because all the subdomains are
considered different.

What I mean by supplementary content is, if
you’re writing an article on dogs then you need
to have links and other things that relate to
dogs as well that are specific to that article.
You don’t just have one big block of text. Ezine
Articles was probably one of the hardest hit by
Panda, and the reason for that is they never
had high-quality content. All they had was a
bunch of individual articles plastered across
their whole directory. There were just big
blocks of text. These days, big blocks of text
just don’t cut it.
A lot of times, when we work with Panda
Recoveries, I show people how to get the best
navigation possible. It’s basically dynamic
navigation, how to completely transform
your site and improve the user experience so
when people land on your site they stay for
two, three, four, five minutes. They visit a
bunch of pages on your site. It makes Google
really happy, it makes your users really happy,
and that’s really the high-level approach to
recovering from Panda. It’s transforming your
entire site and improving the user experience.

How does Google treat sub-domains for SEO?

That’s why you see many sites that have usergenerated content like hub pages or even
Tumblr - they’re doing subdomains. Whenever
you register a username, it’s yourname.
wordpress.com or yourname.hubpages.com.
The reason they do this is because, if one guy
out of hundreds of thousands gets on their
site and starts creating spam, the rest of the
users won’t get penalized and the rest of the
site won’t get penalized. If you’re doing a
landing page, you definitely want to have a
subdomain. Instead of having yourwebsite.com/
landingpage, you want to have landingpage.
yourdomain.com.
Any subdomain won’t affect the other
subdomains. This is especially important if
you have a forum, because forums tend to
be spammed a lot. So if you have a forum
or landing pages or anything like that, you
definitely want to get on a subdomain. That’s
going to prevent your main site from getting
penalized.

What about if we move on to the other
big business killer of the recent year or
two, which is Penguin. Obviously it’s more
related to links than at a site-wide level, so
how would you define what Penguin is and
whether or not Google considers your site
and links to be good via Penguin?
ERIC: That’s the hot topic these days.

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

Ironically, I’d be more worried about Panda
because Panda affects all the website and affects
sites so much more. But Penguin is the new killer.
It’s really funny, the engineers must have had
a talk way back five years ago and said, “Okay,
we’re going to tackle the on-page and site-wide
first and then we’re going to concentrate on
links.”
Penguin is especially about links. They do talk
about keyword stuffing as well when they talk
about Penguin, so I believe there is a small onpage factor as well. But let’s say it’s 90 % links.
In terms of links, Google is looking to see if
you’re getting paid inbound spamming links, or
if you’re getting high-quality links to your site.
The reason they’re doing that is because, in the
past search-engine optimization specialists and
people that just build links all day they could
build a million links to your site. Let’s say 90,000
of those links out of the million were bad.
What Google would do in 2011 is that they would
just ignore those links. At the best, they would
count the link, and at the worst they would just
give it an ‘ignore’ or zero score. Basically you
could build as many links as you want to one
page, and the more the better because even if
it doesn’t get counted you’re likely to get a few
that are counted.

will affect absolutely all the keywords on your
website.

GREG: So if you drop off rankings for a particular
keyword phrase, that’s more likely to be
Penguin, whereas if your whole site drops off
that’s more likely to be Panda?
ERIC: Exactly.
How would you go about figuring that out at a
high level and recovering? My understanding
is Google has some tools out there like the
Disavow that will let you know what links are
good and what links are not.

Now what they have is negative scores, meaning
that if you build too many links and get too
many bad ones they’re actually going to penalize
you. Even if you have maybe 5, 10 really good
links, if you have 20 bad links you’re not going
to rank at all and you’re going to get penalized
for a specific keyword or group of keywords on a
specific page.

ERIC: One of the best things that you can do is,
first of all, I say start with the keyword stuffing
on the home page or whatever page was affected
and just take a look. Even though it’s 90% links,
the fastest thing to do is really going to be
to look at your page. Let’s say it’s “Internet
Marketing” you’re penalized for, and you repeat
internet marketing, internet marketing. Let’s say
you have the word “internet marketing” three
times in your title. That’s something you might
want to consider just having it once. You want
to basically keep it as optimized as possible, but
you don’t want to repeat the same word over
and over again.

One of the big distinctions between Penguin and
Panda is that Penguin is page-specific and usually
keyword-specific for a group of keywords or a
keyword, and Panda is site-wide penalty and

The next step, is looking at your links. I
recommend two sources. I recommend doing
full raw link pulls, which just means getting all
the links to your website from ahrefs.com or

Google then decided “we have to stop this
practice, because people are just building as
many links as they possibly can and the ones that
they do get by are powering up the websites.”

