Facebook Marketing: How to Measure Your ROI

Facebook gets a lot of hype from internet marketers. With over 800 million users and counting, it’s easy to see why so many search engine marketing experts have honed in Facebook as one of the most reliable ways to kickstart a social media campaign.

But the trouble with Facebook, and social media in general, is that it’s difficult to measure your results, which is why so many business owners turn on their marketers and say that it’s just plain not working for them.

What people need to understand is that social media optimization hinges on being able to accurately measure your progress. Every marketing campaign needs a roadmap, a destination, and a set of guidelines for knowing how you’re going to get there. One of the easiest ways to measure a Facebook marketing campaign is comparing the lifetime value of a customer against your investment.

Say your website sells T-shirts for $10, and 50% of your customers buy at least two T-shirts. So the average lifetime value of a customer is $15 (50% spend $20, and 50% spend $10).

Now say you spend $500 on Facebook marketing. It doesn’t matter how many fans your page gets; what matters is that you need to acquire at least 34 new customers through Facebook in order to get your initial investment back.

When you combine SEO with social media marketing, ideally using a search engine marketing firm for the heavy legwork, you have a pretty good chance of building a loyal customer base. I’m not going to say guaranteed, but pretty good.

Search Engine Optimization: A Growing Trend in the Middle East and Northern Africa?

In the Western world, SEO is one of the most popular buzz words for internet marketers. If your goal is to establish an online presence, you have to use SEO as one of your main marketing strategies. But where does that leave the rest of the world? We all know SEO is growing in Asian countries, but until recently the Middle East and Northern Africa, or MENA collectively, has stayed well under the radar.

One of the inherent issues with implementing SEO in foreign countries is the language barrier. Typical Alphanumeric based languages are a simpler hurdle – the words are different, but the letters are the same. In Middle Eastern PPC management, the biggest problem is getting passed that change in language dynamics. There are over 221 million Arabic speakers in the world, but Arabic still constitutes less than 1% of all online content.

Google is working hard to remedy this with Arabic-centric domains such as google.ae, but the change is slow and it’s difficult to find a Middle Eastern search engine marketing firm. With up to 80% of online searches coming out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt being performed in Arabic, it’s about time we saw some improvements in the MENA SEO front.

Luckily, it seems like the Arabic trends are definitely on the rise. In a part of the world with one of the historically lowest percentage of internet users, we’re starting to see numbers like 100 million Youtube videos watched (out of a global 2.5 billion) and 60% of internet users in Saudi Arabia using the Arabic extension of Facebook, now’s the time to get a jump on SEO in the Middle East. With the right Middle Eastern search engine optimization firm, the sky is the limit.

Should Your Company Use Online Market Research?

In the past decade or so, the use of the internet to perform market research has gone through the proverbial roof. One of the ongoing themes on this site is how the internet makes just about everything easier. Not easier in the sense that you can be lazy and still expect to make headway with your company, but easier in that all those communication and marketing tasks that you had to perform anyway can now be essentially completed with the push of a button.

 

The title of this post asks, “Should your company use market research,” and of course we already know what the answer is. Online research in the form of surveys and click tracking can give you and incredibly detailed view of what a specific target market likes, dislikes, and wants to purchase. Now, as with anything there are some drawbacks that should be addressed, and I couldn’t call myself a serious writer if I didn’t at least take a glance at those before telling you to run off and get started in online market research. So here we go…

 

 

Advantages to Online Market Research

 

Requires Less Time – You can rapidly deploy your surveys and get the results back almost instantly. From there it’s just a matter of sifting through the data to find what you need.

 

Low Cost – Just about anything you can turn digital is going to come with a lower price tag. There’;s an incredibly low overhead to online market research, and if you’re willing to put in more time it can even be free, on a small scale.

 

Convenient – Think about all the phone calls and letters you’ve received asking you to take a quick survey. It’s not the end of the world, but it can get pretty annoying pretty fast. With online surveys, most participants are willing, and if they aren’t they can at least delete the email with a click of a button (remember that?)

 

Disadvantages to Online Market Research

 

Limited Results – Some populations and demographics won’t have readily available internet access, for one thing, but there’s also the possibility of skewed data.

 

Misdirected Answers – In any situation where the interviewee is left on his own to complete a survey form, there’s bound to be some confusion about the questions, and with online research there’s nobody there to make sure everything is understood.

 

Is it worth it? Well, you decide for yourself, but in my book it’s definitely a go.

