There’s nothing more elusive than a first time visitor. Visitors entering your site through inbound links (either via Google/Bing, through advertising or marketing campaigns) are exactly why you pay your marketing team, optimize your website for search engines and why you are currently investing in that crazy little social media fad. Yet once you finally capture your user, are you properly monetizing them? Unless you’re ready to start serving ads to generate revenue, you are likely losing valuable conversions on a typically underperforming category: first time visitors.

First time visitors are a double edged sword - marketers love them (they represent possibility) while website optimization specialists often hate them (they represent low conversion). Most of all, though, they represent a vital part of any business, and one that is almost always neglected.

Why First Time Visitors Are Bad

First time visitors historically perform worse than other segments of web visitors. On average, only 1.4% of first time visitors actually convert into sales. For all of your marketing team’s search engine optimization, social media efforts and viral marketing campaigns, less than 2 of every 100 visitors will even turn into a sale. That’s a tiny amount.

Not only do first time visitors underperform, but there’s relatively little data about them. With a repeat customer, there’s all sorts of demographic and psychographic data at your fingertips. For a new visitor, you have absolutely no purchase data, and no idea whether their intent is to buy, browse or otherwise. This is a big reason that first time visitors are typically stressed much less than repeat customers. For repeat customers you’ve already made the sale once. That first sale makes it much easier to sell the second, third, fourth and fifth time.

(more…)

Advertisements. Whether you like them or hate them, they are one of the means by which website owners are generating revenue. While for some the revenue from advertisements are enough to be the average American’s paycheck, for others it is just a nice way to get rewarded for hard work. Either way, even before thinking about what to do with the money you will make off advertisements on your website, what you should be asking yourself is if you are even ready.

One of the biggest misconceptions about making money off your website is that it if you follow the ’steps’ that the ‘experts’ say, you will be making money in no time. The first thing that website owners need to understand is that ’steps’ are different for everyone. Everyone has a unique website and to say that the same thing will work for every single one is impossible. Secondly, unless someone has a proven track record of monetizing multiple websites in different markets, they are not an ‘expert.’

Here are 4 questions that anyone thinking about having advertisements on their website should ask themselves: (more…)

You need to give your consumers a reason to become a fan or follow you on Twitter.  Small and medium-sized companies often make the mistake that the simple action of building a FB Fan Page will instantly allow them to have tens of thousands of fans.  Depending on your company brand and culture, a strategy that you might want to engage in is to be bold, controversial, and sexy.

American Apparel is no small brand.  They are well known and have an excellent following.  At the same time, they are a perfect example of how to push the envelope and generate buzz by using “sex” as the hook but always making sure that the campaign is true to their company culture and brand.

Their latest campaign, Best Bottom in the World, is one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve seen in a very long time.  Lets dive into the campaign to see how they’ve marketed it and how I would improve the campaign.
(more…)

Depending on what type of website you have, and what type of content you serve, your average visit length is likely between 30 seconds and 5 minutes.* That’s an awfully short time to focus someone’s attention. Most websites have dozens of pieces of visible content on each page, and often over a hundred links. It’s no wonder companies like Google focus so much on usability (sometimes even to a fault). When you limited time to convert a customer with a very short attention span (hello, internet!), you have to focus your user.
*Some web forums and sites with heavy engagement may have a longer length of visit. Also, if you’re Facebook, disregard everything I say here. The average length of visit for Facebook is measured in hours, not minutes.

(more…)

While optimizing your site for keywords and search engine traffic is important, another aspect that few have taken advantage of is generating traffic through comments left on forums and blogs. By leaving comments on blogs and forums, you are not only building a relationship with the blog author or forum community, but you are essentially leaving your ‘business card’ with them.

Just how networking is essential in business, ‘networking’ with other bloggers and communities is important in generating interest and traffic to your website. (more…)

My attention was drawn by a simple commercial:

I think the beauty of Old Spice’s traditional and new media campaign is that the brand isn’t afraid to stay true to its roots, try new things, and push the envelope to capture your attention and ultimately buy their product.  Lets take a look at how Old Spice has been able to capture a large social following and entertain people while selling their product.
(more…)

Today’s society is really about more. More bang for your buck, more Twitter followers, more customers, more updates. Unfortunately, the answer to more money, more conversions and more profits isn’t always more. It’s better. Sometimes instead of focusing on casting a wider net and bringing in a small percentage of a large (unlikely to convert) population, you need to focus on a smaller, more appropriate audience. In most cases, you’ll get a better return on your time and effort by cutting down the number of people you pitch or contact, even online.

Proper targeting and segmentation is one of the biggest inefficiencies in marketing and advertising. It is extremely important to increase your customer base while maintaining (or increasing) your rate of conversion. Otherwise, you quickly waste money by expending energy and time on non-profitable consumers. Due to the relative ease of mass social media marketing, many marketers mistake the ability to appeal to the largest audience possible as a necessity. Because, “why not”? The reason is there are costs (even online) of time, effort and resources that add up and could be better spent targeting customers better to increase conversions rather than building up the base that you’re pitching.

(more…)