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september 2013

> COVER STORY:
majesticseo.com. Those are two services that
allow you to go in and get all your links. Once
you have all your links for that page, what you
want to do is look at the follow links because
Google won’t penalize you for no-follow links but
they will penalize you for the follow links.
You want to narrow it down, going from all the
links you have then dividing it and just looking
at one specific page, and then you’re looking
on that one specific page at just the follow
links. Once you have those follow links, you
want to look at which ones are considered to be
spammy, manipulated etc. Then you’re going to
be on your way to figuring out which links are
penalizing you, and then the next step after that
is going to be to remove those links.
If you have a manual penalty, you have to do
a reconsideration request to Google. You start
building links after that, and you get back your
rankings.

SEO seems a lot more complicated than it used
to be. A lot of businesses get a traditional SEO
agency and if that SEO agency doesn’t know
what it’s doing, or they’re not up to date, not
only can they be causing you to drop out of
the ranking temporarily, but they can really be
penalizing you. Obviously, inbound links are
still a major factor in the overall SEO recipe.
What would you consider good, safe ways to
build inbound links these days?
ERIC: That’s a good question. It’s true that a
lot of SEO agencies aren’t up to speed… If you
get the really cheap ones that just will build

EXPERT INTERVIEW

automatic links for you, those could get you
penalized, and they could actually hurt you more
than anything else. Honestly, Google doesn’t
really care if an agency built the links or if you
built them yourself. If the links are bad, you’re
not going to rank any higher, and you could get
penalized. It’s actually really important that, if
you’re going to be picking out an SEO agency,
you want to make sure that they are up to date,
and they know their stuff.
Once you do, the one thing that you want to
make sure of is that not the entire process is
automated. You want to have some real people
going in and building some back links. Right now,
some of the best back links that you want are
going to be relevant back links. Back links from
similar websites are always going to be the best,
so if you have an Internet marketing website,
then you would want to get links from other
Internet marketing websites as well.
That’s called relevancy, and you can either
get it for real, if you’re really doing a real link
exchange with another webmaster. The ideal way
would be that you talk to your friend, and your
friend’s also in the Internet marketing world, or
he’s in the same industry. You just say, “Look, I
want a link from here. Just give me a link, and
I’ll either pay you, or I’ll give you a link from
a different site.” and you do a link exchange.
That’s the best, old-school way. Sometimes
you could do it via phone, you could do it via
shooting out an email in your community.
GREG: Another example would be, here, I’m
interviewing you as an expert and then on our
Internet Marketing Magazine authority site we
would be then linking over to your site. That’s
legit. It’s 100% relevant.
ERIC: Exactly. Really building your contacts,
that’s actually the way to get the best links, is
going to be basically leveraging your community.
I don’t care what you’re doing - If you’re selling
chairs or you’re selling wigs or you’re selling
screens, you’re part of a community that has
similar manufacturers, similar customers, and

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

you really should be talking to your competition.
Instead of considering it competition, there was
a term coined. It was a ‘co-op petition’ where
you’re cooperating with your competitors, and
you’re all helping each other out to rank higher.
You get some really, really high quality links that
way, and that’s going to be the whitish hat way
of getting it.
Then there is a lot of other things. If you’re
doing SEO agencies, they’re going to be sending
out press releases. Those work really well still,
even if Google has been pushing them down and
down and down.
Is SEO for e-commerce stores much different
from what you would call SEO for traditional
authority or blog sites?
ERIC: Well, yes and no. Basically, the websites
on the Internet all follow similar algorithms, but
there are some specific things for e-commerce
stores that are slightly different than for
information sites and local businesses and all
those types of things. Every kind of store or
website has slightly different rules, depending
on if they’re e-commerce or not, because you’re
going to have different navigation and so forth.
In terms of penalties, Penguin can affect any
websites, so Penguin can affect e-commerce
stores as much as they could affect information
sites.
For e-commerce stores, one of the major things
that you want to avoid is going to be duplicate
content.
What a lot of the stores do is they get all their
content from manufacturers and they get
hundreds or even thousands of stock images
sent to them, they get hundreds or thousands
of stock descriptions sent to them, and back
in the day, what they used to do is they used
to basically get the entire catalog, paste it
onto the website, and then build links to it
and call it a day. What Google really looks for,

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september 2013

especially in e-commerce, is they’re looking to
see who’s adding the most value. If you have an
e-commerce store and you have original images,
and your competitor doesn’t, Google’s going to
rank you on top.
What Google really doesn’t like is going to be
when you only have a block of text, the same
block of text as everyone else, the same image
as everyone else, and then you have a buy sign.
That’s really like, Google looks at that and says,
“Well, you could do better,” and they won’t rank
you.
Is there a way to erase the metadata behind
the images?
ERIC: There are definitely ways to manipulate
the images so that, even if the image is very
similar to other people’s, when Google scans
your page, it’ll say, “Oh, that’s one we haven’t

