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As a marketer, I always take note of how effective an online store is.

There are obviously huge sites like Amazon that spend a lot of money into market research and website design and most people would agree that Amazon is highly effective from both the view of an Amazon affiliate and as a buyer.

As I live in New Zealand, I can’t always buy the items I’m after locally.  Additionally, if they are available locally, they are generally much more expensive than buying them from overseas.

Therefore, I tend to purchase quite a few products from various sites.

One thing you quickly realise when you live outside the US or UK is that many sites don’t ship internationally.   This is where my biggest gripe on website/shopping cart design lies.

Essential Information That Should Be Available

Shipping Details

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve found a product that I’m after on a particular website and then I have to hunt around all over the place to eventually find that they don’t ship overseas.

Then on the sites that do offer international shipping, they often make the shipping costs very inaccessible.   Sometimes, I have to add the items to the shopping cart, then register a user account, add all my address details and then, and only then, is the shipping costs displayed.  Quite often, the shipping costs are so expensive that it would more than double the cost of the item, so it really annoys me when I can’t find that information up front.

Now don’t get me started on sites that offer international shipping and assumes the rest of the world uses the same address formats as the US.   New Zealand does not use zip codes (we have postcodes) and we don’t have states.

Payment Options

My next gripe is sites that don’t clearly state what forms of payment they use.   I like using Paypal for most of my online purchases and generally favour a site that has a Paypal payment option.  However, it isn’t always easy or obvious to find whether a site has a Paypal option or not.

The same applies to credit cards.  Not everyone has a Visa or Mastercard, so it’s good to know what other forms of payment are accepted.

I have come across a few sites where this type of information is cleared displayed on their homepage and it certainly saves time knowing if you have a valid method for purchasing items on the site.

Applying This To Your Own Sites

Browsing various shopping sites is a good way of doing market research into the aspects of the site or shopping process that you like or dislike.

If you have your own site selling physical products, please ensure you have clear information as to your shipping and payment methods on the home page (or at the very least, prominent links to appropriate pages that contain all the details).

Even if you don’t directly sell physical products, but are an affiliate for physical products, you should still have the shipping and payment details available.

On one of my Amazon affiliate stores, I used to get a lot of queries from people outside the US asking if shipping to their country was available.  After replying to quite a few emails, I made sure I updated the shipping information on my site to state that shipping was only within the US.

This hasn’t entirely stopped all the queries about shipping, but it has certainly reduced the number of them.

Cheers

If you haven’t heard of QR Codes or don’t know much about them, then I urge you to find out more about their power when it comes to marketing.

QR Codes are an equivalent of a barcode for mobile phones.  The QR Code can contain up to 4296 characters of information.

The type of information they can contain are:

• Website URL
• Email address
• Telephone number
• Contact Details (VCARD)
• Google Places information
• Social Media, eg: Facebook, Twitter etc.

QR Codes have been very popular in countries like Japan and Korea and are gaining a lot more popularity in Europe and the US.

The Real Estate industry has adopted QR Codes very quickly as it’s easy to see the benefit of being able to quickly view the details of a house by simply scanning a QR Code.

To really get a good idea of the power of QR Codes, then I think the video below illustrates this very well, with Tesco using them to great affect in Korea.

Now is the great time to jump on the QR Code marketing bandwagon while there are still plenty of opportunities available.

Cheers

I’ve been using DigiResults as both a product seller, an affiliate,  and a buyer since DigiResults came onto the scene in October 2010.

In this DigiResults review, I thought I’d give you my impressions on the service given that I’ve seen it from all sides of the market.

What is DigiResults?

Probably the easiest way to think of DigiResults is that it is an alternate service to places like Clickbank, PayDotCom, Commission Junction, E-Junkie etc.

DigiResults enables you to sell your products (physical and digital) and as an affiliate, you can promote any of the listed products on the DigiResults Marketplace.

Payments and commissions are done via PayPal.

DigiResults Video Overview

The following video gives you a brief overview of some of the features of DigiResults and what the interface looks like.

Features of DigiResults

OK, so what are some of the features of DigiResults that I like?

