Greg Cassar.com

We started with the barter system, then moved onto precious metals, then coins and notes, followed closely by credit cards.  The next evolution is using your smart phone as your wallet (credit card).

Google has recently launched ‘Google Wallet’ – an app that makes your phone your wallet—with Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data. With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

If you don’t have a Citi MasterCard and you want to use Google Wallet you can use the Google Prepaid Card. The Google Prepaid Card is a virtual card that you can fund with any of your existing credit cards.

The business implications of this technology are far reaching too:

Gift cards: Google Wallet can store gift cards for participating merchants. When you tap to pay at a merchant, Google Wallet transmits your gift card information to the terminal. This is very clever.

Offers & Loyalty: Google Offers are deals on products and services at local or online businesses. Whenever you buy or save a Google Offer, it automatically syncs to your Google Wallet so your offers are always with you. Google Wallet can also store loyalty cards for participating merchants.  The world of the coffee loyalty card will never be the same again.

Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple, was a unique visionary and his influence, as a technology innovator will be sorely missed.

World leaders, tech giants, and countless ordinary people have paid tribute to Steve Jobs after his death, marvelling at how the Apple visionary made modern life more user-friendly.

US President Barack Obama said Jobs, who died from cancer on the 5th of October, had “transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Founder and CEO posted on Facebook “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

After founding Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, he was eventually ousted by the very CEO he had hired to run the company. Without him, Apple struggled and flirted with bankruptcy. With him, Apple flourished and will always be recognised as the greatest turnaround in corporate history, as Apple has become the largest company in the world by market cap.

Apple’s Mac Computer range have unparalleled industrial design while proving that computers can be irresistible as their users ultimately become raving fans.

Apple re-defined the MP3 player market with the iPod and the iTunes Music store set the standard for digital distribution of music and content.

The iPhone not only raised, but really smashed the Smartphone bar and changed the mobile device world forever with the now-ubiquitous touch screen and shot down the idea that technical specifications were all consumers cared about. Rather, ease of use and an integrated user experience trumped everything else.

The newest market that is still unfolding under Apple’s influence is the tablet market, whose standards have been set incredibly high by the iPad and now the iPad 2.

During his absence from Apple, jobs also acquired and created Pixar. Starting with the original Toy Story they redefined the standard of computer generated movies for years to come.

Jobs list of accomplishments are many and far reaching. So what business and marketing lessons can we take from them:

11 Business and Marketing Lessons from Steve Jobs

1. Design trumps function
All the devices Apple made had one crucial thing in common: people fell in love with them. They felt passionately about them, in a way the world had never seen before.

Design, as he explained in 2000, wasn’t about how it looked. It was about how it worked. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Apple products are just plain cool. They’re sleek, attractive, enticing and they work well. While other products may work just as well, people want something that looks good too. Steve Jobs was well aware of the importance of good-looking designs

2. Turn Your Customers into Raving Fans
Apple has become a popular culture icon and adored by its customers on a level that most other brands can only dream of.

They have done this with their sleek cool design and by creating insanely great brand experiences. They have turned their customers into Raving Fans.

Most people are either Windows People of Mac People. From my experience once someone has changed from the dark side over to the light side and embraced the Mac there is no going back . They even become evangelists to try and get others to try it too.

3. Be a visionary leader, not a follower of the Pack
Visionaries are always called crazy in the beginning. Be confident. You might be right, even though nobody listens to you. Jobs showed the world that thinking differently is acceptable. Do not be afraid to implement your ideas.

4. Improve on what is Currently Offered in the Market Place
Apple is known as a highly innovative company that has completely transformed the way we think about entertainment and communication.

But in reality, the business has built its success on improving what went before. It made the MP3 player better with the iPod. The mobile phone was improved with the iPhone.

The story goes that the iPhone came about after Apple execs complained to each other about what irritated them about their mobiles. Jobs focused on what wasn’t working in current trends and overhauled it.

5. Keep a Strict Focus
Jobs once said: “Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before… it means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

6. Demand the Best
Jobs may have a favourable image in the media, but those who have worked under him describe a hard man obsessed with perfection. As well as thinking big, Jobs liked to be across the detail too.

“My job is not to be easy on people,” he once stated. “My job is to make them better.”

7. Work Hard
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day. He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures.

8. Turn a problem into an opportunity.
Jobs got fired from the company he built, but came back to build the most valuable technology company in the world. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Do not give up when facing obstacles. It might just be another hurdle you need to clear before arriving at your destination.

9. Simplicity
One of the largest and most widespread early arguments for switching to Macs was that they’re easy to use. People raved about how simple Mac computers were and felt no sympathy for whiny PC users who couldn’t find the files they stored or the ‘print’ command in Word. Bringing things down to a consumer level can be hard to do, but Jobs made the computer accessible for everyone.