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

seen before,” so there are ways to manipulate. Using Photoshop,
you could do a lot of things, or there are tools where you could
do it in a batch. That means you could get all the images on your
entire website and make them all unique in a few minutes.
Those are some approaches that you want to do, and it’s actually
more important to know what Google’s looking for in terms
of unique images, rather than just know the technique or so,
because some of the images that you want to have are going to be
considered high-quality content. In some instances, when Google
scans a page, if you have, four or five really good images, and
you have a bit of text, Google’s still going to consider that a highquality page, because your content is going to be your images.
Content on the Web comes in different forms - video, pictures,
text. Ideally, if you want to rank as high as possible you should
present both a combination of really good original text and really
good original media, such as pictures, and then also have the
relevant links around that.
It’s not just one thing, but it’s a combination of things that will
make you rank above your competition.
Could you just tell us a little bit about the Panda Breakthrough
program?
ERIC: Panda Breakthrough is a step-by-step recovery program for
both Panda and Penguin, so even if you have a bunch of bad links
and you’ve been penalized for a specific keyword, I show people
exactly, step-by-step, how to figure it out and how to recover.
We have a huge community inside, and members have been getting
some really, really good successes and they’re bringing their traffic
higher than they ever have before.
I publish all my latest research, so a typical day for me is going
to be helping people out, doing interviews like this, and then
researching and doing tests on the different algorithm changes. All
those tests and all those results you get inside the members’ area
for the full Panda Breakthrough.
Panda Breakthrough is great for business owners, SEO agencies and
Internet Marketers who want the real truth about what is working
in SEO in 2013 and beyond. IMM
Resources mentioned in this article:

1. ahrefs.com
2. majesticseo.com
3. Panda Breakthrough

september 2013

15

Make Your Website Easy to Read
& Effective on all Mobile Phones

16

september 2013

>

ECOMMERCE

ECOMMERCE
PLATFORM COMPARISON
By Jon Gregoire

O

ne of the worst mistakes
a retailer can make is
shack up with the WRONG
ecommerce platform. Don’t
find yourself wanting a divorce
after only couple weeks. The
decision to go with a platform
is a big one, and most likely
you’ll hop on a few calls with
several before you decide.
This ecommerce platform
comparison is meant to
provide general overviews
(stereotypes, if you will) to
send you down the path best
suited for your business.

PIC

“

One of the marks
of a highly functional
ecommerce platform
is a mobile integration
feature that comes
standard.

We compare 14 of the most
well-known ecommerce
platforms and shopping
carts today on the basis of
pricing, functionality, userexperience, and overall
value. It’s important to check
out the individual platform
reviews for a more in-depth
perspective:
• Miva Merchant Review
• PrestaShop Review
• Yahoo! Stores Review
• Volusion Review
• Big Cartel Review
september 2013

17

“

>

ECOMMERCE
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Bigcommerce Review
Shopify Review
Magento Go Review
3dcart Review
Amazon Webstores Review
CS-Cart Review
Magento Community Review
Zen Cart Review
OpenCart Review

Note: Our ecommerce platform comparison
grades are based on the expectations of a
medium-sized retailer. These types of retailers
don’t have the resources to set up and run an
enterprise-level ecommerce store but they also
have more general and technical expertise than
small retailers. Let’s review the criteria:
• Pricing: For a mid-sized retailer, unlimited
products and data storage is typically ideal.
These features were generally included
in the upper-tier/premium plans for each
CSE, and so we compared each premium
plan’s price and value (i.e. what are you
getting for what you’re paying).
• Functionality: A mid-sized retailer needs
to have all the fundamental ecommerce
functions and more. Premium features
generally include email marketing, loyalty
programs, coupons and promotions, strong
customization options, advanced SEO,
etc. Ultimately, ratings were based on the
platform going above and beyond in terms
of power and completeness.
• User-experience: Did this platform give
you the hot, stuffy, and dark experience
or the cool, breezy, and sunny experience?
We looked at and compared each
platforms’ ease of setup, navigation, and
design as well as the customer service
and knowledge support (support articles,
instructions, tutorials, forums, etc.)
offered.
• Overall Value: These platforms were hands
down the best value based on the above
criteria.

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september 2013

Ecommerce Platform Comparison:
Click through (on platform name) to see each
platform’s individual review and see how we
evaluated their grade.

Ecommerce Platform Snippets:
Here are the Cliffsnotes for each of the
ecommerce platforms we reviewed. For a more
in depth look straight from the source, click
through to go to the actual platform’s website.

