The Marketing Viking

I recently wrote an article for a business website.

If you’d like a sneak preview, you can read it at: 10 Ways To Increase Your Sales.

After writing the article, I went back to some of the articles I wrote a few years ago and it was interesting to compare where I was then to where I am now.

There haven’t been a lot of changes to my approach (which is hardly surprising, my debut in marketing was in 1994, so I was fairly long in the tooth by the time I wrote my first internet articles), but there have been a couple that are worth remarking on:

(1) There’s been in increase in internet-only businesses in the last few years and a lot of them are based on the idea of free traffic/”if you built it they will come” rather than solid business and marketing fundamentals.

(2) Because of this, I spend more and more time talking about those fundamentals. In particular, building a long-term business based on profitable paid marketing.

I’m finding there’s a bigger and bigger gap between me and the majority of the online marketing community.

They’re talking about traffic, traffic, traffic and how to use “web2.0″ sites to promote their businesses, while I’m focused on about buying traffic, increasing conversion rates and raising the lifetime value of a client.  

Time will be the judge on this one, but I look forward to coming back to this post in 2010 to see who got it right. 

Steve

In the summer of 2006, many people who were using Google Adwords found their ads had been disabled and Google was telling them they needed to bid more to re-instate their ads.

This was christened the “Googleslap” and, since then, there have been a number of additional “slaps” where Google have targetted another group of advertisers.

So, what’s going on?

Google, as usual, haven’t been too explicit about their intentions but, reading between the lines, here’s what I think is going on:

(more…)

I’ve written about website split-testing before, but I want to show you exactly how powerful it can be.

Below is a screen-shot from a split-test I’m doing for one of my clients: (more…)