Online Christmas Game in Flash

If you have a minute checkout this latest christmas flash game we recently developed for one of our clients PMI mortgage Insurance.



P.S. If you want to learn more about my formula for website traffic and how to get it as cheap as possible, you might be interested in my new online marketing seminar.

God Created the Internet to Market your Business Online

God created the internet to market your business online – get that firmly entrenched in your mind … and when he created it what he wanted you to have is thousands of visitors to your site.

To achieve this you'll need a strategy to get quality traffic to your website and drive sales.

An effective online marketing strategy is more than SEO, email marketing, or even optimising your website. It involves a number of activities that, when combined, result in a dramatic increase in sales.

Over seven years Fred Schebesta has learnt the essential secrets to online marketing success.

If you've ever wanted to get a handle on online marketing and make a powerful impact on your business, here is your chance. With only ten places available for this seminar, participants learn from one of Australia's best and awarded online marketing experts - Fred Schebesta.

You will get hands on experience that will improve you online marketing abilities and enable you to start marketing like a professional online marketing agency.

You can get a sneak preview of Fred Schebesta's 11 Online Marketing Secrets Seminar below, watch Fred as he explains the fastest way to grow your email database:




Learn Internet Marketing from Fred Schebesta, limited places available.

12 Quick Christmas Online Marketing Review Tips to Increase Sales Online

Check Your Website with 12 Quick Christmas Online Marketing Tips

Interestingly the 12 days of Christmas song is not actually a countdown to Christmas day but instead a count from Christmas day to the 6th of January, “The Epiphany Day”. This Christmas whilst you are pondering around and have some time on the internet give yourself a break in 2008 and do a little review of your online marketing with these 12 tips.

1. Review your competitor’s website – Type in the main keyword you are competing for in Google and browse through the top 10 results to see what they are doing that you might be able to do. Sometimes comparing yourself to the competition can bring about quick shortcuts which you were pondering before.
2. Review your web stats – If you don’t have access to your web stats, I suggest spend the time to get it. Checkout these metrics and set a reminder for this time next year to make a comparison:
1. Major keywords bringing you traffic
2. Which websites are bringing you the most traffic
3. Number of unique visitors on your website per month
3. Test your website – Just click around it and pretend you are a customer. You are looking for:
1. Quick improvements
2. Spelling mistakes
3. Errors
4. A reminder of where you are at with your site.
4. Increase trust and review your content – Remove your 2005 press release on your website and consider replacing it with some latest news. Fresh content is very persuasive as it shows that the website is alive. Actually read your homepage content and make a quick assessment.
5. Write a quick article – A good article for your website that helps visitors is invaluable. It helps in the sales process for your visitors and it is also great search engine food. If you are stuck for ideas:
1. Pickup a your trade magazine and write about what your take is on the industry and what your predictions are for 2008
2. Write a “How to Choose a ‘your profession’” e.g. How to choose an online marketing consultant.
6. Hunt for a new domain name – Check if the generic keyword for your industry (www.Shoes.com.au) has expired and if you can snap it up. This happened to me quite a few times with our clients. Domain names with keywords inside them are easier to rank in the search engines.
7. Build your email database – Collect together all of those rogue business cards and other email addresses you have and compile them together into an Excelsheet ready to be put into an online mailout database.
8. Write a quick enewsletter – Get together some content and prepare to send out your enewsletter in January next year. Be ready to press the send button next year, before it gets crazy again.
9. Tweak your adwords – Kill poor performing ads and pump up ads that are performing well. If you haven’t got a paid search marketing campaign, get one up and running in 27 minutes with my free guide.
   
10. Rewrite your about us page – Include all of the new things that happened in 2007 into your about us. Include new clients, new products and any other big news that occurred.
11. Check your contact us form – Make sure it works. Is it logical to use, does it make sense to you what it requires. Fill it out. Got back to your website and think where else you could put links to your contact us page to get more people to it?
12. Plan your 2008 online marketing – Jot down things that you want to do, wishlists and what you won’t do next year.