The same can be said for Apple’s other devices as we have a 3-year-old son who can work the iPhone and iPad to play Angry Birds. The same could not be said for many if any other mobile device brands.

10. Make it Easy to Buy
iTunes is the most perfect ecommerce store online. It has an incredibly smart design where they capture your credit card details once and then store it and all your details with your unique ‘Apple ID’ so that next time you are ready to buy you can buy with just one click. Having 200 to 300 million customers setup to buy with 1 click buy has no doubt largely helped the profitability of Apple in recent years.

11. Do What You Love
Steve Jobs said: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Do what you love. Seek out a business that gives you a sense of meaning, direction and satisfaction in life. Having a sense of purpose and striving towards goals gives life meaning, direction and satisfaction. It not only contributes to health and longevity, but also makes you feel better in hard times.

Lets finish with Jobs’s parting advice to the Stanford graduates of 2005 in his Commencement Speech – “Stay hungry,” he said. “Stay foolish.”

The traditional search based HTML browser session isn’t as sexy as it once was.  Now apps (applications) are taking their place as people spend more and more time consuming content and interacting on mobile devices without being tied to a web browser.  The web is now less about the searching and more about the getting.

These are the sorts of common place apps and your interaction with them that are changing the digital landscape: Email on your iPad, living on Facebook everyday, chatting on Skype,  listening to your favourite Podcast on iTunes,  the kids playing Farmville or Moshi Monstors for hours on end, reading Internet Marking Magazine from Zinio or iTunes, Google Maps App on your phone, reading books on your kindle… and the list goes on.

For all of these daily activities you don’t even need to search the web – you just go straight to the platform that delivers what you need.

It’s driven largely by the rise of the Smart Phone, and mobile computing that just fits into your life because it’s always in your pocket.

As a side note, Mobile is now making up 10%+ of all digital search traffic and is rising steadily.

WordPress is the most common way that entrepreneurs and business owners build sites these days.

 
WordPress is infinitely extensible. One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

 
Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, in the directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ you can find, download, rate, and comment on all the best plugins.

 
While there are literally thousands of plugins that you can apply to your site, lets now look at 5 Must Have Plugins to extend your WordPress site’s functionality and reach.

 
Please note: We have not included security plugins here. We will cover WordPress security in a future edition of ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’.

No 1. All In One SEO Pack

 
This brilliant WordPress plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

 
It allows you to set your title tags and description and keywords in one easy place within the plugin for the home page. There are also approx 20 other SEO settings that make your URLs friendly to the search engines and a whole bunch of other SEO related settings.

 
Whenever you make a blog post down below the post while you are still in edit mode you will get the options to set the Title, Description for the search engines, and Keywords related to the post.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

No 2. PopUp Domination

 
This amazing list building WordPress plugin works like a PopUp but gets passed the PopUp blockers. It has a classy look and feel to it and as a result it doesn’t feel as intrusive as what you may imagine a PopUp to be.

 
Its primary purpose is to help you build your list faster. Why we highly recommend it is that we noticed our own list building doubled on our main sites when we implemented this plugin. Every serious marketer should test and implement PopUp Domination.

 
Popup Domination works with all major auto-responders including but not limited to aWeber, iContact, Constant Contact and Infusionsoft.

 
Price: $47
Get it at: PopupDomination.com/new/

No 3. Google XML sitemaps

 
While not particularly exciting in it’s functionality, this is one of those boring bread and butter type plugins that is essential for your site.

 
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap, which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog/site. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

 
The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

No 4. Like-Button-Plugin-For-Wordpress

 
This plugin adds a Like-Button wherever you want on your blog. The button can be placed before or after the content, as well as a sidebar-widget. And many more!

 
Having a Facebook ‘Like’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Like’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post.
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Like’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like-button-plugin-for-wordpress/

No 5. Facebook Share (New) Button

 
This plugin adds a Share-Button, which allows site visitors to share your posts. It also shows the number of times the post or page has been shared through out the Facebook.

 
Having a Facebook ‘Share’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Share’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post. It is slightly more powerful than Facebook Like because when the site visitors ‘share’ they get the ability to add a line or two of text to endorse why they shared the content.

 
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Share’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-share-new/

I hope that is of use to you. We have tested hundreds of plugins and these certainly are some of the best.

99 out of 100 entrepreneurs online are focused on ‘Selling’ as their primary objective and main focus. This is understandable as selling for profit is the reason that we do marketing online.

While this is a valid model, it’s certainly not the best model to position your business
for lasting success in 2011 and beyond. Traffic is getting more and more expensive and so the cost of acquiring a customer to make a one off sale often costs the same as or more than the profits you will make from one sale alone.

So for this reason…

Your Number One Most Important Job as an Internet Marketer is to build a list (database) of prospects and clients who that you can create a relationship with to then market other products and services strategically to them over time.

