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Introduction to Amazon Marketing

June 24, 2016 By: trafucomment

SuccessAmazon is one of the world’s largest retailers. Anything and everything is sold on Amazon, with the company itself even going into food and drink in the near future. Originally established as an online book store, Amazon now has thousands of businesses on their website selling products through FBA – Fulfilled by Amazon. This means the merchant sends all the items to an amazon warehouse, which then pack and deliver the items for the business. This frees up more time to focus on product design and quality as well as marketing. Generally this is seen as the future on business and why I am giving it a try too.

To get started is pretty easy, you simply have to have a product, build a listing for that product and send those products to amazon directly. The process has been outlined on a number of other websites, so I’m not going to talk about it today. Instead I am going to focus on the key element on how to actually rank a product in Amazon, as ranking high in the Amazon search engine itself, is the best way to make a large amount of sales. Generally this is referred to as amazon seo and although it is similar to Google SEO there are some key differences. There’s an epic guide on perfectly optimised listings for Amazon if you want to check that out.

How to Rank in the Amazon Search Engine

SEO Image

Ranking in Amazon is kind of the same as ranking in Google, the primary difference is the key metric. So lets cover the basics first and then get onto the main difference.

As you probably know, including your keywords in your title, url and on your website is key to ranking for these keywords in Google. This is much the same in Amazon and On-page optimisation is basically the same thing. So if you already know the key element for on-page SEO then implement these into your amazon listing and that will give you a great start. Ensure your listing contains all of your keywords and the description is very long (over 500 words.) You also don’t need to worry about over-optimisation with Amazon.

Once the on-page optimisation is complete its time to get sales and reviews! Unlike with Google (which is all about backlinks) Amazon bases their primary metric on sales. Now a high number of sales will improve your rankings, and a high number of reviews will improve your conversion rate and click through rate as well. This all has an impact on how high you will rank on the amazon search engine itself. But primarily you want to focus on a.) Sales – Getting as many as possible and b.) Reviews-  Getting to 10 reviews as soon as possible!

For more information on the amazon ranking strategies you can watch the video below.

Update – April 2018

Amazon is becoming more and more competitive by the day, we’ve recently helped the ASC guys build a massive list of top tools for sellers, this list is mega and awesome, would highly recommend giving it a read if you are serious about your Amazon efforts.

Where I see Business in the Next 10 Years

June 13, 2016 By: trafucomment

Dominos businessAlthough this is more of a broad business, technology and investing style post rather than my usual marketing posts, I just wanted to do it to give people an idea about what I do with my time (outside of marketing). Technology and investing are 2 huge passions of mine, over the past 3 years I have invested close to a million pounds through different forex, stock and even spread investing channels. In the same time my expenditure on technology and more importantly business tech has tripled! I love anything that makes business more efficient and nowadays that is usually a new piece of tech! Below are 3 things I see happening to business in the next few years!

Speed

Over the past 3 years something has become increasingly clear… We are getting quicker and quicker. Whether this be in terms of making decisions, buying things, getting things delivered or simply getting bored! As a species we now have an attention span of 2 seconds! That’s less than a goldfish (3). But what does this mean for business? Well essentially it means the following – “If you are not fast moving in your business, then you will struggle. Technology updates are coming at an alarming rate, but more importantly the way in which technology is used and adapted is what’s different.

One product I am still absolutely amazed by is drones. These used to be huge government spy units back when I used to think of the terms, yet nowadays a drone is this tiny aerial unit that you can purchase for a couple of hundred pounds that takes HD steady video and pictures from stupid distances and insane qualities! The technology itself is nothing new, but the way its become consumer eligible so quickly is quite scary!

Investments Change

More specifically the way investments are made. There is another housing and financial meltdown coming, as much as it sucks to say it, it is going to suck even more when you are not prepared for it. But luckily tech is going to help us overcome it. Let’s take the last meltdown, what happened? People lost a lot of money, but not if you were quick. The technology I am talking about will help people (not just the extremely rich) to get out of a bad financial position early enough to make it through a financial crisis profitably. That’s personal investment, business decisions and loans!