Effects of Square Payments on Small Businesses

These days, it’s cool to be a Square, at least when you’re running a business. Square was launched in 2010 by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, and after a little more than a year it’s now responsible for more than $11 million in credit card payments per day. If you aren’t familiar with the service, Square is a miniature credit card reader that plugs into any iPhone, iPad, or Android, allowing you to accept credit card payments wherever, whenever.

 

Why all the hype though? After all, we’ve had credit cards for decades, and businesses have had no problem integrating them into their day to day operations, right? While that may be true for medium to large companies, small businesses have been getting the short end of the stick when it comes to non-cash transactions. Let’s take a look at what typical setup for a company that accepts credit cards.

 

1) First you need a merchant account, which requires entering into a contract with a third party provider. With a merchant account, you become responsible for authorization fees, statement fees, and the monthly minimum requirement.

 

2) Then you need a point of sale terminal, that ubiquitous black swipe box next to every cash register, which is either purchased or leased from your merchant account provider. When a card is swiped the terminal stores the card information temporarily, submits a verification request, and then uploads the information.

 

Between the fees, the equipment, the licensing, and especially the fees, just the simple idea of accepting credit cards becomes a massive percentage of a small business’ monthly expenditures.

 

And then you have Square. It’s free, plugs directly into your smart phone or iPad, and says “screw it” to monthly fees, contracts, and extra equipment. You just download the app, plug in the device, and activate your account. The Square reader is mailed to you for free.

 

What About Security?

 

One of the (many) innovative features of the Square payment system is that it doesn’t actually store any credit card data. The device plugs into the headphone jack and immediately converts the info into audio and encrypts it. What that means is that neither the device nor the merchant have access to the sensitive data. Instead of signing a receipt, the customer presses his or her finger onto the iPad’s touch screen, and the receipt is sent via SMS or email or, as we’ll talk about in just a second, printed like normal if the customer wishes.

 

Square 2.2

 

Reaching yet another milestone, Square recently implemented a software upgrade in the Square app that allows both customers and merchants even more flexibility in the payment process. The new Card Case app will wirelessly transmit data from nearby customers who have shopped at your store previously, facilitating the transaction process even more. The customer just tells you their name, you ID them based on the photo in their profile, and at the push of a button the transaction goes through.

 

Additionally, you can now recognize repeat customers and automatically integrate a “regular” discount into their purchases. Everyone can accept credit cards now: flower shops, bakeries, taxi drivers, even the kid next door with the lemonade stand. Best of all, it makes it easier than ever to track your online receipts and spending.

What Do Elephants Have To Do With Conversion Rates?

One of the hardest concepts for a new small business owner to grasp is how to effectively increase and maximize their conversion rate. To a newcomer, Internet Marketing can sometimes feel like floating on a vast ocean in just a little rowboat. So much information can seem very overwhelming. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be. What I’m going to do is break the concepts down into easy to follow steps. We all know that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

Clean Up Your Website Design

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard this one before. The truth is, though, that many small business websites look like they were made five years a go with ten year old technology. There is a fine and delicate beauty in simplicity. The only way to stay in the same arena with the big dogs is to make a lasting impression.

Dress to Impress

No, not you! Your website! First impressions are the most important, but not the only important thing. Give your viewers a heck of a landing page, and they’ll look for more. Give them easy to use navigation and user interfaces and they’ll stay around. Give them a lasting impression even after they leave, and they’ll be back. Separate yourself from competitors and stay ahead of the pack. Most importantly, make sure they always always ALWAYS know where to place an order or buy a product. We’re not giving free rides at an amusement park here.

Be Detail Oriented

Organize your product list and subsequent product details in a way that is easy to understand. Put related products together and make sure your products match the keywords that brought your customers to your site. Nothing turns me away from a site faster than searching for graphic t-shirts and getting taken to a website selling nutritional supplements.

Don’t Take Your Visitors For a Ride

One of the worst things for a customer is getting to the checkout page and finding you don’t process credit cards, or you don’t take Paypal, etc. Try to have as many ways of funding as possible. And, on the same note, clearly provide shipping estimates at the checkout page, not after it. Even better, provide a free shipping calculator. Try to let the customer know the total amount before he/she even has to enter any personal information.

These tips should be easy enough to follow for any small business owner. Just remember that when it comes to increasing conversion rates, each step, no matter how small, is still a step.

Using Inbound Marketing to Tailor Your Website to the Modern Buyer

It’s widely known these days that having a website is crucial to the success of your online marketing strategies. It doesn’t matter what type of business or commercial enterprise we’re talking about; your online presence largely determines the outcome of your efforts to reach new buyers.

