A Great Deal

Who doesn’t want a great deal? “The Great American Coupon is making a big comeback, thanks to the Great American Recession” said the Wall Street Journal.  Americans redeemed about 3.3 billion coupons last year, a remarkable 27% leap from 2008 and the first annual increase in 17 years, according to a report issued at the end of January by Inmar, a coupon-processing agent.

Because coupons “pull in the business” they have gained remarkable acceptance and popularity among astute marketing managers. The reason is simple really – it’s their overwhelming acceptance and use by the consuming public. In fact, Advertising Age (the Bible of the advertising industry) reports that 87% of all shoppers use coupons. And who doesn’t want to save money? I try all the time. I just saved $50 on a laptop with a coupon at Staples (thanks @numerati for the tip), on top of the $100 off promo the store had! And the wife loves to save on everything – it’s like a game to her.

Moms make the effort to save. 96% of Moms have used a coupon to purchase a brand they would not normally buy, and 74% visit more than two stores weekly to redeem coupon offers.  As technology pushed Moms online, marketers followed, offering exclusive downloadable deals through couponing sites and, more recently, by using social media in the hopes of making these deals — and their brand — go viral. Today coupons have proven themselves to be highly effective sales tools for every conceivable size and type of business.Though most still prefer clipping coupons (72%), marketers should diversify offers both online and off as 70% of Moms find coupons online and 73% subscribe to couponing emails or newsletters. Integrated campaigns combining viral distribution of paper coupons through offline influencers with online promotion on couponing websites and blogs enable Moms to find the deals that best fit their shopping habits, ultimately supporting long-term redemption.

And as coupon sites become more competitive, many are diversifying their offerings to remain competitive.  Take for instance Savings.com a full scale resource for everything-online coupons. This site in particular not only offers coupons, but has an Answers page which allows you to ask questions about anything you want to save on, and the Savings.com community will respond in real-time with answers to your question.

Businesses are in business to make money.  Consumers want keep more of it in their pockets when they buy stuff.  Coupons make it all possible. Now that’s a great deal!

SEO Doesn’t Translate

SEO is a laborious and, to be frank, rather tedious task.  Fortunately once you have SE-optimized your Web site in English, you can just have it translated without the need to repeat all that effort in foreign languages, right?

Unfortunately, no.  Robert Frost’s definition of poetry as “what gets lost in translation” could apply equally to SEO.  It is sadly not possible to pre-optimize your Web copy before translation — it has to be re-optimized as part of the translation process.

First and foremost, SEO is about the democratic use of language. What matters is not how the advertiser likes to talk about its products, but how customers actually talk about them. So when producing foreign versions, the trick is not to find the words that most closely correspond to the English original, but the words most commonly used by the target audience in the countries in question.

Our experience of working on a major SEO project for a budget airline suggests that from a translation point of view, search terms fall into three broad categories: directly translatable, freely translatable and non-translatable.

Firstly, there are terms that have direct equivalents in the target language that are equally widely used as search terms.  So where English Web users will Google “flights,” French users search for “vols.”  The word means the same thing and is used in the same way.  The world would be a simpler place if all terms were like this!  (Although in fact, even here, things are not as simple as they look.  Only once we have tested the seemingly obvious translation, to verify that it is indeed widely searched for — by actual users in relevant contexts, can we confirm that directly translatable terms fall into this category.)

Secondly, there are terms that can be translated in a number of ways.  Here the challenge is to think of all the possibilities, so we can test them to see which ones are actually searched for.  An example is the seemingly straightforward “cheap flights.” With typical Gallic contrariness, there is in fact no French word for “cheap,” so various different wordings have to be tried – “vols pas chers” (not-expensive flights”), “vols bon marché” (“good-bargain flights”), “vols à bas prix” (“flights at low price”), “vols a petit prix” (“flights at small price”) to name but a few.  None of these expressions sounds a likely search term when rendered back in English, but all of them are viable options in French.  Much to the chagrin of the guardians of French linguistic purity, even Anglophone borrowings such as “discount” and “low cost” also turn out to be worthy of investigation.

Moreover, finding the most appropriate translation(s) is only the first stage.  They then have to be optimized syntactically for a search context, where people tend to use shorthand or elided forms.  So whereas “cheapest flights” would be “vols les moins chers,” in reality French Web surfers would never use the article “les“, they would just search for “vols moins chers.”  Similarly, while “vols à bas prix” (“flights at low price”) is the grammatically correct expression, a far more common search term would be just “vols bas prix” (“flights low price”).

Finally, the third category is terms for which there are no relevant equivalent in the target language.  For example, “flight deals” is a high-ranking search term among budget airline customers in English, but the word “deal” in the sense of “arrangement” does not translate naturally into French.  While an equivalent could be found, it is not something that French people would say, and therefore not something they would search for.

However, conversely, there may well exist some terms that do not appear in the list of most popular searches in English, but would be very relevant in the target language – what Donald Rumsfeld would call “unknown unknowns.”  An example of such a term from the airline project would be “vols secs.” Literally this translates as “dry flights,” but it has nothing to do with alcohol-free travel (as if a budget airline would pass up the chance to sell you four-euro tins of lager!), it means flights that are sold on their own without accommodation, car hire, travel insurance etc.  You could never find these terms through a pure translation process, but that does not mean they are any less useful for generating traffic.  Indeed, they may be more useful than many translated terms.

And of course, identifying the most profitable search terms is not an end in itself. These terms are merely the raw materials, and a skilled copywriter is needed to assemble them into a convincing message in the foreign language.  SEO copywriting is hard work in any language — but if you can find the right way to tackle it, then it’s much more likely that potential customers will find you.