How to start a search engine marketing campaign

Why start a search engine marketing campaign?
Buying traffic for the sake of buying traffic will send you broke. The reason is because it isn’t targeted, so you will only get people coming to your website that just leave. Buying just any traffic is like putting up a T.V. ad, you are shooting millions of arrows out to try and hit a prospect. The answer to not wasting your money is to target specific users and prequalify your traffic.

Target specific users – Market to people who are interested in your product. Michael Kiely taught me to “Fish where the fish are”. I took out of that advertise where people are looking for your products. Search engine marketing targets the people who are interested in your products because the visitor types in what they are searching for. The user makes their intentions clear that they are searching for “a way to save my marriage”, keyword typed in = “Save Marriage Book”. Before the user goes to your website they tell you what products they want to see. If your product matches what they want to see you can easily market your product to them.

Prequalify your audience – Buying advertising on a performance basis is a great start but you still don’t want to be paying for traffic that is not sent to your website for the right reason. Getting a user to do something like typing in a query makes the traffic more qualified. Users actually have to search for your ads.

I recommend buying search engine marketing traffic as the first thing to do. The reason is that you can keep your budgets low, ($100 per month) and you can keep the campaign small and manageable to determine what results you get.

How to start your search engine marketing campaign to get instant traffic

Step 1 - Choose your search engine: I recommend starting with Google because it accounts for around 70% of the Australian search engine market traffic. Yahoo and Ninemsn each account for around 12% each and the minor other search engines account for the remainder.
Below is a snapshot from one of my clients websites that shows you the % of traffic they get from each of the search engines.




You can see from the above results that Google is the big Gorilla in the Australian search space so I always recommend you optimise first for it and buy Adwords first. After that consider Yahoo and Ninemsn.

Step 2 - Setup your campaign on Google
I have put a guide together to help you in 7 steps get your site live on google. Just go to www.StartSearchMarketing.com.au and follow the steps.
To begin you will need the following:

1. A website – You need somewhere to send the traffic you will get from the search engine.
2. A credit card – This is to pay for your ads.

www.StartSearchMarketing.com.au
Start your search marketing campaign now

5 Secrets to A Successful Performance Media Campaign

Performance Media may be one of the easiest, and most effective, online marketing opportunities in today’s market.

What is Performance Media/Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an agreement between two sites in which one site (the affiliate) agrees to feature content or an ad designed to drive traffic to another site. In return, the affiliate receives a percentage of sales or some other form of compensation generated by that traffic.

What are the benefits?

• You only pay for results. You don't pay for page views or click-throughs: you pay for results. You decide what is most valuable to you -- a sale, an e-mail lead, a download, a newsletter subscriber, or any other measurable activity.
• It exposes you to a bigger market to sell your product.
• It gives you the potential benefit of getting advertising space on sites and only paying for commissions, not for the actual advertising space.
• You will most likely benefit form lower cost per acquisition than traditional online marketing.

5 things that you need to consider for a successful Affiliate Marketing Program:

