Looking at the graphic on the right (click for expanded view), you’ll see a sales funnel graphic that is representative of a 4 month period for an Eden client, Southern Energy Management. The funnel is broken into three sections/rungs.  The top rung is monthly website visitors, those visitors filter down through the second band, monthly visitor conversion percentage, then down to the third/bottom rung with is conversions per month. Southern Energy Management was able to use Eden’s SEO and Offers features to effectively maximize their online sales funnel potential. As a result, Southern Energy Management increased their on-site conversion percentage by 419%.

We asked Heather Pownall, Director of Business Operations at SEM, how Eden’s Offers Feature has optimized their conversion percentage and as a result, increased their leads significantly. Here’s her response:

“We now know exactly what messaging works best at convincing our online visitors to fill out our lead forms. Thanks to Offers, our we marketing program is now performing better than ever!”

For a more in-depth description on how this process worked for SEM, check out their Offers case study.

With only 59 days until the holidays, the time to get your marketing site up and running is wearing thin! If you want to see the same results that SEM has seen, you need to get started right away building a content schedule, creating/optimizing at least one page of content a week. You should also add some intriguing offers to provide additional incentive for your visitors to convert and implementing them on your pages.

Sign up for a free 15 day trial of Eden today and get started generating leads immediately!

The free edition service package includes:

• 24 email design templates
• tools letting recipients share messages on Facebook and Twitter
• backend dashboard that shows click-through rates
• an automated web version of the email message
• iPhone and Android app compatibility, letting email administrators manage campaigns on-the-go
• a survey tool allows users to create questions and choose a response type, such as text box, radio button, drop-down menu, or selector.

Even cooler is how they made this announcement to the public yesterday (4/12)!

One of our partners, Magnet Video, is already utilizing this functionality.  Check out their new blog.  This blog was completed using functionality solely within Eden!  Congrats to David Rose and the rest of the Magnet Video team.

You might ask, “why is blogging in Eden better than using WordPress or Blogger?“.  I’ll tell you why.

1. Your blog is at your primary domain, not a subdomain, so all of your blog posts are actually pages on your site.  This means you get all of the optimization benefits of adding new pages and content to your website with every new blog post you write.
2. You get to use Eden’s optimization module to optimize your blog posts just as you would your individual pages.  No guess work!
3. All of your traffic metrics to the blog are registered within your Eden website, making it easier to evaluate and react based on the content marketing summary provided on your dashboard and optimization interfaces.
4. You only have a single login to edit and optimize both your website pages and blog pages.
5. You can easily include your blog posts into your Eden RSS feed to keep your subscribers updated with your company’s latest news and information.
6. You can easily add additional elements to all columns in your layout -  In WordPress, every post has to have the same content in the additional columns, and you have to know HTML just to change content in your additional columns on all pages.
7. You get all of the new features that are released to Eden as part of your Eden subscription.  You do not have to download new versions of the blogging software and worry about installation, configuration, frequent security patches, and hosting costs.

If you want to know more about how to add a blog to your Eden site, or just want to know more about Eden in general, contact us!

We had a heat wave in October here in North Carolina–nearly 90 degrees, if you can believe it–and as I was taking a walk through my neighborhood, I saw some kids had set up a lemonade stand on the corner. I doubt the young entrepreneurs were concerned about sales and profit margin; they weren’t taking tally on how many cups they sold and how much cash they had brought in. They just wanted to make a few bucks to buy some candy and baseball cards at the corner store.

Kids will be kids, right? Funny, but most online marketing campaigns I’ve seen are run with the same business acumen as that of our inexperienced beverage peddlers. Send some traffic to a website with PPC and surely profits will increase, right?

Wrong. Pay-per-click marketing is not a floodgate that you open and close, depending on when you need traffic. You need to know which streams are worthwhile. Open those sources wide and shut off the others. Sounds complicated, right?

It’s really not. You just need to track conversions. All the major paid search players have very simple, lightweight conversion tracking scripts that you can install on your website. All that traffic you’re getting? In a perfect world, what would you want all of those visitors to do while they’re on your site? Fill out a form? Buy a widget? Download your app? Just drop your vendors’ conversion tracker scripts on the page the visitor sees after performing one of these actions.

For AdWords, it’s really simple. Just go to the Reporting and Tools tab and click on Conversions:

Then click the New conversion button:

Then give your conversion a name and a purpose. These will just help you organize multiple conversion types, if you have them. Click Save and continue when you’re done.