Navigation

Probably the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the ease of use.   I have accounts on many other similar sites and I have to say that DigiResults is by far and away the easiest in terms of set up and navigation.   I curse every time I’m on a site like e-junkie where the navigation is not intuitive at all as I think it is critical that things should be easy to find and easy to set up.

On DigiResults, you can literally set up a new account and list a product in under 15 minutes.

Commissions and Refunds

The other feature I really like about DigiResults are the instant commissions.   This works really well from both the seller and affiliate perspectives.

There is no waiting to get paid when a sale has been made.  Your PayPal account is instantly credited whether you are the vendor or an affiliate.

On the flipside, refunds are easily handled with no action required from your affiliates.   As a vendor, if you need to issue a refund, DigiResults automatically reverses the payment from both your account and the affiliates account.

Flexible Payment Options

Most other similar systems have restrictions on what percentage you can set your affiliate commissions to.  DigiResults allows you to set the affiliate commission between 0% and 100%.

You might wonder why you would want to offer a 100% affiliate commission, but it is a great method for building your list.

If you want to offer your product at different prices, you have two options:

You can set up discount codes/coupons, which give the buyer the set discount at the point of purchase.   You can choose whether the discount codes are public or not and also set an expiry date.

An alternate method is to add a “variant”.  For example, if you have a special offer you want to give your customers or an affiliate, you can set up a variant with a different buy price.

There’s no limit to the number of variants and discount codes you can set up.

Hosted Downloads

If you don’t have the technical knowledge or software on your own site to offer secure downloads of your product, then DigiResults has an option where you simply upload your product and it will generate a unique download link for every buyer.

Autoresponder Integration

DigiResults can automatically integrate your preferred autoresponder (pretty much supports any autoresponder, eg: iContact, Aweber, MailChimp etc), so that your buyers can be automatically added to your list.

Note that this only works if you use the DigiResults hosted downloads.   Also important to point out is that buyers will still need to confirm their opt-in if you are using an autoresponder that only supports double opt-in.

DigiResults Screenshots

Here are a collection of screenshots that show the main parts of DigiResults.

The screenshot below shows the main dashboard when you log into DigiResults.  It gives you a handy summary of all the important information like number of sales, refunds, and affiliate sales in the last 60 days.

The next screenshot shows the page where you set up your product that you are selling.  As you can see, the options are pretty straight forward.

There are some optional advanced options not shown in this screenshot to configure your affiliate programme page, cancellation/receipt pages and options to allow you to additionally sell your product via ClickBank and PayDotCom.

The last screenshot shows the DigiResults marketplace.  This is where affiliates can select the product they want to promote and get all the details such as affiliate links, sales pages, affiliate promotional details etc.

The marketplace is really the only section where I think DigiResults needs some major improvement.

You can sort the list by any of the columns, but there are no advanced search features and categories to browse the products by.

Having said that, I know the DigiResults is constantly improving and I’m sure that the marketplace will be one of the things on their list to improve.

Final Thoughts on DigiResults

DigiResults is gaining a lot of popularity, particularly with internet marketers, as it provides a very simple and easy ways to enable your products to be promoted and sold.

At this stage, most of the products listed on DigiResults are in the internet marketing area, so most of the potential affiliates would be looking for products also in that category.  However, that certainly shouldn’t prevent you from listing a non-IM product.

For me, the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the simplicity.    It means I don’t have to muck around wading through huge manuals or watching lots of tutorials to get everything set up.

I highly recommend DigiResults and you can instantly join at no cost, so check it out for yourself.

>>Click here to access DigiResults<<

Cheers

 SECockpit Background

I’ve written this SECockpit review in the hope it will give you enough information to make an informed decision as to whether SECockpit is the right keyword research tool for you.

It’s certainly not my aim to give you an unrealistic and hyped up review of SECockpit that you’ll see on some other sites.

I’ve been lucky enough to use SECockpit since the very first limited release.  I’ve seen the product develop and evolve into the fully featured keyword research tool it is today.

Firstly, in case there’s any confusion, there is no relationship between SEO cockpit and SECockpit.  It’s a bit unfortunate that the names are so similar, but I guess there’s only so many combinations of product names you can come up with that have SEO and Cockpit in them.