Former ad man Guy Gilpin is co-founder and manging director of Mother Tongue Writers.

Internet Marketing 101

According to one report up to 30% of the US workforce are now self-employed, that is 42.6 million Americans working on their own, both online and offline. Just like any other business, an online business needs a business plan. What will you sell or provide? How will you reach consumers? What makes you different and better than the other marketers already online?

Andrew Morden, CEO of the Internet Marketing Center, an online business training service, knowing the answer to these questions is crucial. Andrew adds one more question to the list: do you have a niche?

“At a macro level, the kind of problems people are searching for are recession proof. If I’ve got spiders in my basement, it doesn’t matter that there is a recession on, I have to get those spiders removed. If, then, our businesses have tapped into that market they can get their business up and running fast. There are thousands of examples of this kind of niche marketing,” said Mr. Morden.

So, first, find your niche. Don’t just market a product, tell the consumer why your product is better, why your service is better. In essence, why they should choose you over the 500 spider exterminators already online. One of the best ways to do this, after figuring out the niche, is through search engine optimization

“Be focused on keywords. It’s very competitive and in order to stay ahead of the trends, marketers must continually update and continually be dynamic. From there, build a list,” Morden advised. “Don’t try to sell the consumer from the first second. Give value and you’ll ‘sell’ them down the road.”

Next, diversify. Don’t rely on one product and one product only because as soon as The Best Spider Repeller is on the market, the New Best Spider Repeller will be on the way.

Finally, test the message and test the market. Test keywords, test email marketing messages, test subject lines. Test, test, test. Although testing does take time in the long run the time is more than paid for by better targeting messages and a higher ROI.

“Businesses have to do their market research, They have to know what consumers are searching for in relation to what their product is. We’re very focused on niche market research. The internet gives a unique opportunity to do that,” said Morden.

Kristina Knight writes for BizReport.com

How To Use Testimonials Effectively

If you have never heard of a product before, would you at least consider buying it if it came recommended  from someone you know? Given a selection of similar products, wouldn’t you rather try one that has had some glowing reviews even if you’ve never heard of them before?  A persons endorsement of a product can have a profound effect on the buying decisions of others. That  is the power of testimonials.

These days, testimonials are widely used for building credibility and generating buzz about a brand/product or service.  The world’s largest corporations spend billions of dollars in harnessing the power of a good endorsement.  In affiliate marketing, carefully chosen testimonials can be very effective in convincing prospects to try your product or service. Because of competition however, many  affiliate marketing programs try to increase their credibility factor by inviting celebrities to provide an endorsement. While this can be very effective, particularly if the celebrity has a large fan base, it can also be quite expensive.  Not every affiliate marketer can afford to pay a celebrity just to place their name on his site.  To compete, affiliate marketers turn to their own customers and members, specifically people who have had sufficient experience with the product and want to share their success.

A fully satisfied customer’s testimonial, if honest and well-written, may be as effective as that of a celebrity.  To do it effectively however, consider the following factors:

A) Be Specific – If a testimonial from a customer or another affiliate states that the program is ‘excellent’, it should be followed by a specific description of the program’s most useful features – what makes it excellent, how it has helped the customer or affiliate, why it’s reliable, etc.

B) Skepticism is good – Believe it or not, skepticism is good.  Phrases such as, ‘I wasn’t convinced at first, BUT…’ or ‘I have always used XYZ product and didn’t think of switching to another brand.  However, your product has ____ and ____ features that convinced me it was so much better.’

Even with the stated objection, a testimonial can be quite powerful if it is followed by a positive statement.

C) Avoid using fake testimonials –  You lie, you die. Someone will get wind of the falsehood, expose you and you lose your credibility.

D) Be selective –  Be picky:  find the best, especially the well-written and detailed ones.  Or, you could take the best sentences and phrases and post those in place of a paragraph.

Bottom line is this- use but don’t abuse..

The Art Of Preselling

I took a little hiatus from blogging, but I have returned.  I’ve got some GREAT content to share.  We’ll start of with the art of what’s called Preselling.

What it is

Preselling  is the art of  conditioning your website visitors to be ready to click to the merchant site and buy their product (and earn you your commission.)

Easy enough right? You would think.  But you’d be surprised how many times I’ve landed at a site and all Isaw was a hard-sell. “SPAM!”, I said and left. I was looking for information, but I was bombarded and forced to buy something – no thanks.

However, when you presell your visitor, you are cultivating a relationship. When you present him with agreeable content, you will increase the likelihood that he might click your link to make a purchase.  The question then is this: How does one presell?

Like talking to a friend

The first tip is this: Write like you are talking to a friend.  Keep things sweet and simple. Too many obtions confuse people, and confused people don’t buy!  Stick with one topic and stay on target. Share a problem, and discuss how you solved it, what you did that helped.

Stay clear of the exaggerated claims.  Never begin with unbelievable statements. Big statements and promises may be OK for a merchant’s page, but not for a relationship-building, preselling page. You might tell some short funny anecdotes about your family of snorers, and ease up to the day you chanced on this anti-snoring herbal concoction.  End up relating how it ended your (or your spouse’s) lifelong, nightly noise.

And finally, write your content as if you are the person reading it. See if you:

• Answer a question people are asking
• Are writing on their level
• Provide a solution

Know this: Preselling is the secret sauce of  your  Super Affiliate recipe.  Master it, and your affiliate commissions will have you eating deliciously well…