A Holistic Approach to Internet Marketing

© Copyright 2006 Ian Feavearyear. All rights reserved.

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Whatever your current form of Internet marketing, you are not maximizing your earning potential unless you adopt a holistic approach. That is, if you are only concentrating on one, or a few, aspects of Internet marketing you need to broaden your approach in order to concentrate on the whole. It is only when you address the whole that each individual part of your marketing efforts will start to reach its full potential.

To begin, I shall look at some general principles and then examine some factors that pertain to specific forms of Internet marketing.

No matter what form your internet marketing takes, the single most important factor is that you have a site that establishes credibility and that is sufficiently professional in appearance for your target market. The last thing you need is to spend a lot of money, time and effort to get visitors to your site only to have them leave immediately because of your site's design. Take a look at your site design and check it for the following faux pas.

Poor quality graphics, as with many other of these points, scream "amateur" and can really make an otherwise decent web site look very unprofessional. You want all of your graphics to be clear, crisp and sharp. If you cannot afford the services of a local graphic designer or artist, make use of the graphics sites that are available on the Web. Even though they are still not free, they should be cheaper than getting a bespoke design and will add value to your site.

Broken links are the bain of any web site that contains external links but there really is no excuse for having broken links within your own site. Again, this decreases visitor confidence and leads to a bad user experience. Sites with broken links also convey the impression that the entire web site is incomplete. There are also tools available that enable you to test for broken external links and these should also be used on a regular basis if you have many external links.

In a similar vein, if you have any email addresses displayed on your site, make sure that they will actually arrive and that they will be answered (but more on that later!). I have personally tried to contact at least one online store via one of the email addresses that I found on their web site, only to have it returned to me as undeliverable. How would your potential customers feel if that happened to them when trying to contact you?

In the right place, textured backgrounds can be fine but most of the time they are used by amateur web designers simply because they're there. However, textured backgrounds can be very distracting and also interfere with the user's ability to read text displayed over the background. If you really want a textured background, make sure the coloring & texture is so minimal that it does not detract from the user's experience.

I am shocked at the number of web sites that contain spelling errors, grammatical errors and punctuation errors. Admittedly, such rules vary from country to country, indeed, I had to learn a whole new set of rules when I moved to the USA from the UK, but some rules are standard, no matter where you're from. If visitors are reading the text on your site and find a really bad spelling error, how are they going to react? Personally, I find it hard to overlook such things--and I'm sure many people are more forgiving than I am--but is it worth taking the risk?

A classic example of this occurred on the site for a supposedly 5-star hotel in Norwich, England, http://www.stgileshouse.com. At the time of writing, one paragraph on their home page read as follows (I have numbered the errors, with details below):

Everything in St Giles House, whether it is the jam served for breakfast,¹ the wine served for dinner has been personally tested and selected by us. Only the best is good enough for our clients. Years of extensive travel and staying in hotels has inspired us to recreate the glamour of the world² best hotels in our home town of Norwich, the city that we love passionately and wish to be discovered by others. So whether you are planning to stay in one of our bedrooms, eating in our excellent restaurant, or just popping in for a drink with friends³, we hope that you will take as much joy and inspiration from visiting St Giles House as we have found in creating it.

1. There are only 2 examples given in this list, so "breakfast" and "the wine served for dinner" should be separated by "or," not a comma, otherwise it appears that the writer intended to list something else.
2. This should read, "the glamour of the world's best hotels . . ."
3. This sentence is, strictly speaking, grammatically correct but reads very poorly. Let me explain.
   
   The sentence refers to three groups of people, (1) those "planning to stay," (2) those "eating in [the] restaurant" and (3) those "popping in for a drink." However, when you read it, it appears that the word "planning" qualifies the verbs "to stay," "eating" and "popping." Why does it refer to those planning to stay but not those who are actually staying when it does refer to those who are actually eating and actually popping in?? Thus, the sentence would have read much better if it had been worded:

So whether you are planning to stay in one of our bedrooms, eat in our excellent restaurant, or just pop in for a drink with friends . . . .

OR

So whether you are staying in one of our bedrooms, eating in our excellent restaurant, or just popping in for a drink with friends . . . .

Does the original convey 5-star quality to you? It doesn't to me.

Please, please, please, don't create your web site with a standard template from Frontpage or a similar product. It may be easy and it may save having to learn any HTML whatsoever but such sites stand out like a sore thumb and are clearly identifiable as template sites by anyone with any professional web site design knowledge at all. HTML really is not hard to learn, so please make the effort to do so.