Businesses Actually Change

I’ve invested in a business that provides betting advice to people in return for their email address. I love the business and the people behind it but if I really think about it, should I be doing this? Nope. I should be focusing on individual specific things.

Businesses Adapt or Die Out

To sum this up in 28 seconds I will embed the video by Gary Vee – One of the most outgoing and upcoming business and investing giants. Owning a 100 million dollar company and probably more than that in investments now too.

[Video] Stop Being So Boring with Your Marketing

May 28, 2016 By: trafucomment

If your anything like me then you know that there is nothing worse than good businesses with bad marketing, they can’t generate sales and as a result they can’t increase their marketing budget. It’s an evil evil cycle, but recently I spoke to the guys from supercarhire.co.uk and they spent me to a short video that talks more about viral marketing and how not to be boring in your marketing efforts. Tom and Jeff from supercarhire had a lot of capital tied up in stock (supercars) and as a result they weren’t able to market that much, but they used some pretty sneaky marketing techniques to get there brand in-front of buyers. 

The Reason Why Businesses Fail in 2016

March 20, 2016 By: trafucomment

I’ve been waiting to write this post for a long time now and have actually been writing it for about 3 days, its not long and it is a bit ranty, but there has been a lot of thought into it. Why do some businesses fail, but the very same businesses (same products, same services) succeed?

It’s the age old question in business, some people say its due to lack of motivation for the industry you are in, which is a good point. Others say its 100% down to funding, if you can’t utilise funding and sort cash-flow for your business, again this is 100% true but its not the number 1 reason why businesses fail, especially in the modern age.

Businesses fail because your customers are not “impressed” by your business.

Let me explain.

In 2015 I set-up a business called Ghost Fitness with a couple of other partners. We wrote the business plan and were all happy with it. Today this business is coming along nicely but we made 1 HUGE mistake in the start that was involved around people being un-impressed by the products and the service of “purchasing” in general.

The issue was we all had other businesses or full time jobs, which meant fulfilling orders that had come through sometimes took 2 or 3 days, adding the delivery cost on top of this meant people were looking at 7-10 days for their items. Although individuals loved the products and the response we got from them was overwhelmingly positive, the main issue was people simply didn’t get the products fast enough.

FBA AmazonThe solution? – Well it was a difficult one at first as none of us could just send all day packing orders, and the business itself wasn’t profitable enough to pay someone else to do so, instead we decided to think to the future and scale. The solution was to utilise Amazon and their FBA projects. FBA allows amazon to store, pack and deliver your item for you, they take a fee but as long as your product is over £10, the fee is usually only £3.20. This means that if it costs you below £1.80 to produce, which it did in our case, we could still make £5 profit per sale. Get up to 20 sales a day and that’s a cool £100 / day which was our short term aim.

This made customers a lot more “impressed” by the process of purchasing and hence had a knock-on effect for the business in its entirety. By this I mean people started telling others and the word of mouth knock-on effect came along nicely! Also reviews started to flow in from Amazon, most of these being extremely positive. Reviews also sell products, so these reviews led to more reviews which lead to more sales and so on! The knock on compound effect is for real! Start the ball rolling and it will keep rolling as long as you started it down the right way!


Aston Martin
Simplifying the business was the best way, people could see the price list for each model and then call or email to book, that’s it! That’s all he needed! So we stripped the site and made it painfully simple to use. Then we worked on ranking him in Google itself for the keywords that got the most searches, this was a lot easier with a simple site and Google responded well with some great ranking increases. This mixed with old school marketing methods and PPC ads was enough to generate £10,000 worth of sales a month! That’s a £120,000 per year business in 5 months, not a bad return on time investment!