>

ECOMMERCE

Check out the Top Ecommerce Platforms in
Each Category Below:
Ecommerce Platform Comparison:
1. Zen Cart (A+) – The biggest costs you’ll have
with setting up a Zen Cart shopping cart will be
hiring a web/PHP developer and hosting. Zen
Cart is unique in that not only is the shopping
cart itself is FREE, but its plugins, all of which
are completely customizable, are also FREE to
download. Most open-source solutions make you
pay for extensions/plugins, and the costs can
really add up (ex. Magento Community).
2. PrestaShop (A) – PrestaShop is FREE to
download. The open-source platform includes
just about all of the fundamental ecommerce
functions. All that retailers need to pay for
are the Add-Ons, some of which, like Google
Merchant Center, I definitely recommend.
Prestashop tends to run a little cheaper with
extensions than other open-source solutions.
3. Magento Community (A) – As another FREE
open-source solution, Community will leave
you paying for only web hosting and extensions
(if you choose to add them). Ideally you would
have this in-house, but it’s absolutely crucial to
have an elite web development expert if you
wish to make the most out of the software.
4. CS-Cart (A) – For a one time fee of $395,
you’re paying a little for a lot. With the right
web development resources and expertise, CSCart Ultimate gives retailers the tools to create
an exceptional ecommerce store. Add-ons will
mean extra spend, but Ultimate starts as a very
robust package already. What’s best, you can
always try the free version of Ultimate to get a
feel for the software.
5. Miva Merchant (A) - The Miva Merchant
ecommerce platform is kind of absurdly cheap
for the value you’re getting. Its premium plan,
september 2013

19

>

ECOMMERCE
Warehouse, is $129.99/month for unlimited
products and 40 GB data transfer, not to
mention the many great features that come
with a Miva store.
6. Shopify (A-)- Shopify’s Unlimited plan offers
just that, unlimited data storage, bandwidth,
and products. For $179.99/month, that’s a
valuable and highly flexible plan for a mediumsized retailer because they won’t even have to
worry about transaction fees or other fees for
exceeding bandwidth/storage space.

Bigcommerce features a built-in product image
zoom feature, wish lists, powerful inventory
control, and the rest of the works.
2. Volusion (A) - From
what I’ve seen, one of
the marks of a highly
functional ecommerce
platform is a mobile
integration feature
that comes standard.
Bigcommerce, Volusion, and PrestaShop all
offer this, and of course much, much more.
Like Bigcommerce and Prestashop, Volusion
also offers advanced marketing and checkout
features.
3. Magento Community (A) - Magento
Community sets the sky as the limit in terms of
how sophisticated you want your online store
to be. BUT, Magento Enterprise wouldn’t exist
if Magento Community was as good as it can
get in all categories. Community will provide
a retailer all the ecommerce essentials but
the patchwork and seams will be felt in this
optimization process.

Note: I excluded Big Cartel because the
Titanium plan, their premium plan that charges
$29.99/month, allows for a maximum of 300
SKUs. This range is well below the needs of a
medium-sized retailer.

Best Functionality: Ecommerce Platform
Comparison
1. Bigcommerce (A) - Bigcommerce is nothing
if not feature-rich. It includes everything
you need for an ecommerce store and much,
much more. Highly customizable and robust,

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september 2013

4. PrestaShop (A) - PrestaShop has all of
the base ecommerce functions but is also
extremely customizable in terms of providing
all the tools to make your ecommerce store
as complete and advanced as you’d like. The
fact that it’s open-source gives the retailer
complete control over the store’s functionality.
Best User-Experience: Ecommerce Platform
Comparison
1. Shopify (A+) – Hands down, Shopify provides
the most user-friendly experience for a
retailer. Set up is intuitive and they’re perhaps
most well-known for their highly responsive,
industry-leading customer service. Shopify is
one of the newest platforms and so when

>
they began, they aimed to phase out all of the
confusion that (unfortunately) typically comes
with launching on a hosted platform.
2. Big Cartel (A-) – Though not optimized for
medium-sized retailers, Big Cartel is still a
highly user-friendly platform. It was designed
for the retailer that knows next to nothing
about selling online, and so it’s highly intuitive
to launch a site and is accompanied by wellreviewed customer service.
3. Bigcommerce (A-) - Like Big Cartel,
Bigcommerce was designed to be user-intuitive.
One of its most redeeming qualities is its
community forum, where users have a domain
to discuss technical issues or seek advice.
Ecommerce Platform Comparison: Overall
Value
According to our overall ecommerce platform
comparison, these guys are the best. They get
you the most out of your money, the best bang
for your buck, the destination for a dollar wellspent. Looking at the numbers from this study
comparing platform usage from October 2012
to February 2013, it’s not surprising to see that
Shopify and CS-Cart are on the rise.
1. Shopify (A) –
Though perhaps not the
most feature-rich or
customizable, Shopify
is undoubtedly still the
clear winner (and no,
CPC Strategy doesn’t
engage in affiliate marketing programs with
ecommerce platforms). The platform will
provide a retailer with all of the ecommerce
essentials, a fantastic user-experience, and the
tools to create a beautiful and unique store.