SECockpit is a product from the SwissMadeMarketing team of Shane Melaugh and Sam Haenni.

Some of you will know Shane from his previously released products such as Backlink Battleplan and Sam has recently partnered with Shane as the brilliant technical person.

SECockpit was made available via invitation, so it has had a lot of real world testing before the public launch on July 5th.

Click here to visit the SECockpit Official Site

SECockpit Components

SECockpit has two main components:

1. Keyword Research – this is the heart of SECockpit where you do all your keyword searches, analysis, filtering and arranging your results.
2. Project & Task Management – this is where you can track your various projects and automatically assign tasks and track project revenues.

Obviously it is the keyword research component of SECockpit that will be of great interest to most people and the area where I’ll be concentrating on in this article.

SECockpit Overview

The  screenshot below shows the main SECockpit keyword search results.  The green niche bar gives you an idea of the niche strength, which is based on search volume, competition strength and a few other factors.

Keywords where the green indicator is high, are definitely worth checking out.

The competition strength is show by the orange bars.  This is broken down into positions 1-3, 4-7 and 8-10.   Having this breakdown can let you know how easy or not it is to get on page one and more importantly, how much competition there is for the first three spots (which after all, is where you really want to rank).

SECockpit Videos

The best way to get an idea of how SECockpit works and the features it offers is by watching the following videos I made.

In the video below, I give you an overview on how SECockpit looks and operates.

There have been a number of changes and improvements to SECockpit since I recorded this video, but the core functionality hasn’t changed.

There have been improvements in the filtering and keyword options, eg: grabbing keywords from Google Wonderwheel, Google suggest etc.  There have also been additional columns added so that you can see if there are things like Youtube, Amazon, or Google Sniper pages in the top 10 results.

In this second SECockpit video, I go over some of the additional features and options that weren’t available when I made the original video.

What are the advantages of SECockpit?

There’s certainly no end of keyword research tools on the market and I’ve used quite a few, eg: Market Samauri and Keyword Elite.

Now while, those keyword tools are certainly not bad, there’s one attribute they all share – they rely on the data from Google and Yahoo.  This is primarily the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the search numbers and results and Yahoo explorer for backlink information.

Now SECockpit certainly uses Google Adwords Keyword Tool for getting a lot of its information, but there are some major differences:

1.  The range and diversity of keywords

You can greatly increase the number and diversity of keywords you are searching on by using the SECockpit Google Suggestions and Wonderwheel options.  In particular Google Wonderwheel can be a great source of long tail and related keywords.  SECockpit can dig down to 2 levels in the Wonderwheel, which can potentially find a few great keywords that you wouldn’t normally find with other keyword research tools.

2.  Competition Analysis

Most importantly, the competition analysis uses data supplied by SEOmoz.

If you’re not familiar with SEOmoz, they crawl the web and collect their own search data and metrics which is more complete and more accurate than what Google provides.

Most other keyword tools rely on a combination of data that is mostly supplied by Google for their analysis.

3.  SECockpit is a web Application

This means it is OS independent as it runs in your browser.

It also has the advantage that your local computer won’t get a temporary ban from Google for performing too many requests.

Additionally, as the processing is done in the cloud, the results are fast.  If you were to do the same type of processing on your local computer, it would chew up a lot of resources and take substantially longer to give you results.

4. Integrated Project and Task Management

Now while I don’t yet use the project and task capabilities of SECockpit, I can see that they would be useful for some people, although I suspect most people wouldn’t bother with it as they have their own methods for tracking projects.

SECockpit allows you to create projects around sets of keywords.  It then has built in  task lists based on the type of project that you can use, or create your own.

The screenshot below shows the the project creation:

Interview with Sam Haenni – SwissMadeMarketing Co-founder

In this interview with Sam Haenni, Sam discusses:

• the background behind SECockpit
• technical challenges along the way
• number of keyword searches that SECockpit performs
• future development plans for SECockpit.

SECockpit Pricing

The pricing for SECockpit may be considered expensive for some people, but you need to keep in mind that SECockpit is a premium product and uses a lot of infrastructure to perform the massive amount of processing it does for every keyword analysis.

I have seen a number of new keyword research services on offer that utilize SECockpit as the tool they use for keyword research.  In these cases, the SECockpit monthly fee would be quite easy to cover and make a sustainable business model.