Why SEO for Boring Industries is the Most Important

February 26, 2016 By: trafucomment

Boring BusinessesStrange title but I will explain in-depth why search engine optimisation for industries that are considered “ugly” or “boring” is the most effective marketing strategy and why all business owners should invest as must as possible into marketing their site on the search engines. Although SEO is the most effective long term, there is nothing wrong with using PPC for shorter term gains. I personally recommend to clients to do both, utilise ads and the organic results and you can get even more traffic, once you rank 1st or in the top 3 for your pre-selected keywords you can reduce the amount of ads you run to increase your profit margins! It’s easy except it takes a lot of money and time.

I recently finished a digital marketing campaign for garage shelving UK, as you can guess this was a site that sold garage racking, shelving, pallet racking and all of that stuff. The competition was crazy high, Amazon, B&Q, Homebase, Argos, Tufferman all on page 1. We were currently on page 2. Trying to outrank these guys was going to take some funds and some smart SEO. We knew links and great on-page would do it (like anything else) so we went to work.

SEO MarketingThe reason SEO is so much more important for boring industries, such as the garage shelving one (Yawn.) Is that people don’t bother shopping around. There is not really many styles of shelving and as long as you set-up your site well and its easy to purchase and your prices are what people “expect” to pay, they will just buy from you without really looking around for a better deal or a different product. This is the same for local industries as well, people would rather save time than money when it comes to generic or less interesting products. And as a result ranking in the top 3 results for competitive keywords, means this traffic converts extremely well!! I’m talking 10% range.

For our example we had around 10,000 per month across 4-5 primary keywords. Ranking 1st for all of these keywords would lead to around 4,000 organic searchers a month. At a 10% conversion rate that’s 400 sales a month and at an average customer check-out value of £200, that’s 400 x 200 = £80,000 a month in sales. The company was currently only doing around £5,000 in sales from some longer tail keywords and PPC and social media ads.

I explained the situation to them, that the conversion rate for this search engine traffic is worth more than what you are spending on social. As a result we completely scraped the social media campaign which opened up around £500 / month for seo. He also introduced another £500 a month for SEO. Which meant we had £1,000 per month for 6 months to work with. Although we aren’t ranking 1st (or anywhere near) at the moment, we are onto page 1 and the conversion rates are still holding around 8%. 1st would likely lead to £80k of sales!

SEO and Digital Marketing in 2016

February 21, 2016 By: trafucomment

It seems every year we hear about some huge Google change that is going to rock the SEO and digital marketing community. But people forget that even the massive Penguin updates affected about 3% of the web. That’s a very low propotion of websites, even if you were a black hat SEO, the chances are you didn’t get affected as long as you weren’t trying to game the system “too hard” as it were.

In 2016 and beyond though the emphasis is definately on content and content distribution. Creating truly awesome content is what you should be looking to do from now on, but distributing that content is equally, if not more important. For example the infographic below (on the same subject digital marketing in 2016) by Bulldog Social Media is an example of great content distributed well!

Digital Marketing in 2016

Once they’d created the infographic the company decided that simply posting it on the site would result it not a lot of traffic or social traction, so instead of simply posting it, they created a tailored blog post, optimised with some relevant keywords and got going.

Once live the team utilised their social following on twitter, Facebook and Linkedin as well as reaching out to industry experts to see if they liked it and would like to share, this is manually creating the “viral” effect, which in business industries is pretty much impossible to do automatically.

This lead to hundreds of retweets, some great traction on Facebook and a number of people embedding the infographic on their website (such as here.) All in all the post gained a huge amount of traffic and some high quality natural backlinks as a result, this is the future of digital marketing and SEO!

How to Start a design company (Flyer Design)

November 20, 2015 By: trafucomment

This article is based on exactly what the team at LeafletGo did, they are a flyer design, print and distribution company. This is how they set it up.

 

Businesses are looking for solutions. Not services.