Think about it now in your own business – “If building my list is the most important task I have online, how much time, effort and resources do I put to that task each week or month?”

How was your answer?  Chances are, not good, but that’s OK provided you learn from that and move on. If you were able to answer honestly to yourself that you are devoting massive time and resources to building your list and your relationship with them then congratulations as you are well and truly on your way to building a good long term strategic internet business.

Most new Internet Marketers I meet are in the ‘Opportunity Seeking’ business, meaning that they are chasing one online opportunity to make some cash after another.  I know this for a fact well as I did it for several years myself. You know what, this is fine initially when you first start marketing online because you really need to get some experience with driving some traffic and making offers and trying out different niches until you find the area that you are going to specialize in.

All the consulting clients that we work with at InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com that are doing big numbers online have changed from being opportunity seekers to strategic marketers at some point in their development. They now make money out of building a big list and creating relationship with them and making offers over time. There is no exception to this.

Think about it, how often does Amazon email you?  And they started off as just an online bookstore making one-off book sales and evolved and morphed over time into one of the best marketing machines on the planet. The great thing about their business is that they are emailing a list of ‘clients’ rather than ‘prospects’, which is a very powerful position to be in as they know their list already are buyers.

So how do you build your list?

The answer is to build a  website  (or  a  squeeze  page  section  of  your  website  where  you  drive  traffic)  where  its  primary  focus  is  to  provide  something  of  value for free in exchange for your new prospects’ contact details.  You then follow up with them again in an automated way with the use of autoresponder software.

Your free offer is about quality… not quantity.  What you offer is only limited by your imagination, but good examples  of  what  you  could  use  include  free  reports, videos, audios and newsletters  etc.

To create a good free offer you really need to get into the mind of your prospect and ask yourself “What is it that they really want?” and give them that, as that will significantly increase your chance of getting a great conversion rate on your landing page.

An important point with your opt‐in offer is to also communicate you are going to follow up with them again, otherwise what people see and hear in their mind is that “I’m just going to get this free product or service the one time”.  You want to set up the right relationship from day one so that they look forward to future communication from you.

You can achieve this by having an eCourse component to your offer or advising them that they will also receive your newsletter or follow up training components on an ongoing basis.

Once you have your free offer in place you need to drive targeted traffic to it over time to capture your leads and deliver your free offer to them.

A recent study by our friend and colleague Armand Morin showed up something so powerful you can’t ignore it.  His research showed that of the top

100 websites on the Internet 89 of them use the new ‘free’ model.

What we’re referring to is, if you look at the major online companies today, like  Google, My Space, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of them utilise the 100%  FREE model… it costs you nothing to use!   Then they make money out of you over time with enhanced services, or they make money out of advertisers because they have they have the target market on their list.

The way we look at it is that we can debate this all day long but the facts are facts. The free model is here and it’s here to stay.  It’s a great model and it is obviously the right model because the marketplace as a general rule doesn’t want to be ‘sold to’ and this is more the case now more than ever before.

What do you do now that you have them on your list?

You need to follow up with them in an automated system called a ‘marketing funnel’ that provides both value as well as offers over time. (I’ll cover detailed ‘marketing funnel design’ for you in a future edition of the magazine).

By opting-in the prospect has put their hand up to say that they are interested in your area of expertise, your training, your products and/or services.

You get the opportunity to nurture and educate them and build trust so that when you do make offers there is a high probability of their success because you are not marketing to strangers – they feel like they already ‘know you’. This way you become a welcome guest rather than an unwanted pest.

Having a large list with which you have a good relationship enables you to make good value offers and generate income on a predictable basis. Marketing to your existing leads and clients is always more cost effective than the costly process of continually trying to get new clients.

All successful Internet Marketers (without exception) know that the money is in the lifetime value of the client, not in one‐off sales. If you are not following up with your prospects and clients you are potentially leaving a huge amount of money on the table.

Ask yourself now “how many automated follow up emails do I have in my marketing funnel sequence that create value and relationship as well as offers over time?”

If you answer was ‘not many’ then this is a great place to start on your action list of what you need to do next to become a more successful marketer in your niche.

When thinking of Internet Marketing Online there really is 2 main camps:

1. Info marketers
2. ‘Traditional’ type businesses with an online presence

While the learnings from this article will work for both, it is written with the traditional business owner in mind, as these businesses often stand to benefit most from the following leverage points.

The 3 proven steps to ramp up any businesses online presence are:

1. Increase the targeted search traffic to the site
2. Deliver that traffic to a relevant well written specific benefit ridden web page
3. Make the primary call to action prominent and clear

You may be thinking at the moment ‘that is obvious’ and in some ways it is, but most businesses we work with don’t do this well initially.  By making these changes we have increased companies revenues by hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and with some increased their lead generation by hundreds or thousands of percent. So it seems often it’s the fundamentals that make the most difference.