SECockpit Final Thoughts

It takes quite a bit for a keyword research tool to impress me, but I could see the value and worth of SECockpit from day one and having used it extensively, I can vouch for the results I’ve gotten.

One tip I would give is to not get too hung up on trying to find “diamonds”.  When I initially started using SECockpit, I discarded any keywords that didn’t have a “diamond” ranking.  This was a mistake as I was missing lots of good keywords.

I personally think keywords with “diamond” rating are generally quite difficult to rank for as the SECockpit algorithm is biased towards the number of daily searches.  That means if a keyword has a large number of daily searches and relatively low (that’s lowish for a high competition keyword) then it may get a “diamond” rating.

In general, it’s probably fair to say that “diamond” keywords are high reward, medium/high effort keywords.

While some people might be put off by the SECockpit pricing schedule,  you need to consider the power of SECockpit and the tools you are getting for your money.   At the very least, you could sign up for one month, to try it out and see if you agree that it’s the best keyword research tool available.

Bottom line is that I have no hesitation in stating that SECockpit is by far and away, the best keyword research tool I’ve ever come across.

>> Click here to find out more about SECockpit<<

Cheers

I often hear the endless arguments and counter claims about the importance, or otherwise,  of domain suffixes (aka top level domains), eg: .com, .net, .org etc.

One angle I’ve been seeing quite a bit recently is the suitability and level of trust a user places in a domain name.

For example, if a user had to go to a site like:

http://amazingdiscounts.XYZ

Where XYZ could be any of the lesser know domain suffixes like .me, .pl, .tv etc

would that user be suspicious or at least cautious being on a site that wasn’t a .com, .net or .org?

Additionally, I also see claims that if your site isn’t a .com, then users won’t remember the URL of your site or end up going to one of your competitors sites.

Well, I think that would have been the case 5+ years ago when users relied heavily on bookmarks and typing in the URL’s of the site they wanted to visit.

In my opinion, the whole process that most people use to navigate and find information on the Internet has changed significantly in the last few years.  Let’s look a some of the reasons, why I think this is the case.

Search Engine Prevalence

Obviously search engines have been around for sometime, but when Google hit the scene, it changed the way people search for information.

These days a lot of people use Google as a portal, ie:  it is the place they use to access any information or site they need.   Whether their home page is set to Google or whether they use a Google search bar in their browser, they are constantly interacting with Google.   For these types of people, Google is the Internet.

Additionally, these days, Google provides much more information than the standard search results in the early days.  Now you can get search results on current news, images, videos, maps and all manner of related information.

Google becomes so integrated into these people’s usage, that they rarely or never type in a URL in the browser address bar.  So for example, to go to Amazon, instead of typing:

http://amazon.com

in their browser address field, they’ll type “Amazon” into Google and get to it that way.

Browser Improvements

Browser development have included many improvements to make navigation so much easier from the early days when a browser was much more basic in functionality.

In the early days, to navigate to a web site, you would need to either:

1. Type in the full URL of the site you wanted to go to (including the http://)
2. Have previously bookmarked the site
3. Use a search engine like Yahoo or Altavista (in the days before Google) or navigate through an Internet Directory.

These days, just about all modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and IE have a range of features that make the above methods mostly redundant.

Features such as:

• Integrated search engine functions, so that there is no need to even navigate to a search engine.
• Auto-completion where you can type in the first few letters of a site, and the browser will display possible matches from your browsing history or bookmarked sites.
• Reopening of tabs and windows when you restart your browser.   In the old days, you had to manually open all the windows you were previously on (assuming you could remember what they were and had bookmarked them)
• Adaptive address bar.  You can type virtually anything into the address bar and get a result.  For example, typing in amazon.com or Amazon, will get you to the Amazon website, whereas in the old days, you needed to type in exactly http://amazon.com

Bottom line is that not many people type in the URL of a website these days.

The Trust Factor

It’s certainly true that the .com extension is the most common in existence and that there’s a certain familiarity with them.

So the question is do people trust non .com domains?