We know how in demand advertising and printing business are. Every business around them needs their help and services. In order for you to become known and acknowledged in the market, you should exert effort in making a name in the limelight. All rising business needs flyers for their promotion.  They usually have it printed before their grand openings and if there are promotional sales that need to be announce to the local public. Giving out flyers is one of the inexpensive ways to promote an even or happening which you want to invite a lot of people to come over and attend the event with you.Leaflet Design Print Deliver

In planning to start out a business, you should know your target market. When you choose to have a flyer and distribution company, you should know where you should focus in order for you to come up with your own campaign and get the attention of some companies to come to you and check what they can avail from you.  Being unique is important and setting an enough amount of capital is a part of your game plan. Skills can be learn through a bit of tutorial or hire someone who has the skills and learn from them. You should purchase the right material and machines you will need in your business. A starting business should be ready to meet the demands of the market. Since you are in a printing and advertising industry, you are expected to have your resources at hand to start up with your operation.

You should hire credible workers to work for you. You can manage the marketing in the initial phase of your business and you should take charge of your daily operation. It is the time that your business become vulnerable since it is still building its name and you should be the one to find the leads where you can promote your services. Establishing a price list for all your services is necessary and you should do it prior to doing the marketing. You may add up some promotional prices for bulk orders. Flyer distribution should be well coordinated with the courier you will get a tie up with. The pricing should be base on the zip codes that it will get into before it reaches its destination and on top of it is your labor fee on top of your expenses.

Sort your legal services before you go live! We utilised Parker Bullen in Andover but you can utilise anyone who has a good track record, but its always better to get a solicitor than to find out you’ve breached a trademark or something else as bad 5 years later!

Before you start your operation, you should study the nature of your business. You can have the research first for you to have at least an idea on what you should expect especially on the negative side. Businesses have their own struggle and you should be ready for this. If you are quite confidence with your operation and getting some of the loyal clients to have regular orders with you, you may set up a website for online clients. There are thousands of potential customers worldwide and you can showcase your services to them through hiring a web designer and professional SEO consultant to optimize your page.

How to Write a Good Digital Marketing Resume

October 27, 2015 By: trafucomment

Even if you’ve put together some outstanding ads, social media campaigns, etc. as a digital marker—truth be told, if you don’t have an outstanding resume, you’re going to miss out on some great job opportunities. What’s important is that you showcase your skills and experience, and get recruiters to see your resume.  The good news is that you can take some tried-and-true steps to write the best digital marketing resume possible. Here are some of them:

  1. Have a strategy for your resume

Like when creating a social media campaign, it’s important to have a strategy for your resume. It’s important that you try to connect with the recruiters who will be reviewing your resume. You can do that by creating a message like you would when making an online marketing campaign. There are many issues to think about. Which keywords are the ones that your target employer will be searching for? What’s the best structure to spotlight your uniqueness as a digital marketer? What’s an idea design and layout to stress your message?

  1. Keep your target audience in mind

As when creating an online marketing campaign, it’s important to think about the people you want to reach. Many of the other logistical decisions you need to make about which words to choose, which social media outlets you should use, etc. fall into place once you’ve figured that out. You should take the same approach when writing a resume. Think about the time of company you’d really like to work for, whether it’s a big or small company, A small company might want to use social media to boost their sales, while a the marketing department of a huge nationwide corporation might focus on analytics. You should also consider whether the company is a traditional or contemporary type of company.

  1. Quantify your results as a digital marketer

It’s important to use your skills and knowledge of measuring/analyzing to effectively share your work experience. It’s highly advisable when including figures that you avoid rounding too many of them. The reason is that it will seem more realistic and precise. This is even true if it’s just a different of 1%, and depending on the type of figure you’re stating, that could be a large quantity.

  1. Be persuasive as if you were doing digital marketing

Like your work as a digital marketer, it’s important that you use your skills/knowledge about what prompts people to buy stuff. However this time you’ll basically be selling yourself instead of a particular product or service.

  1. Know what makes you a unique applicant

It’s important to share with the target audience what makes you a uniquely valuable candidate. Think about the fact that you have a unique mix of job skills, experiences, and characteristics that make you different from every other applicant for a particular job. When writing a resume it’s important to learn and keep that mix in mind. What makes you 100% different from all other digital marketers? It could be skills related to viral videos, search engines, content, or analytics.

