A recent MarketingSherpa case study is instructive for anyone selling a high-priced subscription or membership based product or service, and wishes to boost renewals.

MarketingSherpa profiled Corbis, a photo licensing agency, which was having difficulty handling the renewals of its content licenses.

The solution? To introduce a process for identifying licenses about to expire and allow sales representatives to target those account holders with about-to-expire licenses and persuade them to renew. Sounds simple… but Corbis had licenses covering 4 million online images with varying types of licenses as well as varying license periods. Around 7,000-10,000 image licenses were expiring each month. And at the time only about 2.5 percent of those licenses were being renewed.

Corbis developed a renewal program that used automated emails to remind clients that their licenses were about to expire, and gave a prioritized list of account holders to sales reps who could then contact the relevant members. While this is relatively easy to set up in most off-the-shelf membership scripts, it’s not so easy when you’re a large company and need to modify existing technological infrastructure.

Essentially, the steps which Corbis took - and which YOU can model, especially if you’re running an expensive membership program - are as follows:

1. Automate the sending of reminder emails to members whose membership is about to expire;
2. Automate the sending of emails to you (or your staff) about the members with accounts about to expire (e.g. by email). Ideally prioritize account holders based on renewal value or other relevant factors; and
3. Call those clients (in order of priority).

Corbis’ automated email efforts resulted in doubling its online renewal rates – from about 2.5 percent to 4-5 percent. The follow-up calls further boosted renewal rates to 10 percent in some locations.

What I find particularly compelling is the use of follow-up phone calls. So many Internet marketers seem averse to contacting their customers by phone… but if you have members paying, say, a few hundred dollars per month, isn’t it worth it?

Source: MarketingSherpa, “How To Double Renewals with Triggered Emails and Sales Reps: 6 Steps”, MarketingSherpa, November 6, 2008

Have you found yourself thinking (or shouting) those words? Or do you know someone in this situation? You might be shocked at how often I have heard this from beginning Internet marketers and - more worryingly, those who have been involved in Internet marketing for several years.

While it’s impossible for me to advise someone about what they should do in this situation (without knowing their individual circumstances) let me offer a perspective on this predicament: having hundreds of private label rights (PLR) ebooks, software scripts, etc is about as useful as having a garage full of books, toys, laundry products or ANY kind of product. It’s the same as having a supply of any kind of inventory… without having a store (online or offline) to sell it in or customers to sell it to.

Unless you have a means of attracting customers, you don’t have a business. And unless you have something valuable to offer your target market, you don’t have much chance of converting people into customers.

What’s more, even if you are able to generate traffic to your site… if you’re simply offering the same PLR products that everyone else is offering - with no, unique or better point of difference - you’re unlikely to convert any traffic you do get into customers.

My suggestion? Put those PLR products to one side and work out what kind of business you want to be in, who you want to sell to, and how you can deliver what they want in a different and better way than everyone else.

If, after doing that, you find that some or all of those PLR products fit into your business model, then by all means give them the attention required. Otherwise, forget about them.

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

Good article by Christine Churchill in Web Marketing Today. Ms Churchill points out that one of the factors impacting on Google Quality Scores awarded to Google Adwords pay-per-click advertisers is landing page load time.

All else being equal, the longer the load time… the lower the quality score… and the lower the quality score, the higher your minimum bid price… and the lower your ability to place higher in the paid ad listings.

Without giving Ms Churchill’s article away, the main keys to speed up landing page load times are to:

1. Keep the page (file) size as small as possible. Ways to do this are to minimize (or at least optimize) images, media files (such as Flash), excessive scripts (e.g. javascript) and code that can be placed elsewhere (e.g. in a CSS file);
2. Use a static (e.g. standard HTML) rather than dynamic (e.g. PHP or ASP) page; and
3. Make sure your server is sufficiently fast.

Source: Christine Churchill, “Raise Your Quality Score and Save Money with Fast-Loading Landing Pages”, Web Marketing Today, August 12, 2008

I’m a big fan of viral marketing. Maybe because of the enormous challenge involved in creating something that takes off in a huge way. Despite what some may say, this is much, much harder than it sounds. All the “refer a friend” scripts in the world can’t make up for a poor idea that no-one wants to share with others.

And yet we still see funny - but hardly earth-shattering - YouTube movies achieve upwards of 100,000 views. What do they have that our videos don’t? Are the ideas behind such movies so much better than ours? Maybe they are… but maybe they aren’t. So why do they seem to achieve a truly viral effect while our movies get nary the attention of a few of our buddies?

Well, before you beat yourself up over how hopeless your videos are… perhaps you’d appreciate knowing that the “viral” movies achieving 100,000+ views aren’t entirely viral at all. Rather than exemplifying a truly viral effect - i.e. where a movie is so compelling that it just has to be sent to one or two people before it spreads like wildfire… the success of many (if not most) incredibly popular YouTube movies is, in fact, the product of big money and time investments in what could only be called mass media “seeding” efforts.

And mass seeding – where a movie is “planted” among thousands and thousands of people – is not that different from spending money to advertise to thousands and thousands of people. Sure the extent to which those thousands become hundreds of thousands is where the viral effect comes into play… IF that too relies on viral marketing rather than further media manipulation…

Don’t believe me? Well, maybe you’ll believe Dan Ackerman Greenberg. Writing in Tech Crunch last year, Dan Ackerman Greenberg - whose company, The Commotion Group, has developed and spread viral movies for large movie studios and corporates - revealed the secret strategies his company uses to achieve 100,000+ views for movies uploaded to YouTube.

Most of Dan’s tips are enlightening and you’d probably do well to follow them. Others are, frankly, dishonest, and NOT recommended. Not if you want to build a successful business in a moral, ethical and legal way…

1. Dan’s Video Creation Tips

Firstly, here are Dan’s main tips for creating a popular YouTube video:

• Keep it short, ideally 15-30 seconds. Break down longer movies into 15-30 second segments.
• Don’t make your advertising message obvious.
• Be shocking. Ideally, the video should leave viewers wanting to know more.
• Use fake or controversial headlines that draw people in.
• Use sex appeal. According to Dan, alluring women still work like crazy.

2. Dan’s Video Distribution Tips

When he works on a viral movie, Dan’s first main goal is to get the movie onto YouTube’s Most Viewed page, which requires the movie to have at least 50,000 views. Here’s how he recommends you do it:

• Pay bloggers to embed the video in their blogs. Not to falsely rave about them, but simply to embed them. This is pretty much the same as buying advertising on someone’s blog. I think it’s okay as long as people aren’t misled into believing that a given blogger is objectively endorsing the video.
• Create multiple accounts on discussion forums, start and participate in threads, embed your video in one or more posts, and encourage colleagues or friends to participate in such threads in order to attract attention. Now, while it’s okay to get a few of your friends or employees to legitimately participate in such threads… it’s NOT okay to create multiple fake accounts and pretend to be different people participating in a discussion. That’s DISHONEST and a MAJOR NO-NO in my opinion. And some forums will kick you out for good if they find out what you’re doing. And they CAN find out by looking at the IP address of all those accounts (which will be the same).
• Embed your movies in the comments sections of MySpace members’ profiles. Unless the MySpace members in question don’t mind, this could border on being MySpace spam.
• Share your movies with friends in Facebook. You can do this in a number of ways: create an event to launch the video and invite friends… write a note about the movie and tag friends… post the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Send the video to your email list. Just be sure your list is likely to welcome such an email.
• Tell everyone you know about the video and try to get them to email it to their friends, share it on Facebook, etc.

3. Other Tips

• Use a catchy title and change it as needed to continue to attract attention.
• Use a compelling video thumbnail to help your video stand out on the Most Viewed video page in order to maximize the number of clicks your video receives.
• Create multiple fake YouTube accounts in order to create a heated, fake comment thread about the video in order to attract traffic to your website. Nothing wrong with a heated comment thread… as long as each participant is a separate person. As indicated above, I’m DEAD AGAINST using fake accounts. It’s DISHONEST.
• Delete negative comments. Although some would object to this, I think this is just sensible. A YouTube account is not - and doesn’t have to be – a democracy.
• Release multiple videos simultaneously. Rather than drip-feed viewers your videos, release them all at once. Dan says this works much better for attracting people to your website.
• Strategically tag videos - choose 3-4 unique tags and use only these tags for all related videos. This gives you greater control over what videos show up on YouTube as “Related Videos”. When views start trailing off after 3-7 days, add more generic tags to enable the movie to feature in relevant search results on YouTube and Google.
• Track your videos by, for example, adding “?video=1″ (or similar) at the end of the links you place on YouTube. This will enable you to see how much website traffic comes from the video.

So there you have Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s tips for achieving 100,000+ views for your YouTube movie. Most are useful… some are dodgy and not recommended… and all indicate that “viral” success is not just a matter of loading your video onto YouTube and hoping it will go viral of its own accord. It’s about putting time, effort and some money into significant seeding…

Sources: Dan Ackerman Greenberg, “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos”, Tech Crunch, November 22, 2007, Michael Arrington, “Follow Up To The Viral Video Post: Dan Wants Another Word”, Tech Crunch, November 24, 2008