Well, that depends.  Some people pay attention to the domain name and might be put off a little by an unusual domain extension (given that they are sometimes used for phishing sites), however, I think that most people wouldn’t even look at the URL of the site they are on and even if they did, they wouldn’t care if the page in front of them had what they expected or what they were looking for.

Having said that, I found the following piece of information from Alex Smith on the Warrior Forum to be very interesting:

I decided last year that rather than replying on my own preference (.com) and marketers’ general preference (.com), I’d ask all my customers and prospective customers what they prefer to see, and what they think “looks best” on my sort of sites and what gives them most confidence in the site.

And the answer came back “.info”, loud and clear, from a big majority of those who expressed a preference, in each of eight different niches.

Looking To The Future

With the advent of global top-level domain names happening sometime in 2012, there will be a flood of new domains that will increase the top level domain diversity.

Cities and big companies will be applying for these new global names, so in future you’ll be seeing domains like:

cafes.newyork

camera.canon

So what does this all mean for Internet Marketers?

Well, I personally think that popular top level domains will have less and less importance as more choice becomes available and the general Internet users either become more used to the variety, or just don’t know or care.

Cheers

If you operate an email list, you probably take great interest in the statistics of your various email campaigns.

After all, it’s very important to know how successful or not, your email marketing efforts are.

You want to ensure you get the maximum possible open and click rates and minimal number of unsubcribes.

I found the following email marketing statistics on MailChimp and they make very interesting reading.

The statistics are compiled from over 273 million emails sent out by MailChimp users, so with a sample size that large, you have some really useful data to analyse.

Firstly an explanation of each column.

• Open Rate – The percentage of recipients that opened the email.
• Click Rate – The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in the email.
• Soft Bounces – The percentage of email addresses that were temporarily unavailable.  For example a full mail box.
• Hard bounces – The percentage of email addresses that failed.  Causes can be email address no longer existing or spam filters rejecting the email.
• Abuse complaints – The percentage of recipients that click on the “This is spam” button in the email.
• Unsubscribes – The percentage of recipients that unsubscribed from the list.

Campaign Categories

Looking at the data above, I thought it would be interesting to highlight the highs and lows.  Note that I’ve excluded the categories “Other” and “Other Groups” as they are too generic.

The lowest open rate is Entertainment with 15.29%

The highest open rate is Food with 36.62%

The lowest click rate is Janitorial with 0.10%

The highest click rate is Food with 7.90%

The lowest soft bounces is Food with 0.84%

The highest soft bounces is Healthcare/Medical with 10.47%

The lowest hard bounces is Creative Other with 0.60%

The highest hard bounces is Self Explanatory with 17.33%

The lowest abuse complaints is Architecture with 0.00%

The highest abuse complaints is Healthcare/Medical with 0.23%

The lowest unsubcribes is Janitorial with 0.00%

The high unsubscribes is Construction and Beauty/Health with 0.85%

Analyzing Your Own Email Campaigns

These statistics are useful to know how you are tracking against these averages.

If you are performing better than average, then well done, you obviously know how to create effective email campaigns.

If not, then you need to pay more attention to the area in which you are under-performing.

If your open rate is low, then you should look at writing more compelling subject lines.

If your click rate is low, then you should look at the placement of your links and the call to action.

With soft and hard bounces, that’s mostly outside your control.  Generally the larger the list, the more likelyhood of higher bounces.

If your abuse complains are high, you definitely need to take a very careful look at the content you are writing.  There will always be a percentage of people who forget they have subscribed to your list, but that is always a minority.

If your unsubscribes are high, you should definitely be concerned:

Is your content too spammy?

Are you sending out emails too frequently?

Are you send out endless offers without any real value?

Cheers

What exactly,  is spintax?

That’s a question I get asked quite often, so I thought I’d write an article explaining what spintax is and what uses it has.

The term spintax is a contraction of “spinning syntax”.

Spintax is the format (or syntax) that is used by various software spinners and article submission sites that create or use spun articles.

There are various spintax formats depending on what software/services you use.  See the section titled “Spintax Formats” below for more details.

Article Spinning

Firstly, let me explain what article spinning is.

Article spinning is a method of creating one or more unique copies of an original article.  The level of uniqueness depends on the type and amount of spinning you do.