Let’s now explore these 3 leverage points in more detail:

1. Increase the targeted search traffic to the site

Chances are that people are already searching in the search engines for the solution to the problem that your product or service solves.  The trick is to make your Pay Per Click  (PPC) Ad or natural search engine listing(s) show up on page 1 of the search engine at the time that they are searching.

For the purpose of simplicity and speed of implementation let’s focus on Pay Per Click as it’s easier and quicker for you to have a direct impact on your business.

Google Adwords Search Network ads are the paid ads that turn up on the top section and the right hand side section of the Google search screen. Yahoo’s version of it is called Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft’s version is Microsoft AdCenter (these two have now merged in what is commonly referred to as the Search Alliance).

Pay Per Click advertising like Google Adwords is something that every business owner should implement to get your message in front of the millions of people searching for solutions to their problems, and have your ads showing up on the first page of Google stating that you can provide a solution to the relevant problems.

When designing your PPC Ads make sure you use very small tightly themed Ad Groups. The reason why is so that your Ad is highly relevant to the keywords that they are searching for.

Let’s say you are running a timber company and you sell two main types of timber: ‘pine framing timber’ and ‘pine flooring timber’.  If the searcher is searching for ‘pine flooring timber’ we want to make sure our ad is tightly focussed on ‘pine flooring timber’ and even mentions that in the ad.  We don’t want our ad to be about ‘pine timber’ in general as it won’t get as good a click through rate because the searcher won’t find it to be as relevant.

So Step 1 is to get your relevant, highly targeted Ads or Listings coming up on page 1 when people are actively searching for your product, service or problem statement.

2. Deliver that traffic to a relevant well written specific benefit ridden web page

So now if you have done Step 1 correctly you have highly targeted search traffic turning up to your site.

In Step 2 here we really have 2 main things that we need to achieve:

The first is delivering the traffic to the right page that is 100% relevant to the search. If the searcher from the search engines was searching for ‘pine flooring timber’ it’s important to take them from your ad directly to a page about ‘pine flooring timber’, not about pine framing timber, and certainly not any other type of flooring timber or a page as general as your home page.

The page should be just about ‘pine flooring timber’ not about any other subject. The number of links and banners etc off to other products and services should be minimized.

The second is Quickly and clearly communicate your marketing message. When the new site visitor gets to your site, they are instantly making a ‘will I stay or will I go’ decision. There is a term called the ’10 Second Rule’ which means that you only have 10 seconds when they get to your site to answer their ‘What’s In It For Me’ (WIIFM) question that goes on in their head. With the amount of things competing for people’s attention these days it’s probably closer to 5 seconds than 10.

On your new highly targeted page some design and sales copy elements that you should include to quickly and clearly communicate your message are:

• A Benefit ridden headline
• Clear product image(s)
• Benefit ridden bullets
• A quick video which explains the benefits of the product / service
• Reasons why to choose you
• Social proof elements of what other satisfied customers are saying

3.         Make the primary call to action prominent and clear

With every page on your website you should know in advance what your desired primary course of action for your site visitor is going to be. If you have a primary, you should also think about the secondary course of action that you desire.

It is important to then have these desired primary call to actions buttons in a logical spot above the fold (meaning before they have to scroll down).

The most common calls to action buttons we see and use are:

• Get a Quote
• Speak to Our Team – Call 1300…
• Leave us a message
• Book in an Appointment
• Register Your Interest

If you have long sales copy you will also want to repeat your call to action buttons at the bottom of the page.

So in closing… take action now by looking over your site and traffic with a new set of eyes and identify if there is any of these fundamentals that you can apply in your business for a boost in your sites lead and sales conversion rate.

In this quick video, which is the 8th video in the 10 part Internet Commandments series we focus on a major part of internet marketing that most people overlook – the monitoring and improving of their conversions.

This has a massive effect on your ROI. I’ve seen niche marketing businesses survive or die based on the conversion rate that they get. The reason why is that is can have a dramatic impact on your cost per lead or cost per sale. Suss it out.

Firstly the dirt: I use a combination of AWeber, 1Shoppingcart and/or Infusionsoft depending on the size of the project and the nature of the traffic. More on that in a moment…

But to start with, I think it is fair to say that AWeber is without a doubt the best autoresponder for you to get started with for following up with your prospects and clients systematically via email.

Internet Commandment 7 – Remember Thy List and Community, and Build Relationship with it. Build a list and maintain a good relationship with them. Past and current clients are good prospects for your future projects.

Internet Commandment 6 – Thou Shalt have Logical Sales Orientated Site Design. Sales website design so that it is an ecommerce website that actually sells