9/1/2008 - Richard Branson, Direct Marketing & Facebook Success
Hope your New Year is going well and business is good.
Just thought I'd let you know about some new posts on the blog:
1. There's an excellent video interview with Sir Richard Branson,
2. Direct marketing expert, Doug McIsaac , gives you some tips on
USP and LTV. (If you don't know what they are, you really need to
read the post!)
And...
3. I give you an update on my adventures into pay per click
marketing on Facebook. I think this could be a huge opportunity for
most businesses in the UK!
Check them out at the blog:
http://www.laneconsultancy.com/blog
If you like it, you can subscribe to blog updates via email. It's
very straight forward - just enter your details in the box on the
right, and you'll get a summary of all the new blog posts every
week or two.
(I'd rather do this than send you blog update emails without you
specifically requesting them.)
Hope you enjoy, and I'll speak to you soon!
Best wishes,
George Lane
Lane Consultancy
UK Internet Marketing Consultant
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31/12/2007 - Internet Marketing Tools
A lot of people ask me what internet marketing tools I use to create successful Google Adwords campaigns for clients. Here are my favourites:
One that I've just discovered is called Keyword Spy. It allows you to see what keywords your competition are bidding on. This gives you a great head start in competitive markets. You can read a review of the keyword spy tool here.
Have you ever spent hours creating broad match, phrase match and exact match versions of your keywords? Ever racked your brains to find every possible keyword combination and mis-spelling? If you're anything like me, you probably wasted half your life setting up Adwords campaigns... That was until I found this Adwords Tool by Howie Jacobson. It's saved me huge amounts of time and money. Check it out and see what you think!
Finally, here's a really simple tool I created myself. It's totally free and can make the difference between a profitable pay per click campaign and utter failure. The tool (in excel format) helps you work out how uch you can afford to pay for a click without losing money. You can read more about it and download the visitor value calculator here.
Cheers,
George Lane
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20/12/2007 - New Marketing Audio Seminar - Free Download
I've just posted a new internet marketing audio seminar as a Christmas gift and a way of saying "thanks for taking an interest in my work".
The seminar covers:
- How to make your business stand out from the competition,
- Viral and interactive elements on your website,
- Getting ranked highly on the natural search engine listings,
- How to approach joint venture partners and set up deals,
- How to position yourself if you’re in a service business,
- Top Google Adwords tips and a free tool,
- How to improve visitor conversions,
- How to find your customers needs and create good website content quickly,
- My opinion on internet marketing “get rich” schemes,
- How to find out if your new product or service has the makings of success with very little risk,
- How to set up an email marketing campaign, why the 80/20 principle is important when sending emails.
You can find out more and download the mp3 file from my main blog here.
Internet Marketing Audio Seminar
Please let me know what you think - I'd love to hear your feedback!
Have a great Christmas and an happy New Year!
Cheers,
George
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16/12/2007 - The £100 Million Free Marketing Resource
I just stumbled across this free resource from Paul Gorman, a UK marketing legend.
I’ve heard some great things about him, but haven’t studied him in great detail myself. However, I reckon this new site is worth a look.
Apparently, Paul has now retired and is “opening the doors” and making his previousy paid-for information available for free.
I’ve only skimmed the website, but it looks like it’s got a lot of good, solid marketing information on it based on the likes of Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy.
Check it out and let me know what you think by leaving a comment on this blog.
The address is:
http://www.leavetheminthedust.com/
Cheers,
George.
Internet Marketing Blog UK
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14/12/2007 - YouTube, FaceBook, and American Food…
admit it. I’ve been slow on the up take with this.
If you’ve been following me or my work, you know that I’m a pay per click and direct response marketing evangelist.
I love it because it brings me and my clients measurable, accountable results. The kind of results businesses can be built on and financial projections can be made.
However, a couple of things recently have sparked my interest. Here’s how it happened…
FaceBook and direct mail marketing.
Back in October I was at a get together in Chicago with Perry Marshall and his other coaching students. We were talking over lunch about marketing on the internet and the subject of FaceBook came up while we were waiting for our food…
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.laneconsultancy.com/blog/2007/12/12/youtube-facebook-and-american-food/
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14/12/2007 - Free Laptops from AOL?