Give a few details about the page where your conversion will be tracked. Is it hosted on a secure server? Is there a revenue amount associated with the conversion? What language is the page in? Once you’ve filled out these detailed, click Save and get code.

Just copy and paste the code into your conversion page and you’re all set:

Now, in addition to traffic metrics–visits, pageviews, time-on-site–you have conversions. If a campaign or keyword is sending you lots of traffic but isn’t converting, then it’s low quality. Maybe it needs to be cut? Maybe you can improve the landing page? There’s so much potential for improvement, now that you’re tracking which visitors are actually potential customers.

When you are paying to get traffic to your website, you need to know whether or not it’s profitable. Most businesses are in the habit of making money. Those that aren’t won’t last very long.

For more information about pay-per-click and conversion tracking, check out the ROI Revolution blog.

Of course, we’re flattered. We’re also really excited to see the focus TopTenREVIEWS put on search engine optimization and marketing-centric features within a website management tool. We couldn’t agree more!

The last decade saw nearly every small business building their first website. Now, small businesses are asking about the results their website investments are producing. They are demanding more traffic and more measurable results. After all, wasn’t your website supposed to be a marketing investment?

Our goal is for Eden Platform to allow small business owners to build a steady flow of qualified traffic to their websites at a low cost.

As we continue to move toward our vision, and our version 2.0 launch, we’d like to take this moment to say thank you for your support, feedback, and trust. Here’s to a great 2011!

Sure, the benefits are there – stock photography is fairly inexpensive and easy to obtain in just a few clicks, but if you don’t want your product or service to be perceived as “cheap”, then stay away from the cheap stuff when developing your website, email marketing campaigns, and marketing collateral.

For most organizations, stock photography can’t convey your specific features and benefits, especially if you have a unique product or service offering. Take Shoeboxed.com for example. On the website’s homepage and in its marketing videos, you’ll see custom designed illustrations and real life users interacting with the organizational service’s offerings, including illustrations of the Shoeboxed process – granting Shoeboxed the unique marketing opportunity to put the viewer in the mindset of using the service themselves.

Another risk of stock photography is having access to the same libraries of imagery that other organizations, perhaps even your competitors, may be using. That attractive woman giving your business a “thumbs up”? She’s also giving your competitor a “thumbs up”. Ouch!

Jamie Starling, a professional photographer in the Raleigh, NC area notes: “images that go on the cover of your book, your brochure, or your website become part of your image. If someone else then uses the same image, they can (accidentally or otherwise) exert some control over what people think of your product or company”. You can read more about Jamie’s goal of bringing a little recognition back to the creative types on his website at http://www.jamiestarlingphoto.com/.

Instead, seek out professional photographers and graphic designers in your area with experience in capturing or creating the type of imagery appropriate for your business. And while you should be prepared to make an investment in quality images for your brand, try reaching out amongst your network of local professionals – one of them may be willing to offer a partial trade in exchange for your goods or services along the way!

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This blog post was courtesy of Lisa Jeffries at Shoeboxed.  Shoeboxed is the easiest way to digitize and organize your receipts and business cards. With Shoeboxed, you can mail receipts and business cards and they will be scanned and entered into an online account for you. The paid scanning service and the free online software make organizing these receipts and business cards easier, which saves you time and frustration. You can eliminate your clutter, avoid using a scanner and have your information at your fingertips.

Writing effective ad copy on Google AdWords is a task easier said than done. One must be able to make a compelling case for their product or service and encourage searchers to take action all while complying with Google’s policies and character limits. Given the limitations of 25 characters for a headline and two lines of 35 characters for ad text, it can be more strenuous than writing a newspaper classified ad!

If your AdWords account isn’t being managed by an agency or a professional, figuring out what approach to take in writing your AdWords ad copy can quickly become frustrating. There are many ad copywriting pitfalls that can easily damper your click-through and conversion rates. Not only can these issues cost you money in wasted clicks, but they can also leave your campaigns not reaching their fullest potential. A few simple guidelines can help make all the difference in spending smarter, not harder. For the do-it-yourself AdWords advertiser, here are 10 things you shouldn’t say in a Google AdWords ad.

1. Bad call to action

• Example: “Check us out!”
• Why Not? We don’t just want people to click, we want people to click with purpose! A proper call to action sets the user’s expectation of what their next step will be when they are enticed by your ad copy. This can include browsing the selection, signing up for details, or purchasing a product. Lastly, “Click Here” is a major faux pas in AdWords, ads containing this phrase are swiftly disapproved.
• Instead, try “Shop Now”, “Learn More”, “Get a Quote”, or “Download Now” – anything that fits the desired action you want your customer to take.

2. Meaningless superlatives and “puffery”

• Example: #1 Television Retailer; Best TV Store Ever; Cheapest TVs Online
• Why Not? Neither Google nor searchers take kindly to puffery and meaningless claims that can’t be verified. It’s natural for the searcher to immediately doubt generic claims that have no actual value. After all, the advertiser’s mission is to attain more sales, meaning the searcher can’t put confidence in those claims. Extravagant claims void of meaning or proof can instantly hurt your credibility.
  
• Instead, try using the extra characters to better explain what makes your offering unique (use your unique value proposition) or tell about your website’s key strength at a particular attribute (Ships Same Day, Excellent Service, Hassle Free).
• Exception: The only exception is when there is a backup of said claim by a credible third party. If a popular publisher says your store or service is the best for one reason or another, feel free to flaunt this in your advertisement. It’s important, however, that you include proof of that claim within 1-2 clicks from the advertisement per Google’s policies, or you’ll risk your ad being disapproved.

3. Hailing features instead of benefits

• Example: “Mints with as much caffeine as coffee”
• Why Not? This is a guiding principle of direct response ad writing in general. Good ad copy is all about what the customer has to gain from using your product/service. Put it in the context of the customer’s mindset as to why they’ll want to use your product. Don’t sell the back scratcher; sell the relief of the itch.
• Instead, try: “Feel alert and awake without the coffee breath/stains”

4. Calling out your competitors (or mudslinging)

• Example: “Cheaper Than Amazon” or “Tired of Walmart?”
• Why Not? While this is potentially a great way to compare your company to your competitors and get a great click-through rate on your ads, if the competitor becomes aware of an ad that is putting their name in a bad light, you can expect a cease and desist letter in short order. They can also file a trademark claim and have the ad disapproved by Google. Customers may inherently distrust mudslinging efforts, as again the source is biased to increase their own sales. Much like politics, you want customers to vote for your product (with their buying power) because it’s the best, not because the competitor is inferior.
• Instead, try using the space to be more relevant to what the customer needs by highlighting your benefits, strengths, and promotions that help position your superiority to the competitor. (“Free S&H Until 12/20”; “24-Hour Support”; “We’ll Match Any Price!”)

5. Company name as the headline

• Example: Home Depot Online (on a search for “black and decker drill”)
• Why Not? Including the searched-on keywords in your headline is a surefire way to grab user attention, as those keywords will appear in bold if they match the search query. Imagine somebody remodeling their home in need of a new cordless drill at the best possible price. Rather than browsing retail stores, he/she searches Google for a “black and decker drill”. In our example, “Home Depot Online”, nothing in the headline will show in bold, and the user is much more likely look past it. Typically the user will assume that the ad must not be relevant, and they’ll instead favor an ad that reads “Black and Decker Drill” in the headline – with the keyword appearing fully in bold.
• Instead, try using keywords in your headline. Bolded headline keywords will make your ad much more visible in the sea of ads that may appear. The end result: better quality scores, lower costs, and better click-through rates.
• Exception: Branded campaigns. Some advertisers will have a campaign dedicated solely to searches for the brand name of their company. This is especially useful when competitors are trying to capture your customers by bidding on your brand name.

6. ‘Cutesy ads’ instead of straightforward ads

• Example: “Sun Glasses for Home & Work. Eyewear for the Irreverent & Jaded.”
• Why Not? Simply put, the search network is not the place for trying to be clever and cute. Leave the branding to the display network, where it’s most effective. People who have their wallets out and are searching for a product on Google are seeking something specific. Meanwhile, being “jaded” isn’t exactly a positive connotation that will help you sell reading glasses at this point in the buying cycle. Your ad must be relevant to what the searcher wants (i.e.: what type of glasses or frames, what brand of designer frames).
• Instead, try being direct, straightforward, and sensible in your message. Users need to know why they should buy the product they’re looking for from you and not anyone else.

7. Long words that have abbreviations and excessive punctuation available

• Example: “Free Shipping”, “And”, “Or”, “Information”, “North Carolina”
• Why Not? Space, of course! Every character that can be must be conserved so it can be put to better use: highlighting your strengths!
  
• Instead, try abbreviations everyone can understand, such as “Free S&H” (or “Ships Free”); ampersands “&”, state abbreviations (“NC”); “Info” instead of “Information”, etc. In some scenarios, a forward slash “/” can be used in place of ‘or’, saving you up to 4 characters (i.e.: “iPod/iPhone Docks” instead of “iPod or iPhone Docks”).

8. Vague/ambiguous wording

• Example: “Save Tons” instead of “Save 30%”
• Why Not? Searchers tend to respond more to quantifiable terms. “Save Tons” says nothing to those who know the price range in a category of products, but “Save 30%” or “Save $70” speaks to what kind of value the searcher can expect (setting expectations is important!) Furthermore, “Save Tons” can mean different things to many people. If one clicks through expecting to “Save Tons” and finds a measly $10 discount, he or she will be fairly disappointed and may leave quickly. Don’t forget that the competition is just a click away.
  
• Instead, try qualifying your clicks by setting expectations with savings searchers can understand, such as “Save 40%” or “Save $70”.

9. Bare minimum display URLs.

• Example: Searching for “Las Vegas Hotels” and seeing an ad’s display URL as “www.FindHotels.com”
• Why Not? The display URL is your last chance to take advantage of another 35 characters. While it doesn’t give much room for added copy, it does help set expectations for someone who may click through. Ending your Display URL with “.com” is a missed opportunity if the ad is for a particular product or destination within the website.
  
• Instead, try leaving out the “www.” prefix and ending your display URL with a hint of where the searcher will land within your website, like “FindHotels.com/Las_Vegas_Hotels”. You can also use a sub-domain, such as LasVegas.FindHotels.com. Only the root domain has to match the destination URL. This strategy works best on tightly themed account structures. In addition, using a keyword can help this added piece of the URL to show in bold, adding to your ad’s visibility.

10. Don’t abuse dynamic keyword insertion!

• Example: For the seasoned AdWords advertiser, dynamic keyword insertion (or DKI) allows you to insert any matched keyword into any portion of your ad copy. For example, by using {KeyWord:Refurbished Television} in the ad headline, the headline will be replaced with any keyword within that ad group that triggers the ad. Any keyword longer than 25 characters will be replaced with the portion after “{KeyWord:” minus the end bracket. While it may be tempting as a means for spending less time on writing ads and building account structure, it shouldn’t be used all of the time, especially in extremely broad campaigns.
• Why Not? DKI in a broad ad group requires that your ad copy be especially generic and non-competitive to make any sense. You can’t brag about a unique advantage or a specific promotion if you’re covering a broad amount of themes in one ad group. DKI becomes most dangerous when advertisers aren’t building campaigns with granular, separated themes in different ad groups. This mistake can lead to ads making no sense at all. Nextag, Amazon, and eBay among others are repeat offenders of DKI abuse, with examples such as:

• Instead, try only using DKI in the most granular account structures without overlapping keyword themes between ad groups. If you’re unsure of how to use it effectively, stay away from it altogether.

Writing effective AdWords ad copy is all about setting proper expectations, speaking to the customer’s mindset, and being relevant in terms of your offering and the webpage your ad points to. With these tidbits of ad writing wisdom, the do-it-yourself AdWords advertiser can easily boost their click-through rates, lower their costs from wasted clicks, and help get the most out of their AdWords account.

For more information about pay-per-click advertising, check out the ROI Revolution blog.

Turn a Casual Visitor into a Lead

Once you get visitors to your website, how do you keep them coming back? Get them on your email list! Email service providers such as iContact offer easy-to-implement signup boxes for collecting contact and demographic information from your website visitors. This puts the visitor in the driver’s seat and allows them to give you the green light to communicate with them further. Use this information to tailor your email marketing messages to your audience segments. Many email service providers also feature automated confirmation emails and the ability to direct new subscribers to a landing page.  These landing pages can be easily changed to match your email messaging by using Preation’s content marketing system, The Eden Platform.

Remind Your Audience That You Still Exist

Email marketing gives you daily, weekly and monthly opportunities to share new information and exciting updates with your audience. An email with a simple, yet powerful text statement or an attention-grabbing image and a link is all you need to get your audience back to your website. Just be sure to watch your unsubscribe rates—you’ll see spikes if you’re emailing too frequently.