Both professional and amateur web site designers fall into this pit. Maybe there was a time when you could get away with designing a site for a particular browser (usually Internet Explorer) but those days are gone. If nothing else, Firefox now has a sizeable market share and then there are those other browsers such as Safari and Opera. In percentage terms, they may still be a small fraction of your users but can you really afford to turn away any of your potential customers? Furthermore, supposing you get 500 visitors per day and "only 5%" of those use Opera. If you consider that's too small a percentage to bother with, you are turning away roughly 750 potential customers each and every month.

So, don't turn away those minority browser users and make sure that each and every aspect of your site design works in every major browser. As an aside, on the same principle, you also need to make sure that your site isn't dependent on a non-HTML technology such as Java or Flash. I recall one particular web site with Flash navigation that had no alternative for non-Flash-enabled browsers. In fact, even though I was using Firefox and had installed Flash, it still wouldn't work, so there was no way for me to navigate the site!

Recently, I have also come across sites that had design issues as a result of bad CSS (cascading style sheets) implementation - one site was so wide when viewed in Firefox that roughly a third of the page was hidden to the right of my browser, despite the fact I was using a pretty high resolution monitor. That's a really bad mistake because users are even less likely to scroll left-right than they are up-down.

Maybe for some web applications frames are OK but in most web sites they are a bad idea. Please don't use them. If you want to know why, search on Google for "why frames suck," "don't use frames" or similar phrases.

For the most part, when visitors to your site are attempting to make a decision as to whether to stay and explore or try somewhere else, they will quickly scan your content and make a decision in just a couple of seconds. Thus, you need short, snappy, bullet-pointed text that attracts the eye while still conveying key information.

I have personally had to deal with a client who was guilty of this particular design sin ... a sin motivated by fear. The fear in question has been named
"i - must - tell - them - everything - they - could - possibly - need - to - know - on - my - home - page - aphobia"
- that is, the fear that if you don't supply every possible piece of information about yourself and the user's potential experience on your home page, the user will leave as a result of their ignorance. For example, do your visitors really need to know that you offer free shipping for orders over $x, that you carry a price promise, that you've been selling online since 1927, that you have free catalogues, etc. etc. etc. each in their own box in the margins of your site. Perhaps some of those things are important but are they all really necessary on your home page? You'll find very few of those things vying for your attention on the most successful ecommerce web sites. Remember, often less is more, and a clear, tidy design with plenty of white space provides the user with a peaceful and easy experience - don't scare them off with 100 different messages on your home page, each one crying out "Read me! Read me!"

One site that I looked at while researching this article contained a "Site Map" link on its home page. However, if you clicked on that link and then tried to get back to the site's home page, using its own navigation system, it was impossible, you just couldn't do it! Imagine your user's frustration if your site doesn't have clear, logical and easy-to-use navigation. This is especially true of ecommerce sites when users often want to move quickly between product pages, "About Us" pages and "customer service" type pages.

This malady often goes hand-in-hand with "i-must-tell-them-aphobia" and is known as the "just-because-I-can-syndrome."

Whatever fancy, fun web technology you're using, whatever cool JavaScript toy you've employed, ask yourself "is my site less useful to the user without it?" If the answer is "No," scrap it. These are just a few examples of useless web tricks and technologies that you may want to eliminate from your site:

1. Visitor counters (not to mention that they are so 80's/early 90's)
2. Flash splash screens
3. Scrolling text -whether horizontal marquees or vertically scrolling news headlines
4. Customized greetings (hmmm ... a controversial one this - but does it really impress your users that you can tell whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening where they are, or that their name is "Bob?").

This isn't really a site design issue so much as a credibility and practices issue but still has connections to site design. Whatever forms of communication are promoted on your web site (contact phone number, email address, etc.) please make sure that you comply with the following guidelines:

1. If you display a contact email address, make sure you check the mailbox those emails go to and reply promptly. One supplier that I personally deal with has, as the main contact address on their site, enquiries@xxxxxx.xxx. I wrote to this address and did not get a reply. When I later spoke to one of their employees on the phone he said "Yeah, we don't check that one very often." Duh!!! I cannot get over the number of times I have contacted a company by email, or an online "contact us" form without ever getting a reply. I wonder how much business is lost each year by companies who fail to reply to emails. Make sure you're not one of them.
2. If your site displays a contact phone number, somewhere on your site you should indicate when the phone is manned, preferably your "contact us" page. For those times when the phone isn't manned, you should ensure voicemail is available and turned on and that, as with emails, any messages are replied to swiftly.