1. Direct traffic to the most persuasive and relevant section on your website – The last thing you want is to generate traffic to your site and see it dropping off straight away, because people can’t find what they are looking for. This is particularly important as your affiliates are incentive by commissions and if your site doesn’t convert they will stop promoting your program. When you are advertising for a certain offer in your ad, make sure that potential customers are directed to the exact section of your page that promotes that product or offer. A lot of businesses redirect potential customers to the landing page and lose valuable leads, as people don’t have time to look through the site to find the particular product/offer that you advertised for. Keep the message simple and deliver on what you promise in your ad, i.e Avoid hidden costs or charges.
2. Work with your affiliates – Building a strong relationship with your affiliates is crucial to a successful performance campaign. See it as a long-term relationship that you need to work on constantly, which will lead to a win-win situation. It is essential to develop a community of reliable affiliates, who are committed to your program and its success. One strategy to do this is a monthly email newsletter to communicate directly with your affiliates. A monthly newsletter not only increases awareness in your program but allows you to offer incentives (e.g. Higher commissions) for better performance. Another point to think about is whether you will pay your affiliates a commission on sales only, or pay them by some other incentive. As a merchant, your options for commission payments are: Pay-per-sale, Pay-per-click or Pay-per-lead.
3. Ensure your site converts, otherwise you are wasting your time – The best performing online businesses have a simple and clear site. Ensure your site is easy to complete the desired conversion action e.g. fill in a contact form and that potential customers can find what they are looking for within 2 clicks away. A site map can be useful for users who wish to navigate to specific sections. Organize your pages into nice categories so that it is not frustrating for your readers to find what they want. Ask yourself the questions:
1. Who am I trying to persuade to take the desired action?
2. What is the action I want them to take?
3. What does that person need in order to feel confident taking that action?
4. Rotate your creative to keep it fresh and converting – There are many different types of online advertising creative such as: banner ads, pixel advertising, pop ups, emails, text links and the more options you provide your affiliates the easier it is for them to promote you. You have to decide which is the best for your product and/or service. If you're not experienced, one of the easiest ways is to find out what methods the bigger sellers in your market are using. Always make sure you have few different ad-formats available, as this will generate more exposure and will give you a better understanding of what works, its also helps you understand which creative converts the best and therefore what your customers prefer.
5. Contact details/Excellent customer service – Many small businesses that aren’t performing well on the internet may find that their contact details are impossible to find. Lots of people think that their privacy will be violated and they will get hundreds of customers calling them asking questions. This is a tragedy. You must speak to your customers as they want to spend money with you. Every single one telephone call is a potential opportunity to make money. It’s also important to give your customers the peace of mind that they can just pick up the telephone and contact you. After your customers trust you they will order more on your website and thus keep your affiliates happy. To be successful in your affiliate program, you should have customer service and support not just for your customers but also your affiliates. Be prepared to respond to questions and enquiries in various forms such as emails, faxes, phone calls or instant messages from your affiliates promptly and professionally so that you build better relationships.

If you want to learn more about performance media opportunities for you business, please speak to one of our consultants for a free evaluation as to whether it will be suitable for your business. Contact us on 02-9339 6747.

How to avoid search engines telling customers things you don't want them to see

This morning I typed in Colorado into the search engine hoping to browse their lovely website and catalogue. I was absolutely shocked when I saw the second listing in Google:

"webstore is closing" – this was followed by a website which was an email folder which lead to a broken link.



The website itself at present has no content, and you can’t browse to that folder. Google has slipped through the cracks of the website and has found some content that it feels is important. If I were Colorado I would be concerned as to what links are lurking in the rest of their website!


3 ways to search engine optimise your website so that spiders don't find your skeletons

1. Add the pages and folders you don't want visible in search engines to your robots.txt file eg:
   Disallow: /admin-access/
   Disallow: /cms-login/


2. Make sure that pages like CMS login, administrator access etc that should only be accessible to the webmaster are not linked to from anywhere on your site.


3. Use your Google Webmaster tools account to submit a URL removal request

NSW Young BizStar Entrepreneur Competition

My fellow director of Freestyle Media, Frank Restuccia had a great time talking at the final of the NSW Young BizStar Competition 2007 yesterday.

He told me it was a great opportunity to pass on our experience of the pros and cons of being young and starting a successful business to the next generation of entrepreneurs

I know he inspired them to great deeds with our story of:

1. Starting Freestyle Media while studying at University in 2001
2. Building it up to group revenues exceeding $2M in the past financial year
3. My being appointed ADMA Australian and NSW Young Direct Marketer of the Year 2006 for pioneering work combining traditional direct marketing with online marketing techniques.

Most importantly he motivated them to persevere in their quest to be entrepreneurs because in the words of former President of the United States Calvin Coolidge they should:

“Press on: nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent”