Research conducted by JupiterResearch for BuzzLogic indicates that blog readers tend to respond to ads on blogs, with 40 percent of people reading blogs taking action as a result of viewing an ad on a blog, and 50 percent of frequent blog readers taking action.

Of the action taken, 17 percent read product reviews online; 16 percent sought out more information on a product or service; and 16 percent visited a manufacturer or retailer Web site.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, 25 percent of the blog readers (people who read at least one blog per month) said they trusted ads on a blog, compared with 19 percent who trusted ads on social networking sites.

The survey also found that consumers are influenced by blogs at the moment of purchase decision. According to BuzzLogic and JupiterResearch, blogs play a greater role than social networks because bloggers establish themselves as an authority on a topic, particularly in niche areas, and create a relationship with the consumer.

Source: Enid Burns, “Study: Blogs Influence Purchases More Than Social Sites”, The ClickZ Network, October 28, 2008

Google has struck a multi-year deal with NBC Universal to sell inventory on a number of NBC cable stations.

Under the arrangement, Google will sell ads on Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC and other networks. It will also partner with NBC Universal to develop new ad metrics and assess viewership data acquired from set top boxes (available under Google’s relationship with EchoStar’s DISH network).

Source: Zachary Rodgers, “Google Partners with NBC Universal on TV Ads”, The ClickZ Network, September 9, 2008

In short… yes. Copywriting is, in my view, the fourth and final critical skill for Internet business success is.

There may be other variations of the following, but I firmly believe that, on the Internet at least:

“Pictures tell, words sell”

What you say and how you say it makes all the difference in terms of attracting people to your website, developing a relationship with them (e.g. via email), and converting them into customers.

But it’s not just words in the form of text - it’s also words in terms of (what is said in) audio and video.

Multimedia doesn’t end the need for powerful, persuasive copywriting - it promotes the need for well written scripts!

So, when it comes to YOUR business, you need to have - or have access to - the ability to write persuasively.

So there you have the four critical skills to Internet marketing:

1. Business management
2. Marketing (particularly Internet marketing)
3. Web design; and
4. Copywriting

If you solely focus on these four areas - or at least hire good people to focus on these four areas - I firmly believe that you’ll set your business up for ongoing success.

Of course, it’s all very well to suggest you focus on “business management” or “marketing” or “web design” or “copywriting”… but what do each of those really involve? What do you really need to KNOW and DO in practical terms?

Well, that’s what this newsletter (free) and the products and services we promote (paid) are for

Before we get started, you may be wondering… what’s a “name squeeze” page?

Also known as a “forced optin” page or simply a “squeeze” page, a “name squeeze” webpage or website is simply a site where the visitor must enter their name and email address (and possibly other details) in order to “enter” the site.

Now, why on earth would anyone effectively say to a visitor:

“You can only come in if you give me your name and email address!”

Wouldn’t that turn most visitors away?

Actually - depending on the site in question - the answer is:

“Not necessarily.”

Now before I go further, let me explain the dirty little truth that many name squeeze advocates seem to conveniently ignore.

(And the irony is that I know of at least three high profile “name squeeze” zealots who do NOT use name squeeze pages on several of their key websites!)

The dirty little truth is that name squeeze pages are NOT necessarily the best way to enlist the MOST QUALIFIED prospects into your sales funnel. This depends on a number of things, but in particular:

• Your target market - where are they coming from, what are they looking for, are they ready to buy now?
• Your product or service

We have tested requiring prospects to enter a given site via a name squeeze page versus allowing them full access to the site before inviting them to sign up for something.

In several instances, we received fewer subscribers… but MORE sales from a site WITHOUT a name squeeze page.

Also, remember that the effectiveness of certain tactics - such as name squeeze pages - changes over time. Especially as more marketers use them (and certain types of marketers use them) which can detract or enhance their effectiveness.

Having said that, in some cases name squeeze pages continue to be the most effective way of generating sales. If prospects are more likely to buy if the marketer builds a relationship with them via ongoing email communications (rather than simply presenting an offer upfront) then “forcing” prospects to join an email list may be optimal.

In fact, there are two specific cases where it might be best to use a name squeeze page. Where:

1. Relationship Building Is Required

With target markets that are likely to be more (or only) responsive based on having a positive relationship with the marketer, the main aim should be to get them onto a list. This enables you to build that relationship via ongoing email communications.

Forcing prospects to provide their name and email address before seeing any of your content is based on the idea that you’ll get more of your website visitors opting in to your list than otherwise.

A good name squeeze page may deliver an optin conversion rate of 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent or higher, depending on where the traffic derives. (Note that 20 percent of search engine traffic may be just as good as 50 percent of traffic from an endorsed mailing).

That’s a significant percentage of visitors you can now communicate with, build a relationship with, and sell products or services to - not just once, but again and again.

One major caveat though: it doesn’t necessarily follow that getting more optins via a name squeeze page will get you more QUALIFIED optins than if you allowed free access to your site and encouraged people to join your list by other means.

2. You Don’t Have a Product or Service Yet

Another reason why you might use a name squeeze approach is where you haven’t yet got a product or service to sell.

By emailing your prospects on a regular basis, you get to build both a list and a positive relationship with your subscribers, so that by the time you do have a product or service, they are more likely to buy from you.

One final point about name squeeze pages. They only work if you offer something people are willing to trade their name and email address for! The greater the perceived value, the more - and more qualified - subscribers will likely sign up.

Of course, the best way to test whether or not a name squeeze approach is the most profitable is to test each approach.

Jason Calacanis - serial Internet entrepreneur and the guy who co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey - announced on Friday that he was retiring from blogging. He subsequently sent an email to a list of about 750 subscribers explaining that blogging was dead.

Well, “blogging” as Jason understood it to be.

In his email, Jason wrote that bloggers now spend more time and effort trying to broadcast their blogs, than actually blogging:

“Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts than they do on the posts themselves. In the early days of blogging Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to win at blogging: “show up every day.” In 2003 and 2004 that was the case. Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from whatever you’ve said.”

Jason went on to say:

“Excelling in blogging today is about link-baiting, the act of writing something inflammatory in order to get a link.”

Ironically (i.e. for anyone who remembers ardent bloggers announcing that EMAIL is dead), Jason heralded email as his communication tool of choice, owing to its “intimacy” and “immediacy”.

He pointed out that email facilitates a “level playing field” between sender and recipient, where there is commitment on both sides - the commitment of the sender to send, and the commitment of the recipient to subscribe to the email list in the first place. I should also add that Jason aims to limit his list to a 1,000 or so subscribers, in order to achieve a “deeper” relationship with his subscribers.

Hats off to Jason for making a choice about the communication medium right for him, based on his individual goals and circumstances.

But this is just a CHOICE - it’s not right or wrong.

Blogging HAS changed over the past 3-4 years. It has evolved from being an “open diary” kind of medium to being a medium used by a range of individuals, journalists, businesses, interest groups and others, for a range of purposes. And the term “blog” is coming to be synonymous with “website content management system”, rather than a style of communicating on the web.

Can blogging no longer facilitate intimate and immediate communications? Do bloggers really spend more time trying to get attention FOR their blogs, than writing interesting, compelling content ON their blogs?

Maybe the majority of bloggers ARE more interested in gaining attention for their blogs than writing worthwhile blogs in the first place. Heck, we all know of Internet marketers who specifically advise people to set up blogs purely for marketing purposes, regardless of their content.

And perhaps this is not what blogging used to be about. And on that basis, perhaps blogging is, to some extent, dead. But the same could be said about email: once it was used for personal messages between individuals, now it is used for personal messages between individuals… AND for business communication purposes… AND for promotional purposes… AND for all kinds of other purposes.

So, just like email is a MEDIUM, so too is a blog. If blogging is dead… long live blogging!

Furthermore, I can’t see why a blog - as a medium - can’t still facilitate an intimate, immediate and deep relationship between a writer and his or her readers. What’s stopping Jason from setting up a private blog that is only available to 1,000 of his closest friends? What’s stopping him from keeping comments private? Surely such a blog would have an advantage over email in the sense that it won’t suffer from deliverability challenges.

That said, I do agree that email has the edge when it comes to intimacy and relationship building. An email IS a bit more personal and “special than a web-based blog post. This is basically because an email - assuming it’s not spam - is an invited guest to YOUR PLACE i.e. your email inbox, and, as such, is likely to grab more of your attention and interest than a blog post appearing on someone ELSE’s website. So if I had to choose, I would rather send emails than post messages on a blog.

But, of course, you and I do NOT have to choose. We can do both. As marketers, we can enjoy the best of both worlds - the ability to have our blog posts spread or shared across the web in order to generate traffic and interest in our offerings - AND the ability to develop a deeper relationship with our subscribers via email.

Sources: Nik Cubrilovic, “Jason Calacanis’ First New Email Post”, TechCrunch, July 13, 2008, Wikipedia, “Jason Calacanis”, Wikipedia, Last Updated July 14, 2008

Okay, so that’s a pretty dramatic headline, but it seems to me that too many search engine optimization consultants and their clients are focusing on the wrong things. It’s not necessarily intentional, but many companies have bought, sold and swallowed several SEO lies…

The first lie is that search engine optimization is all about getting high rankings in the search engines for the most popular keywords or keyphrases in a particular market. Technically, that may well be what “search engine optimization” or means… but does a company really want higher rankings… or does it want to make more money?

Is getting a number 1, 2 or 3 for the most searched on terms in your market really what you want? Or is it getting a high ranking for what Dan Thies calls those “wallet out” keywords - those keywords most searched on by people who are likely to buy from you?

The second lie is that search engine optimization (SEO) should be about increasing traffic to your website. Does getting more traffic matter… or does getting more paying-customer-traffic matter? It’s possible to use several techniques to bring a whole lot of traffic to your site… but whether those visitors are interested in – or likely to buy – your products is another question altogether. Again, certain keywords – including keywords that are searched on by people in your target market – may bring a lot of traffic to your site… but are they really buyers?

Finally, building on the first and second lies, the third lie is that, when it comes to search engine optimization, your focus should be on increasing your search engine rankings and overall website traffic.

Um, if you are in business, shouldn’t your focus be on making more money?

Okay, okay. There may be a clear relationship between increasing your ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for the most popular keywords and generating more traffic. But the point is that this is not necessarily the case. In fact, identifying what relationships exist between given keywords, types of traffic and money will generally require a good deal of analysis and experimentation.

Case in point: I know of a company that is very pleased with its high ranking for a highly-searched on phrase in their market. But the money they are making from their SEO efforts is appalling. Could it be that the phrase they have spent so much effort achieving a high ranking for… is not the phrase used by most “wallet-out” search engine users?

In any case, what surely can’t be disputed is that the key metrics a company should really use to measure the effectiveness of their online marketing – including search engine optimization – are visitor value and overall online profit.

Visitor value equals revenue per visitor less the costs of acquiring that visitor. In SEO terms, it’s the revenue per visitor derived from organic search engine results less the costs of search engine optimization.

You can actually use more precise measures of visitor value. You can work out the visitor value per search engine, per keyword, and per other kinds of variables. Ideally, you will have different visitor values for each distinguishable type of marketing you carry out - e.g. visitor value per paid search, visitor value per a particular banner campaign, and so on, in order to work out the effectiveness of each kind or activity. In each case, though, the visitor value metric essentially tells you how much money you are generating from an average visitor less the costs of acquiring that visitor.

Online profit is how much money, overall, you are making from your website less the costs of maintaining and marketing that website. Depending on how you define “costs” your online profit may be different to your overall gross profit, which may take into account various “off-line” costs.

Online profit is important because, depending on the types of products or services you sell, your visitor value may be relatively low, but your online profit may be considerable.

But what matters is not so much what your visitor value and online profit are now… but, rather, the extent to which they are growing. In other words, when it comes to measuring the return on investment from your search engine optimization activities you want to know if, and by how much, such activities are increasing your visitor value and online profit.

Consequently, when considering the performance of your SEO firm, you are wise to focus less on whether they are getting you higher search engine rankings or generating more traffic, and more on whether they are improving your visitor value and your online profit.

The same is also true of paid search engine marketing. I’ve found that many companies are so intent on lowering their cost-per-click and increasing their click-through-rate that they lose sight of the big picture, which is to increase visitor value and online profit. In fact, in many cases, by working out which keywords best convert into sales in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you can find out which are the best keywords to optimize for in terms of SEO.

Of course, your methods for converting visitors are integral to raising visitor value and online profit. And these may well be outside your SEO company’s control. On the other hand, it’s important to recognize that search engine marketing and conversion activities are highly interdependent. What keywords you optimize for will not only impact on the traffic your website receives, but the degree to which that traffic converts into customers. Fortunately, it’s possible to hold all variables constant and identify which keywords are more highly converting. So, in this respect, you can see how effective your search engine optimization consulting firm is in identifying and optimizing for those wallet-out keywords.

All in all, your online success depends on recognizing and focusing on improving those bottom-line metrics that really matter – visitor value and online profits. Getting better search engine rankings and more traffic may well be essential for increasing visitor value and online profit… but they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That’s our view as an internet marketing services provider, as well as the operator of a portfolio of money-making websites.