An exception ... a case for ugly web sites: Some people have recently proposed that ugly web sites are more credible because they smack of "mom & pop selling from their garage" - where you get good customer service because it's a small business where every customer is really important, etc. Perhaps. Personally, I don't support the ugly web site theory. However, I have also read that, if you're an AdSense publisher, ugly web sites often get higher CTRs (click thru rates). Even then, I would resist the urge to produce an ugly web site just because you use AdSense. If your site only exists for AdSense clicks then, strictly speaking, you are in violation of AdSense's Terms of Service anyway. Furthermore, to get clicks you need traffic and people are much less likely to link to an ugly MFA (made for AdSense) web site.

From personal experience, I would guess that those most in danger here are those relatively new businesses that have found themselves getting high rankings on Google's organic search results and have therefore dropped (or never started) any other forms of marketing. If you have great rankings on Google search and are getting most of your traffic that way, which is also the major source of your income, it is like building a skyscraper right on the San Andreas fault--nothing bad may happen but how would your business survive if it did?

There have been plenty of instances of online businesses suddenly finding themselves dropped from Google's index. What a disaster for businesses whose major, or even sole source of traffic was Google's organic search results. Remember, (at least at the time of writing) Google is under no obligation to list your site at all, or to ensure that it's at a particular position in the search results. Is that a strong foundation on which to build a business?

Similarly, if you are advertising with AdWords but have neglected the search engine optimization side of web marketing, just think of all the free traffic you may have missed. Google has been actively trying to reduce the number of commercial web sites being returned in high positions in the organic search results but, even so, it is too important an area of potential business to ignore. Furthermore, for queries that are clearly commercial in nature, Google tries to return commercial results.

There are also many business-oriented web directories, both general and specific (i.e., directories for particular fields of business). Are you listing your site in them? Many of these directories offer free listings as a way of building up a decent database. Furthermore, if you haggle you can often get a price reduction. Listing your site in such directories not only provides a means of getting business directly but can also improve your search engine rankings as a result of additional links to your site.

There are many other forms of promotion that you can use but they are beyond the scope of this article.

I recently engaged in a discussion with a journalist and the editor of the technology section for The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. regarding one of their articles in which they were discussing a particular British business whose web site had been dropped from Google. I made the same points that I made in this article, that it's foolish to build a business dependent on a single source of traffic, particularly one that could disappear at any time. I was hitting my head against a brick wall--however, in the course of the discussion I wrote the following parable, which has been amended slightly for this article and is based, in part, on a true story.

Are you sitting comforably? Then we'll begin . . .

There was once a man who lived just outside Sacramento, California. The house directly behind his house had a plum tree that overhung his back yard. As the years went by, the man found that he was getting more and more plums off that tree, so many, in fact, that he started a plum store and made lots of money from selling his free plums. One day, after coming home, the man went into his back yard and found his neighbor had cut down the tree. It was his tree, he could cut it down. The man had done nothing wrong. He had no more free plums. He should have planted his own plum tree, or paid for his plums from a wholesaler.

So, if you are building your business on Google's organic search results, remember the parable about the wise man who built his house on the rock and the foolish man who built his house on the sand. Building your business on the sand of good Google search rankings may well result in your house collapsing, so be wise and build on the rock of paid advertising and other forms of marketing, then your house won't fall flat when the bad winds of Google's index blow against you.

And don't forget, this parable is just as true for the person only using AdWords, or any other single form of Internet marketing!

Many AdWords advertisers create a single campaign, with a few obvious keywords and then sit back and expect the sales to come rushing in. However, there is so much more to creating an effective AdWords campaign. Below, I shall be looking at the additional steps you need to take that are external to AdWords itself.

Probably the most neglected aspect of a truly holistic AdWords campaign is the landing page. Way too many advertisers simply send people to their home page or another page within the site that seems to be the "closest fit" to the advertising campaign. If you want to optimize your campaigns, you absolutely must create purpose-built landing pages. If you have multiple campaigns, or a single campaign with a variety of ad groups, then you may even need to create multiple landing pages.

Remember, AdWords campaigns are at their most effective when you have highly targeted keywords that bring up very specific, targeted ads. So why would you then send your "clickers" to an untargeted landing page? Targeted landing pages are an absolute must in order to maximize your conversion rates so make sure that you are creating effective, "optimized" landing pages. This has become even more important since Google's algorithm change (summer 2006), which requires ads and landing pages to be even more targeted than before, in order to avoid a high minimum CPC.

Another extremely important element that you cannot afford to overlook in managing your AdWords campaigns (and, indeed, any other advertising campaign), is the tracking of your results. You cannot possibly determine the effectiveness of your advertising if you cannot quantify your results in some reasonably accurate manner. Supposing you start a new campaign and business increases but you've also recently submitted your site to Google or Yahoo, etc., or you've just paid to be in your local Yellow Pages or whatever. Unless you have some kind of tracking mechanisms in place, you cannot determine whether or not your advertising expenditure has been worth it.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't have money laying around for me to waste on projects whose success I cannot determine. Don't forget, the bottom line of all of this marketing is your return on investment - that's where the rubber hits the road - and unless you can state with reasonable certainty that campaign x cost $y and directly produced an increase (or, decrease!) in sales/profits of $z, how can you possibly make an educated decision as to the success of the campaign?

Futhermore, Google provides some pretty good tools for tracking your campaigns, particularly with the ability to link your AdWords account to an Analytics account. AdWords even allows you to track conversion rates from third party campaigns. In addition, there are other tools available that enable you to track your results and you owe it to yourself and your business to use them.

At the heart of AdSense publishing is a very simple equation:

Y = T * CTR * CPC

where Y=income; T=traffic; CTR=click-thru rate/ratio; CPC=cost per click

Thus, your income depends on the interaction between three variables—traffic, clicks & cost per click—increase any one and your income goes up. To differing degrees, all three are at least partially under your control and the holistic AdSense Publisher definitely needs to address at least two of them. Below, I shall quickly examine all three, from the least important to the most important.

This factor is the one that you have the least amount of control over in that Google determines the ads that are going to appear on your site. However, if you don't yet have a site, you can research which types of site content attract high-paying ads and develop a site in one of those genres. However, unless you have a particular passion for your chosen topic, I would recommend against doing this and sticking with a topic that you are interested in personally.

Even though you cannot make visitors click on your ads (in fact, doing so will get you banned!), you can present the ads in a manner that will maximize your click-thru-rates. For example, placing your ads in the middle of key content; blending the ads so that they have the same background, text and hyperlink colors as the rest of your site; limiting the number of other navigational options available to the user, etc. Small changes to the layout of your pages and format of your ads can produce significant increases in CTRs and any AdSense publisher worth his or her salt will pay careful attention to this. Indeed, I would thoroughly recommend that you read "The AdSense Code" by Joel Comm (available from our U.S. online book store and our U.K. online book shop) or take a look at Michael Cheney's AdSense videos.

When all is said and done, the need for traffic is one of the great unstated aspects of much Internet marketing and especially, it seems, for those hoping to generate income from AdSense. I am shocked by the number of people that seem to think all they have to do is create a blog or simple web site, stick some AdSense code on it (sometimes even "optimizing" the code), and then expect to hear the cash registers jingling. It won't happen unless you have traffic.

So, how do you get traffic?

Well, that's a pretty fundamental question for most Internet marketing and an in-depth examination of it is beyond the scope of this article but below are what, in my opinion, are the two most important things to do.

1. Create useful content. I cannot express enough how important it is to give your site visitors value and, to do so, you must give them useful content, preferably original content. This is true of all web sites but particularly true for the blogger who really has to work hard at adding new content on a regular basis. Good content is vital for a number of reasons but there are two that stand out. First, search engines like useful content and the more you have, the higher your organic search results are likely to be and the more free traffic you're likely to get. Second, if you provide useful content (especially with new content provided on a regular basis) you will get more repeat visitors and more external links to your site, the latter again being of vital importance to good organic search rankings.

2. Submit your site. You can gain a lot of traffic from submitting your site to relevant web directories, and, of course, search engines (I think that goes without saying . . . at least, I hope it does!). From my experience, creating an RSS feed (particularly relevant to blogs) and having it submitted to sites such as technorati and other similar services is a particularly good way of generating traffic and simply becoming "visible."

For further ideas, I recommend that you read the article "Sometimes Google AdWords is the least effective way to reach your target customer." This interesting article, by Perry Marshall, contains a great list of methods to obtain new customers for your online business, as well as explaining why AdWords is sometimes the worst option!

I hope this article (as a whole!) has given you some pointers to ensure that you're not neglecting some vital areas of your Internet marketing and has inspired you to think for yourselves how you may be missing out on some vital customers and, even more importantly, profit!

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