Remind Your Audience of Your Relevance

Banish the annual slowdown (whenever that may be for your organization), by crafting subject lines and content that cater to any seasonal relevance that your organization may offer your audience, giving your once seasonal audience the opportunity to realize why they want or need what you’re offering, even during a non-peak period.

Easily Track Performance and ROI

Once your campaign is live and active, pull up your latest email analytics to check performance and benchmark it against past performance. Pay particularly close attention to what links are the most clicked. Was it the attention-grabbing image that you included in last week’s email that drove so much traffic to your site, or was it the call to action link? Learning the answers to these questions will give you powerful insight into what your next email should and should not include.

Tweets, Facebook updates, and blog posts are all useful communication tools, but given their lightning fast pace, they’re also easy for an audience to miss. If you can harness the significant advantages and opportunities of email marketing, you can continue to drive visitors back to your site time after time, and if you play your cards right, turn those repeat visits into performing conversions.

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This blog post was courtesy of Lisa Jeffries at Shoeboxed.  Shoeboxed is the easiest way to digitize and organize your receipts and business cards. With Shoeboxed, you can mail receipts and business cards and they will be scanned and entered into an online account for you. The paid scanning service and the free online software make organizing these receipts and business cards easier, which saves you time and frustration. You can eliminate your clutter, avoid using a scanner and have your information at your fingertips.

Small businesses are now starting to tweet and post into social networks alongside their other regular marketing activities (flyers, websites, email newsletters, Google AdWords, etc). As businesses spend more time on social marketing activities they’re going to continue to ask how to measure the fruits of their labors. This is where Argyle Social comes in and they were demoing their product to drop-jawed marketeers all day long at the Internet Summit. I ran into both Eric Boggs and Adam Covati at the Argyle Social booth a few times. I’m not surprised that Argyle Social was picked since the booth was packed every time I walked by.

As a demo showcase company from 2009, with our Eden Platform product, I can say that we turned up a number of good leads at the event. Thanks to TechMedia for coming up with the demo showcase concept for the Internet Summit conference as it’s a great opportunity for new startups to show off what they’re doing.

Location location location.

Is the adage for real estate true for social media? Should you use all available social media marketing tools…. just because you can?

The answer is not so simple.

Which social media networks you use should be driven by (surprise, surprise!) who you are trying to reach. For example, you expect a musician to be on ReverbNation or MySpace or YouTube, where the prominence of artists is high and where people are explicitly looking for music. But would you expect that same musician getting as much of a benefit from LinkedIn? Not so much.

Then there is the issue of time. It is a serious logistical challenge to manage so many pages and profiles. Granted, there are platforms with dashboards for social media marketing, but no one platform is all things to all people. Yet.

Being everywhere, though, does have its benefits. Every social media outlet in one way or another will cater to a separate audience and by being on all of them you have a much larger outreach; we’ll call this visibility.

Visibility via multiple networks is an ideal strategy. The SEO benefits of links from varying sources back to your blog or website increases the credibility of your site and causes it to rank higher. In an interview from Social Media Examiner, Steve Rubel makes some excellent points as to why you *should* be on all networks.

Steve Rubel from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo

There are two ways that we at Argyle Social like to think of social media strategy. The first is as a funnel. (We’ve talked about this here, too.) With this concept, you manage to incorporate and curate the content that is happening around you and your brand, later using that analyzed information to better the funnel.

Second, use your social media marketing as outposts. Chris Brogan’s thoughts on outposts is best summed up in this one image.

If you were to combine the ideas by funneling your outposts, you get a system that monitors efficiency among networks. At the same time, you’re benefiting from each network uniquely without being a nuisance.

The takeaway is this: your business should be where it’s relevant and target a relevant audience.  So how do you find out which networks work for you? With a tip of our hat to Chris Penn from Blue Sky Factory, here’s great way to find where your customers are concentrated:

Download your customer email list, create a new Gmail account, and then upload your list as contacts in the new Gmail account. Next, use the new Gmail account to connect to the “find your contacts” features on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Presto! A quick and dirty snapshot of where your customers are hanging out.

Now that you know the social media platforms that are most interesting for your customers, you can start making smarter marketing investments.

How did you decide which networks to use? Share your own rules of thumb!