Surprisingly, a lot of businesses still haven’t made that leap to get in on the digital action. 1&1 Internet recently conducted a survey of SME businesses and found that an incredible 40% of small businesses don’t even have a website. Some of these have at least established some sort of social media presence, but simply having a Facebook page isn’t enough to create a fully realized strategy for online marketing. As we get further along in 2012, it’s becoming more essential than ever to set up a virtual front for your business that allows real, engagable customer interaction.

Okay, so a website is important, but what then? Just building a static site isn’t going to get you nearly as far these days as it may have back in 2003. The difference is that inbound marketing is playing a larger role in how sales are made, and a truly successful website needs to take advantage of that on all fronts.

What I mean is that websites today are much more interactive than they were in the past. Where we are right now, your website’s success depends on the network of connections surrounding it. Through strong social media interaction, efficient use of search engine marketing, blogging, and informative content you can more easily showcase your website to a more widespread audience, thereby increasing your sales and boosting your conversion rates. Do it right, and it’s more effective than most article marketing techniques.

Why has this arena changed so much? Most of it is due to a shift in the behavior of buyers on the web. Consumers need the freedom to make their own choices – they want to choose when, where, and how they buy something, and the last thing they want is a salesperson pushing them towards the checkout. This fundamental change can be summed up by saying that modern buyers don’t want to be sold to – they want to be given information. It’s a self-service psychology.

Interactive content like this – podcasts, social media, blog posts – are now bringing in the majority of online sales, proving that inbound marketing techniques are becoming more effective while outbound strategies – telemarketing, direct mailers, email marketing – are dropping in terms of conversion and ROI.

The bottom line is this: a virtual business optimized for inbound marketing allows the sales to come to you – not the other way around. It’s easier, cheaper, and all around more cost effective.

Why You Need to Stop Paying For Your Backlinks

When you own a business or a website, you can be tempted to use one of those services that offers “Cheap PR8 Backlinks!” or “Get on Page 1 of Google!” It’s an easy decision if you don’t know much about how these services work – What’s that? Get on page 1 of Google? Why sure, I’ll pay for that!

 

What these services do is spam a massive number of links to a whole bunch of non-relevant sites. That is bad for your business for 2 reasons:

 

1. Google doesn’t look very favorably on backlinks from sites that are not relevant to the destination page (although it’s still not a punishable offense, just stupid)
2. Depending on the methods that the service uses to get the links out there, it actually MIGHT be a punishable offense, in which case your entire site could get slammed and sent back to the hundredth page, or worse.

 

I actually had #2 done to me recently. I wasn’t using a paid backlink service (tried it once, never went back), but I was testing out some different techniques and theories that I had for getting my page ranked. I went from page 3 of Google for a certain keyword all the way back to page 92. You can guess that I was pretty bummed when I found out it happened. I lost a lot of revenue on that site as a result.

 

I’ve been able to build it back up to page 15 so far, but it has been a long, arduous process that could have been avoided if I had just stayed away from that one technique. Now, I know I didn’t pay for the backlinks that did this to me, but the point is that you never know what these services are actually doing to get the promised number of backlinks out there.

 

Google doesn’t tell you when it punishes you, and it doesn’t tell you what you did wrong. It just sends your page way back and leaves you to figure it out for yourself.

 

If you want to get onto the 1^st page of Google, put the effort in and do it yourself. Article directories don’t have the same sway they used to since the Google Panda updates, but they still hold some weight, so don’t count them out completely. Social networking sites like Facebook are apparently going to be given more weight, so make sure you use them as well. Ask other people to share your site on their pages to help get the word out.

 

If you are offering a quality service or have useful information on your site, people will have no problem linking to it and sharing it for you. If you want some quick backlinks, you can hire a freelance content writer to write some articles and then get them up on article directories quickly and painlessly, controlling the process so that you know exactly where your links are coming from.

New Blog Design and New Page for Internet Marketing Articles

I’ve got a couple new updates happening with the blog right now that I wanted to talk about. First of all, as you’ve probably already noticed there’s a new design on the blog! Let me know if you like it or prefer the old one in the comments section below. I’m always open to feedback on how to best improve the user experience here at HandleyNation.

Second, if you look to the right of this post you’ll see a brand new picture advertising my free list building e-book How to Build an Unstoppable Email List. Previously I had a post asking my readers to leave a comment and request the free e-book, but all you have to do now is subscribe. Just enter your email address and I’ll send the e-book straight to your inbox. You’ll also be notified every time I make a new post, so there’s nothing to lose!