ECOMMERCE

2. Magento Community
(A-) – There’s a reason why
Magento is so popular. A
huge thing to keep in mind
is that Magento is serious,
heavy business (probably the
most on this list). With such a functional and
flexible platform, retailers should determine if
they really need all of the features and weight
that comes with the software or if their needs
could be satisfied by a more user-friendly
platform.
3. Miva Merchant (A-) –
The clear dark horse in this
comparison, Miva Merchant
offers tremendous value
with an extremely affordable
premium plan, advanced marketing tools, and
high levels of customization. Many retailers
have been sleeping on this option.
4. CS-Cart (B+) – As opensource software that allows
for maximal customization,
CS-Cart rather
unconventionally combines a
very intuitive user-interface
with the software’s high level of sophistication.
Though retailers will have to go elsewhere for
hosting, this is nonetheless a very complete and
powerful shopping cart solution.
5. Bigcommerce (B+) Bigcommerce earns 5th
highest praise because of
the unique combination of
great customer service and
support as well as having an
abundance of advanced and
essential tools/features. IMM

september 2013

21

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september 2013

23

>

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

BOOST YOUR WEBSITE’S
PERFORMANCE WITH 4 SIMPLE STEPS
By Mitchell Schneider

A

s marketers we put a lot of effort
into generating traffic to our website.
However, the conversions may not be what
we are looking for. So we put more effort into
generating more traffic only to achieve the
same results. The problem with that is we’re
focusing too much on the top of the funnel
and not spending enough time figuring out how
to bring them down the funnel. Now you’re
probably asking yourself, where should I begin?
Well, we’ve put together 4 simple steps you
can take in order to improve your website’s
performance.
1) JAVASCRIPT ERRORS
This is probably the simplest of areas to
drill down into and understand why visitors
are not converting, or are having issues
interacting with your website. There’s a
definite quick fix to achieve instant results.
Looking at where and when the Javascript
errors are occurring, you can go back to
the code or bring it to your developer and
fix the error. Once it is fixed you can see an
immediate jump in the conversion rate.
• What does that mean for you? Imagine
you had a Javascript error in your
checkout form. Knowing it exists can
often come too late, and you’re losing
customers. Knowing about it ahead of
time can eliminate this problem.
2) ENGAGEMENT TIMES RATHER THAN VISIT
DURATION
More often than not, when we focus on
web analytics we’re focusing on how
long the page has been open for. We

24

september 2013

like to think that this seemingly gives
us an indication to the level of interest
the visitor has for that page. What if the
person walked away for a while and had
the web page open?
A more accurate indication of interest is
engagement time. We like to look at the
engagement time or even attention time
on that page. By focusing on the levels of
interaction through mouse moves –clicking,
scrolling, and hovering we can find what
content the visitors care about the most,
what they read, and what they completely
skip over. Once we have the full picture
we can make the necessary changes to
increase engagement on the pages.
• What is the difference between
customers who spend 10 seconds on your
page or 30 seconds on your page? Do one
of those groups convert better? If so,
what is that user group doing differently?
Once you understand the engagement
time, your page will automatically
convert better!
3) BETTER CALL TO ACTION
This is something common throughout all
industries. It doesn’t matter what you’re
selling or how you’re selling it. Your Call To
Action is really important. If you’re having
issues with with your Call To Action button
it might be time reexamine the location,
color, and/or the wording and then testing
it out.
• We always recommend putting at least

>

ADVERTISEMENT

Need More Traffic?
Need More Leads?
Need to Reduce Your
Adwords Cost Per Click
& Cost Per Lead?
one main Call To Action above the fold.
• Try testing out different colors. Certain
color creations have different emotional
actions.
• What you’re saying should be strong
and it should also stand out. You want
them to click on that button, do so by
making it actionable.
4) CLUTTER OVERLOAD
When you look at the bounce rate do you
ever wonder why it’s so high? Was it a hard
bounce, medium bounce, or soft bounce?
It could be there’s too much clutter on
the page. When there’s too much clutter
people have to ask themselves where is
the Call To Action? Why did I come here
again? Where should I be clicking? It’s really
important to have a focus on a page.
• ‘Clutter’ is subjective. The question
is: is what the visitor looking for clear
enough to find? If not, make sure it is
to ensure that they get to it quickly and
clicks through!

CLICK HERE

to touch base with Greg
Cassar and the team at
InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com about
Professional Adwords
Services with a real
focus on ROI for you the
business owner.

