How often do you visit social media sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Reddit etc? I do often. Those sites offer a wealth of online resources from health to technology. And they’re becoming more and more powerful in terms of control of what we read, watch and buy.

Each one of us can engage in social bookmarking as we’re surfing the web. In fact, some of your customers are extremely hooked on this bookmarking activity. On Digg’s social bookmarking site, these folks are called Top Diggers. While this term doesn’t reveal much about their potential to spread the word about your products and services, the term “secret influencers,” used to describe active members on social bookmarking sites in general, is term that does.

There are certain influential users on social bookmarking sites who spread the word about sites and ideas day in and day out. Some of the websites these folks bookmark receive so many votes that they get listed on front pages of Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Reddit etc—giving those websites a massive amount of exposure from influential sources.

Most Diggers and social bookmarkers do what they do for the thrill of it. If fact, what social bookmarkers do is to provide resources that people fall in love with. A random user who visits Digg.com is seeing aggregated news and resources that have been Dugg by the most influential and active members of the Digg community.

As a marketer, I’m particularly interested in how this phenomenon controls our sphere of interests. In marketing, huge sums of money are shelled out just to understand audience’s needs, interests, and behaviors. For companies, social bookmarking offers unique insight into the types of products and services that get noticed by the web populace. When I go to social bookmarking sites, I learn volumes about what’s hot in the world, what’s cool with the youth today, what adults like to read, etc.

Through social bookmarking sites, we are given the opportunity to make a difference in the world. However, with the growing popularity of social bookmarking websites, some websites like user/submitter.com offer payments for bookmarking (50 cents for three votes). By doing this, they are getting their customer’s websites exposed on social media networks. Although representatives of social media networks claim that their algorithms change on a regular basis to prevent fraud or from top users promoting their friends, they won’t be able to catch every online marketing attempt on their sites.

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Google listens to numerous webmaster requests and adds a link tool on Google webmaster’s console for querying both internal and external links. After verifying website ownership this new feature will allow webmasters to check what sites are linking to their domains and what sites they’re linking to. It’s a handy feature complementing Google’s search operator [link:]. The link: operator, however, was not able to deliver comprehensive and classifiable data. With the link tool webmasters will now be able to filter and download customizable link stats. The quantity of links to download is unlimited.

In order to check links to your website, you will have to choose a verified site in your webmaster tools account (sign up if you don‘t have one) and click on the new links tab at the top.

Once you get there, you’ll see: external links and internal links options. If you pick external links, you’ll see a table with two columns. The first column lists pages linking to your site and on second column shows a number of links from each page. It’s nice and easy.

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As discussed in the previous post, social bookmarking and social networks are fast becoming extremely popular and influential. It’s no surprise that the most talked about candidate running for president elections of 2008, Barack Obama, realized the importance of online social media for his campaign.

He’s the first politician to back his election campaign by launching a social media site. www.BarackObama.com is a full scope social networking site which allows members to write blogs, set up personal profiles, meet others through internal site messaging, upload photos, and all of the other benefits found on typical social networking sites. He’s even got his videos posted on YouTube and his photographs on Flickr.

The Obama example foreshadows the new wave in online political campaigns. Of all communication mediums, the internet offers the widest reach possible—something that politicians need badly!

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Don’t think that SEO alone will provide the solution to all your online business problems. SEO is great for driving more traffic because more visitors will find your website in SERP’s and will therefore reach your sales pages. But once those visitors land on your page, your next challenge is to convert them to customers. The exciting thing is that with today’s advanced online web tools, understanding how to convert prospects into customers is easier to do than with just about any other advertising medium.

With web analytics, you can track just about every action that visitors take on your website. You can discover your conversation rate—i.e., the percentage of visitors that take your desired action once they arrive on your page. If you know how many leads you need to make a sale and you know your conversion rate, you can easily achieve your online sales goals. As your site becomes more visible through SEO, your revenue will grow as well.

There’s nothing essentially wrong with the approach of focusing energy on driving more and more customers through SEO in order to increase sales. However, relying on SEO tactics alone you miss on other great opportunities that are just around you – to improve the conversion rate of your website!

The basis for increasing conversion depends on how well you interpret your visitor’s needs. Take a look at the example below that illustrates this concept…

Let’s assume that your website has a one percent conversion rate, which means that 10 visitors out of every thousand buy your product. Your first thought may be that in order to boost sales, you must increase the number of visitors to your site. The problem is that if the conversion rate stays the same, you’re spending more and more time and money driving traffic to your site while still turning away 99% of your leads. At the same time you’re building a growing number of frustrated and unsatisfied potential customers.

Why not focus your time and money on improving the conversion rate before bringing all of that traffic to your site? By increasing the conversion rate from 1% to 2% you could double your sales with the same amount of traffic. Perhaps what is turning away potential customers is a poor SEO strategy like silly sounding keyword stuffed content. Perhaps it’s that the ordering or checkout process is so confusing that many people just leave rather than buy. There are countless reasons why people don’t buy—which means plenty of opportunities to improve your conversion rate.

The recipe for success in online business lies in your ability to interpret your prospect’s needs. Successful online businesses optimize the sales process first before driving traffic and then continue to analyze visitor behavior and make changes to the sales process in order to achieve the most effective results.

Why should they care about your products? How do you convince your prospect to buy your product today, tomorrow, or next month? Think of special scenarios for your visitors. Have some people to review your website and ask for feedback. Find out why they chose to buy or not to buy. Optimize each sales process page with regard to the things discussed in this article.

You’ll want to find ways to increase your visitor’s motivation to buy as well as establish a long-term relationship with your visitors. Your goal is to communicate with visitors throughout each stage of sales process. You must also have a good understanding of your customer’s demographics etc, their needs, wants, buying patterns, hot buttons, etc.

In short, you must be well prepared for receiving those huge amounts of qualified traffic or your SEO is just a waste of time and money. Good luck with your sales process optimization!

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Do you pay enough attention to persuasive design? No? You could be losing lots of money. This subject is often overlooked by many website owners, but one of critical importance. Persuasive design is one of the critical factors that can convert prospects into customers.

The art of persuasion in itself is nothing new. From Cicero’s speeches to modern TV ads, the goal of a communicator is to persuade audiences. However, the art of online persuasion is a relatively new challenge. Many still struggle to understand how powerful persuasive design can be when marketing products and services. In today’s highly competitive environment we can’t rely on copywriting alone to persuade a prospect to become a customer.

Have you ever wondered what impact a website’s images have on sales? Below we have some pictures of apples. Let’s assume for a moment that you’re selling apples. Which picture do you think would motivate and engage your website’s visitor most? Although those are not the best pictures I managed to find, there’s a clear difference between the first row of pictures and the second.

Take a look at the first row pictures—the focus is on the apple alone. These pictures don’t offer any clue about how the customer might feel after purchasing the apple. Providing illustrations for the sake of illustrating your product or service is a lame way of approaching online persuasion.

The pictures in the second row each tell a story about human interaction with apples. Whether the apple is eaten by a baby or by a man, those pictures tell true stories about passionate consumption of juicy apples. You could easily relate to that man to that cute baby. Maybe you already want that apple! Now you know what makes one picture more persuasive than another does. If you have access to professional designers, have them make professional photographs that tell stories to your visitors and that have an underlying call to action message behind them. Before too long your visitors will feel a difference!

Pictures that don’t sell!

Pictures that sell!

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