Typical uses for spun articles are:

1. Submitting to various article directories
2. Submitting to blog networks
3. Creating unique content for a website/blog

In general, the main purpose of spinning articles is to gain backlinks.

Spintax Example

Let’s look at a spintax example using the most common spintax format.

Let’s say our original article has the sentence:

Writing articles is a lot of fun.

Now if we format the above sentence with spintax, we might have something like:

{Writing|Creating} {articles|stories} is a {lot of fun|rewarding experience}.

Each of the words or phrases contained with {|} are randomly substituted in the spun article.  So for the above example, some of the variations generated would be:

Writing stories is a lot of fun.

Creating articles is a rewarding experience.

Creating stories is a rewarding experience.

And so on for all the combinations possible.  The number of variations depends on what software or service you use with your spintax.

You can spin articles at the word, phrase, sentence or paragraph level or a combination of all these.

Nested Spintax

Nested spintax refers to two or more levels of spinning.   Not all spinning software or services support nested spinning.

Nested spintax is probably best explained with an example.

Let’s say I have the following sentence in spintax format:

Article directories are {an important {element|component|aspect} of SEO|useful for {getting|gaining} backlinks}.

In the example above,  the first level spintax is in blue and the 2nd level is in green.  So some examples of the output this example would produce is:

Article directories are an important aspect of SEO.

Article directories are useful for getting backlinks.

Article directories are an important element of SEO.

Optional Words or Phrases

Another spintax function that is supported by most spintax formats is the facility to make a word or phrase optional.

An example of this is:

The best {|overall|general} product.

Note there is no word specified before the first pipe symbol.  The above spintax example would produce the following results:

The best overall product.

The best general product.

The best product.

Spintax Formats

Unfortunately, there is no standard spintax format.

In the examples given, I’ve been using the most common spintax format (sometimes known as Jet format) used by software spinners such as The Best Spinner.

This format uses {} to delimit the words/phrases to spin and the | symbol to separate them.

{word1|word2}
{word1 {level 2|level two}|word 2}

Probably the next most used spintax format is the one used by article submission sites like ArticleRanks.   The first level spin uses {~} and the second level uses [|]. For example:

{word1~word2}

{word1 [level 2|level two]~word 2}

Then there is the format used by article submission sites like the Free Traffic System which uses [spin]|[/spin] format.  For example

[spin]word1|word2[/spin]

Note that Free Traffic System only supports one level of spinning (also known as flat spin).

The Best Spintax Strategy

So putting everything together, what is the best strategy for creating the most effective spintax.

Well, the answer to that question depends on the purpose of what you want to use the spun article for.

However, let’s assume you want to use your article in as many places as possible, eg: article directories, blog networks etc.

Here’s the tips I use:

• Don’t be tempted to use an auto-replace option in your software spinner as you’ll just end up with a junk article that will take you quite a while to clean up.
• Manually spin each sentence or paragraph.  If you have a  large article, then perhaps spin ever second or third sentence.
• Then go through a spin at the word/phrase level by manually selecting the best synonyms.   This is an easy task with spinners like The Best Spinner.
• Make sure you proof read a couple of examples of the spun article to make sure it reads OK and doesn’t have any bad grammar or clumsy sentence construction.

By following these tips, you will greatly increase the chances of having your spun article accepted on the sites you submit it to.  Additionally, by having a high level of spin and uniqueness, it will help your rankings as the search engines will see your backlinks coming from articles with unique content.

Spinning Hyperlinks

The last part of spintax is spinning your hyperlinks.

Obviously, you don’t want to go to all the effort of creating a spun article and leave out hyperlinks to your site.

There’s no real difference between spinning plain text and hyperlinks apart from having to get the hyperlink format correct.  An example of a spun hyperlink is:

<a title=”{keyword one|keyword two}” href=”http://{example.com/page1|example.com/page2}” target=”_blank”>{keyword one|keyword two}</a>

The more keywords and URLs you add, the greater the potential for missing a quote or misformatted HTML tag.

If you need to generate spintax for hyperlinks, then you should check out my Free Spintaxer Tool.

Also, make sure you take advantage of my special LIFETIME 40% discount off The Best Spinner.

Cheers