Once you’ve made a few changes to your
website, do some testing. Compare the
results before you made the changes. Using
these 4 simple steps will help you improve
your website’s performance and ultimately
see higher conversion rates. IMM
september 2013

25

See the SEO Training Every Business Owner, SEO Expert
and Internet Marketer in 2013 Needs to Know!

Essential Reading for
Professional Internet
Marketers -

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>26
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september 2013

>

SALES AND MARKETING

THE 80/20 OF SALES & MARKETING:
HOW TO WORK LESS AND EARN MORE
By Adam Kreitman

S

ure, you’ve probably heard about the 80/20
Principle (aka “The Pareto Principle”), which
basically says 80% of your results come from
20% of your efforts.
But do you REALLY understand its true power to
transform your sales and marketing efforts.
Bestselling author and AdWords guru Perry
Marshall spent the last 10 years exploring 80/20
on a level no one else has. And he’s come away
with powerful new insights into how to apply
80/20 that have turbocharged his success and
the success of many of his clients.
He reveals
these insights in
his new book,
80/20 Sales and
Marketing
In fact, he’s such
a big believer
in 80/20 that
he says “If you
and I just had 30
seconds together
before terrorists
busted through
the door and
whisked me away in a black sedan, my final
words of business advice to you would be:
Thoroughly Master 80/20.”
In this interview we discuss some of the insights
he’s discovered about 80/20 and how they can
transform your business and life…

Just about everyone has a basic idea of what
the 80/20 Rule is. But you’ve applied it to
business and marketing in a unique way that
very few people have before. In fact, you say
it’s the secret behind your business’ success
and that there’s hardly anything you do or
teach that doesn’t have this formula behind
it. So what are most people missing out on
when it comes to 80/20?
People are missing three things:

1

People don’t realize that 80/20 applies
to not just a few things like customers
and sales, but almost everything you can
count. Nearly EVERYTHING you would ever
care to measure is 80/20. Sources of defects,
complaints and theft. Expenses of every
kind. Problems of every kind. Product lines,
value of activities throughout your day. Sales
commissions. There is extreme inequality in ALL
these things.

2

Almost nobody realizes that 80/20 is an
endless repeating pattern: 80/20². If you
ignore the bottom 80%, 80/20 will still be true
of the top 20% that’s left. That means 64% of
your results come from 4%. Then you can 80/20
the top 4% and guess what, 50% of your results
come from 1% of what you do.

3

Almost nobody realizes that when a group
of people responds to ONE stimulus – say,
100 customers buy one product from you –
80/20 can tell you how many will buy a product
that’s 10X more expensive. It’s almost a law of
physics, a HUGELY ignored resource.
september 2013

27

>

SALES AND MARKETING
That means you can apply 80/20 to 80/20
itself! You can make ONE move, do one small
market test… then infer an entire complex
future business from the results. And while it
won’t tell you *what* your customers will buy,
it will tell you how much they’ll pay when you
put the right thing in front of them. And it will
be scary accurate.
How accurate? I used the tool that comes with
the book and said “Southwest Airlines is company #167 in the Fortune 500 and sales are 15.7
billion dollars. How big are all the other companies in the Fortune 500?”
Here’s what the tool shows you:

ger way. What kind of exotic cruise would you
need to organize to get those 7 to spend thirty
grand?
The sky’s the limit. As Jay Abraham likes to say,
“How high is up?”
Okay, so with 80/20 applying to a million
different things, where would you
recommend someone start (ie. what’s the
80/20 of the 80/20)? Focusing specifically
on marketing, where should people look
first when thinking about 80/20? And have
you noticed any area of marketing that can
deliver greater impact than others?
Practical 80/20 marketing begins with knowing
this: 20% of the people will spend 4X the money. And 20% of them will spend 4X more. And
20% of them will spend 4X more.
And on it goes until you literally run out of
people.
So if 1000 people gave you $100, you collected
$100K. But that also means:
200 will give you $400, 40 will give you $1600,
and 8 will give you $6400, and at least 1 will
give you $25,600.

Southwest Airlines is #167 in the Fortune 500

Southwest Airlines is #167 in the Fortune 500,
with $15.7 billion in sales” to generate the
white curve, based on 80/20. The yellow curve
is the actual data. 80/20 is incredibly accurate and applies to literally a million different
things.
When you use 80/20 this new way, it prompts
you with incredily powerful questions:
100 people paid $3,000 for a voyage on a cruise
ship. 80/20 predicts that 7 of them would
pay $30,000 to scratch the same itch in a big-