Finally, I made one more addition to the blog in the form of a new page for articles. This page is an index of internet marketing articles, work from home articles, and motivational articles around the internet that hopefully you’ll find informative and educational. There’s 38 articles on the list right now, but I’ll be updating it constantly so check back often for some helpful guides and tips. You can click the link there on “internet marketing articles” or you can access the page in the “Articles” tab at the top of the blog.

Oh and one more thing! There’s now a Facebook like box on the right side of the blog. If you like the posts just take a second and show your appreciation by liking us on Facebook. I also post some discounts for my freelance writing services on my Facebook page from time to time, so if you’re in the market for exceptional content writing at affordable rates, go ahead and take a look at the page. You can also contact me through this blog or on my email at andrew@handleynation.com.

That’s it!

-Andrew Handley

November 2011 Earnings Report

November was an incredibly busy month. It’s finally starting to clear up down here in Costa Rica after a long rainy season, so with the sun shining I’ve been trying to spend more time outside while keeping up with all the work. I missed a good friend’s wedding due to the fact that I couldn’t get away for a few weeks, and I’m actually pretty regretful about that. If you can’t be around for friends, what kind of a friend are you?

 

Nevertheless, my spirits are higher than ever thanks to the weather change; we’re going into one of the most beautiful times of the year down here.

 

As far as earnings, November was a pretty good month. Earnings are down a little on Triond, but I’ve been pursuing other writing outlets so that’s understandable. A few months ago we got the HandleyNation Facebook page up and running thanks to the help of my lovely graphic designer.

 

I’ve been seeing a lot of traffic here on my blog from people interested in learning how to make money online, so thank you to everybody who’s been reading even when the posts were few and far between. I also have a free list building e-book available (link goes to the post)

 

Now let’s take a look at my November 2011 earnings report:

 

Triond: $8.69 (down from $16.19 last month)

 

Amazon Associates: $0.36

 

Helium: $5.26

 

Misc. Affiliates: $18.34

 

Textbroker: $10.08

 

Freelance Writing: $1,201

 

Total earned in the month of November: $1,243.73

 

Like I mentioned, I haven’t been posting much on Triond so those numbers are going down. I’m kind of getting tired of Triond’s lack of quality control, but so far it’s been a convenient outlet for anything I feel like writing at any time.

 

Helium is starting to replace Triond. Their PPV earnings are higher and it’s just a more friendly and inviting community in general. I’ll probably be doing more with them in the future.

 

Earnings are still trickling in on Amazon Associates, even though I haven’t done anything with The Twitter Experiment in awhile. It’s been months actually, so if you read those posts and wondered where the rest of the updates went, well, there you go! I’m still getting residual sales even though I haven’t touched it since about June.

 

Freelance earnings are also down, but that’s because I’ve been taking more days off. It’s Costa Rican summertime; there’s no way I’m staying inside all day!

 

Subscribe using the button at the top right of this page to get email updates whenever a new post goes up, and don’t forget to claim your FREE list building e-book.

-Andrew Handley

Hey, Want a Free List Building E-book?

**Note: I made some changes to this post and to the steps for getting the e-book. All I want you to do is put up a tweet or post a Facebook update about it.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already December! It’s been a great year so far, and now that we’re in the month of giving I want to give all my faithful readers something in return for the support you’ve given me and my blog. I’ve written a full length e-book which I’m going to give out for free on an exclusive basis. The name of the e-book is How to Build an Unstoppable Email List, and it details all of the hardest hitting methods currently in use for creating a strong, targeted list of email subscribers.

If you have a business and you haven’t set up a subscriber list yet, now’s the time to start. This is a great guide for beginners and veterans alike, because it outlines the steps to not only bring in a ton of traffic and subscribers, but to monetize your list as well. A massive subscriber list lets you pitch your product to an audience of thousands.

In the e-book, you’ll learn how to:

• Choose a foolproof domain
• Build a basic high conversion website
• Set up an autoresponder
• Design a squeeze page and enhance it with promotions and attention grabbing giveaways
• Create a high power opt in page
• Boost your number of subscribers into the thousands with my patented START traffic method
• Take advantage of 4 simple ways to monetize your subscriber list to maximize your online income

To get this book, you basically “pay with a tweet.” When you click the link right below this paragraph it will take you to the download page for How to Build an Unstoppable Email List and all you need to do in return is either tweet about it or make a post on Facebook. That’s it! You’re paying for a full list building guide with nothing but a tweet.

Pay With A Tweet And Get This Free List Building E-Book!

-Andrew Handley