Have you seen the adverts? Why on earth would AOL give you a free laptop for joining their broadband service? Surely they’ll lose money…. or will they?
If you’ve been in the marketing business for a decent amount of time, you’ll know that AOL, despite all their faults, are very clever marketers. They understand the concepts of lifetime value.
Let me begin by explaining Lifetime Value for the uninitiated…
Put simply, lifetime value is: the sum of all the purchases a customer makes from you over the lifespan of your business relationship.
Here are some examples:
A heating engineers’ average customer may pay him to service their boiler once a year for 5 years. He charges £50 per service, so the lifetime value of his customer would be around £250.
A hairdresser may charge £25 for a haircut. An average customer may come in once a month for 2 years. Therefore the lifetime value of the hairdressers’ customer would be £600.
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.laneconsultancy.com/blog/2007/12/05/free-laptops-from-aol/
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24/10/2007 - Pay Per Click, Adsense and Gmail
When you're researching your market for a Google Pay Per Click campaign, it's pretty simple to discover who your competition are simply by entering your keywords into Google as a search term.
It's a lot more difficult however, to work out who you are up against in the Adsense network. A quick work-around I've discovered is this:
- Set up a Google Mail (gmail) account.
- Send yourself an email with the keywords you're bidding on in the content network.
- Open this email in your gmail account when it arrives.
- The ads on the right will be the most popular Adsense ads for that keyword.
Hey presto - you know who you are competing against and what ads work the best!
Cheers,
George Lane
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19/10/2007 - This is Where To Start...
As a reader of my blog, I have no idea where you are with your online business. You may not have a website yet, or you may have been online for years.
Whatever the case is, what I'm about to tell you can make a huge impact on your web site and your online marketing efforts.
Whenever I start working with clients, this is one of the first questions I ask them and is the foundation to marketing success on the internet.
The question you need to ask yourself is this:
"What is the purpose of my Web Site?"
This is such an important question because it forces you to be very clear about your business and exactly what you want your customers to do.
Now, the most common answer to this question is "to get more business" or "to make money", but that's too vague.
You need to establish exactly what you want your visitor to do when they're on your site.
This can vary enormously depending on the type of business you are in.
- Some websites purpose is to get the visitor to purchase right there and then.
- Others use their website as a lead generation tool for their sales force to follow up with.
- Sometimes a websites sole purpose is to get their visitors to "spread the word" about their website to their friends.
As a general rule of thumb, the more expensive your products or services are, the harder it is to get your visitor to buy there and then.
The kind of things that you can sell directly (and quite easily) on the web are things like books, CD's etc. (Look at the likes of Amazon as a case study!)
However for most other services, your website is best used as a lead generation tool. You can use your web site as a "first step" in a sales process, which you can follow up with offline.
This has been used very effectively in industries such as farming machinery and industrial scaffolding, where the average purchase is between £50,000 to £100,000!
Whatever you decide your website is for, make sure it's designed with that action in mind.
The sole purpose of your website must be to lead your visitor to take the action you desire. That's it. Anything else is merely a distraction for your visitor to procrastinate or go elsewhere.
So once you're clear on what you website is for, and what you want your visitor to do, the next question is "how can I get my visitors to take action?"
I'll be answering that soon. Stay tuned!
George.
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19/10/2007 - Welcome!
Welcome to the blog! This is my first post of many here. In upcoming posts I'll be discussing Marketing & Business in general and Internet Marketing inparticular.
Hope you enjoy it!
Cheers,
George
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About Me
Hello, I’m George. I’ve been in business since the age of 20, ran businesses in the “real world”, helped other peoples businesses grow, and have been featured on ITV and in the Independent newspaper. I’ve studied some of the best online and offline marketers in the world and applied this knowledge with great success. This site aims to distill this information in easy to understand and implement methods, whether you’ve been online for a while or are completely new to the web. My aim for this blog is to keep you up to date with any internet marketing insider news, tips, tactics, and my opinions on all things realated to business and marketing.
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