28

september 2013

Add all those up and you don’t have a $100K
business. You have a $100K + $80K + $64K
+ $51K + $25K business. Total is $320K. You
tripled your business! You also made it more
robust, more diverse. Economic changes may
wipe out one of those product lines but they’ll
almost never take out all of them at once.
This is why GM has Chevy AND Buick AND Cadillac AND GMC. All their real money is made on
the higher end brands. The cheap stuff just
keeps the lights on.
This progression, this “infinite series,” is essentially a law of physics because 80/20 is an

>

SALES AND MARKETING

endlessly repeating pattern.
A few of your customers DO have the ability to
spend the money; I can virtually guarantee you
that. They have the desire to scratch the itch; I
can virtually guarantee you that as well.
Now, obviously the $6400 product is going to be
much different than the $100 product. Sometimes it’s the corporate buyer or the person
who’s going to buy 64 units instead of just one.
But it’s almost never just the multi-unit buyer.
There is almost always a deluxe buyer who
wants to be pampered.
Think Nordstrom. Think Neiman Marcus. A lot of
people think those elite brands are some kind
of anomaly or oddity. “Who would pay $2600
for that ugly dress anyway?” 0.3% of any population, that’s who!
Notice the multi-dimensional nature of 80/20,
because not only are there 8 people who will
pay $6400, some people will also buy 50 $100
units instead of 1.
So when you start your business and when you
get any of it to actually work at all, there’s a
whole network of hidden opportunities that I
can guarantee you are there, which most people never consider, or discover only accidentally. Most people don’t see those opportunities
because 1) they’re thinking too small, and 2)
they don’t yet posses 80/20 X-Ray vision. That’s
why I wrote the book and built the software
tools that come with it.
A company I worked for years ago had one
client that accounted for about 75% – 80% of
revenue. One year they decided to go with
another service provider and the company I
was with folded within the month. In thinking
about that, I’m wondering if there are situations where it may be risky to apply 80/20?
Is it possible to take 80/20 too far?

The 80/20 Curve says that if you have five
clients, one is going to be 40% of your business.
And if you have 500 clients, the biggest one is
going to be 10% of your business.
Having only one client is not 80/20.
In 80/20, there is always some group of people
that comprises 100% and it shouldn’t be just
one.
80/20 means that how much a client affects
you by leaving can range from almost nothing to a big shock. Losing 40% of your business
overnight, yes that’s usually a big shock.
It is possible to take 80/20 too far – or more
precisely, to so completely ignore the bottom
80% that it’s as though they don’t exist. They
always exist and they always have a role. But
they need to be accorded the proper amount of
energy, which, while not zero, is 20% or less.
Another way that people take 80/20 too far is
that you can be very mercenary with 80/20.
80/20 says you’ll always do better by funding the Gifted Program and cutting the Special
Needs program. The Eugenics movement was an
attempt to get rid of the bottom rungs of society with genetic ‘cleansing.’ I strongly object.

september 2013

29

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SALES AND MARKETING
What I believe is that you need to be deliberately mercenary about enforcing quality, and
hiring “A” players, nurturing gifted students
and having “A” customers. Why? One reason
is, so that you have money to be generous and
build orphanages and help people who can’t
help themselves. In fact that’s what Chapter
24, “My Latte’s Too Foamy,” is about. I really
hope people read that chapter because it’s
about the fact that there are times when we do
have to turn 80/20 upside down.

When you’re an 80/20 individual you don’t just
immerse yourself and let the hours fly by.

There’s a great quote in your book: “Don’t
fall in love with bright shiny objects. Fall in
love with mastery.” That’s such an important point in this age, where we’re all barraged by a never-ending parade of bright
shiny objects that can quickly make us lose
sight of what’s really important in business
(and life). How does 80/20 thinking help limit
the distractions of bright shiny objects and
build a successful business?

Instead, you allow SPACE for THINKING and
PLANNING. Including time for reading. Dare I
say silence? Along with some time spent in the
outdoors.

When you obey 80/20, you do NOT:
• Allow emails and tweets and social media messages to interrupt you at will
• You do not check your email incessantly
throughout the day
• You never fill your time with meaningless
activity just because it feels good to be doing
something

The most important thing you do every morning
is write your to-do list. The 80/20 professional
knows that your to-do list also follows 80/20.
So out of 20 things you need to do today, 4 of
them have far more importance than the other
16.

Oh yeah, that’s a good one.
The advent of the smart phone now means that
all our least-productive time – the 80% of our
day that used to be unoccupied – is now COMPLETELY filled with activity. Jammed full.
No one ever has to be bored again, ever.
Now… no one ever really has to even think,
ever. All we have to do is hang out in our echo
chamber of hand-picked friends and entertain
each other. We’ll all be busy and occupied… accomplishing virtually NOTHING.
I’ve always thought it interesting that the
economic crash of ’08 perfectly coincided with
Facebook taking over the world.
The 80/20 professional allows only measured
spans of time for this. You allocate it with care.

30

september 2013

When you place strict limits on external interruptions, when you get your nose out of your
Facebook and email accounts all day long, your
brain immediately gets more space for thinking
about the mid- and long-term future. You are
positioned to not be carried away willy-nilly by
incessant distractions.
Everyone thinks time is short. It’s not true.
80/20 says that there is always enough time!
There is PLENTY OF TIME to do the things that
are important to you in your life when you’re
deliberate about it. The 80/20 individual is
deliberate, and that’s why he or she gets 10X
more rewards than everyone else. IMM

september 2013

31

>

MANAGING SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

HOW TO SAVE TIME MANAGING
YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNS
By Stuart Davidson

“

Using a service that
allows you to schedule
updates for times when you
are not online allows you to
setup posts in batches and
achieve continuity in your
marketing efforts.

september 2013

“

32

>

L

earning how to save time
and minimising work
loads is a no-brainer for any
business. When it comes
to managing social media
campaigns, using these tips
can be beneficial in order
to free up time for other
activities and keep your
business streamlined.
A common technique is to
plan ahead and complete
non-time sensitive work in
batches. Every time you
finish one task and start the
next, you will have a period
of downtime. By minimising
the amount of time between
switching tasks, you can
reduce the overall campaign
time significantly and improve
the total quantity of work
done.
Rather than spending time
each week creating content
to use for your online
marketing, try and come
up with non-time sensitive
material you can use over
the next month. Depending
on what type of campaigns
you are running or what type
of product or service you are
marketing, this can save huge
amounts of time. Finding a
batch of related images that
you can post on Facebook or
Twitter over the next month
is unlikely to take much
longer than finding the one
image you can post now.


Social media dashboards like
Hootsuite and Tweetdeck
allow you to monitor and
manage numerous social
media accounts all within
one screen. Being able
to visualise and control a
number of different streams
of information in one place
will save time by not having
to login to each account
separately. Social media
management tools like these
also typically have additional
functionality to the original
social platforms. Hootsuite,
for instance, can provide
some good analytics features
that Twitter itself does not
offer users.

There are two huge
advantages of being able to
schedule your social media
content. The first expands
on my advice about planning
ahead. Using a service that
allows you to schedule
updates for times when you
are not online allows you
to setup posts in batches
and achieve continuity in
your marketing efforts. This
does not mean that that’s
it. Hardly. But it does mean
you can now spend the rest

of your social media time
on what counts – speaking
to people and building
relationships and networks.
The second big advantage is
the ability to schedule posts
to go out when they are likely
to have the most impact. By
posting things at different
times of the day you can
start to work out which times
are the most effective for
different types of content, for
each platform. Hootsuite now
even has an auto-scheduling
tool which saves even more
time than having to figure it
out yourself.
Making the most out of
every idea can be hard, but
knowing how to build and
expand upon each idea is
where you can really add
value to your campaigns. If
you are sponsoring a local
event, you may think to post
some pictures or videos on
Facebook afterwards. This
should not be the end of
it. Building that one event
out into a number of social
media updates,blog posts
and associated marketing
activities is key. The following
list provides some ideas:
• Announce you are
going
• Announce you are
sponsoring
• Share information
about the event
• Ask who else is going
• Say where you are
september 2013

33

>

going to be and when you
will be there
• Promote competitions
(if any)
• Post your arrival
• Highlight what is
happening
• Post pictures
• Tell people who you
have been talking with
• Share any videos
• Express your feelings
about how the event is
going
• Post an event summary
• Post remaining media
• Say your thank you’s
• Guest post for people
you met at the event
• Follow up on new
contacts by getting
connected and introducing
yourself

channels. Using email and
print marketing to promote
competitions, while writing
a blog post to announce the
winner, couples your efforts
to reduce time. This can
ultimately extend to all areas
of marketing. By using each
marketing channel to support
and complement the others,
you can greatly increase
the effectiveness of your
marketing efforts.
Following other businesses
social media activities can
be another great time saver.
Provided they are not a
competing company in the
same location, using your
competition as a resource
can be rewarding, either for
inspiration or even to share
their posts directly. If they
tweet a link to a good blog
post or recent news article
that their followers are likely
to be interested in, chances
are it may interest your
followers to.
Remember, every business is
different…

Looking for ways in which one
bit of content can be used
across a number of different
marketing channels can save
time and reduce the overall
workload. Competitions can
be a great method of building
a social media following, but
they can also be used in a
variety of other marketing

34

september 2013

These are a few tactics
you could use to save time
running an effective social
media campaign. One thing
to keep in mind is that every
business and every person is
different, and there may be
many other ways to improve
aspects which are more
relevant to you. IMM

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35

Tạp trí Internet Marketing Số 26 - SEP 2013

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