This post was written by Tom Hannemann, an Australian professional resume writer with http://www.advance-yourself.com.au/.

Recommended UK SEO Companies

August 24, 2015 By: trafucomment

I’ve had a lot of questions in the last 2-3 weeks about what companies I recommend when it comes to digital marketing / SEO. As you should know by now I’m an affiliate search engine marketer and don’t have any reason to get back into client seo services. Saying this there is a lot of poor information on who to hire. So I’ll just give a quick shout out to who I recommend and more importantly WHY I recommend them.

The seo company is called HQ SEO Cardiff, I’ve worked with a few members in the past, such as Tom over at SEO Oasis, he’s a very good SEO. As well as the people behind HQ SEO who stay nameless for the most-part. The reason I like these guys so much is they will take on £300 / month local clients as well as the huge £5000+ global corporations and they can do this because they have a PROCESS in place to rank clients, it’s not all run around and hope for the best, which is unfortunately what you get with most SEO agencies.

Another reason I like them so much is they run case studies, such as the powerliftinggymcardiff.co.uk one they are currently running, a simple local case study targeted to ranking for Cardiff gym phrases (obviously.) The reason they run these is due to the sheer relevance of potential clients. If a gym client comes to them thinking, can we trust these guys… Well um they ranked a site, in a competitive area, on page 1, a brand new site (and its pretty bare too)….I’m pretty sure they could rank your gym….Or at least that’s the thought process.

Reason 3 and maybe the biggest one of all, is all their SEO proposals are based on potential ROI for a client! They even quote on the homepage that if they can’t make a 300%+ ROI for a client in 6 months they don’t take the business on. That’s a solid promise if ever I heard one. Not the cheapest company but in my opinion probably the best. Anyway that’s who I recommend, so if you’ve asked me and I’ve directed you to this post, this is why 🙂

HQ SEO Cardiff

Best Place to get an Local SEO Citation

August 18, 2015 By: trafucomment

LOCAL SEO: All you need to know

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO means to make the most out of a website to have a rank in an industry at a certain area. For example if a business only has a single location then that certain business will only want to have customers in the area where it is located. There is no point in nationally campaigning for your SEO because the highest possible return of investment would only be ranking high in locational keywords.

Local keywords have a general format which is “industry location” or to search for a local service in your area. An example of this format would be “real estate London”. There are different varieties for these keywords but since search volumes usually tend to be low for the local industries, getting the highest possible rank for this kind of keyword format is a primary target.

You need to be careful when you choose your keywords. In any SEO campaign, keyword research is among the important parts. Why? These keywords have the ability to make a campaign or break it even before it has begun. If you aim too high you might end up losing your money and investment. But if you aim too low, you might get no traffic even if you have managed to rank for all of your keywords since no one is searching for them.

Instead of aiming to rank with easy keywords, go for ones that will be most profitable for your industry and location. This will make a bigger ROI when you increase your rank. SEO has gone beyond being just a knowledge or time game. If you do not have any budget for your SEO campaign, then you will end up working a lot of hours trying to achieve the rankings that you want otherwise, you will not get any rank at all. Wisely calculate your ROI and create a money and time budget before you start campaigning.

Ranking Factors for Local SEO

  • Business signals refer to information that is typically in your website like type of business and location.
  • External location signals refer to name, address and phone number.
  • On-page signal refers to the text and code on the website.
  • Link signals are backlinks that point to your website and the relevance and quality of the sites they are from.
  • Review signals are important. The review that you get from the Google business page will determine a small part of the rankings.
  • Social signals are only a small percentage of the ranking, but it is still important to have accounts on social media sites.
  • Mob or Beh signals refer to the click through rate of the website that you have and its mobile optimization. Make sure that you have a site that is optimised for mobile use. It is also good to have titles and a description that can get one’s attention. If you do, people are more likely to choose your site over your competitors even if you are not listed as number one.
  • Search results that are personalised.
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Harry Ford is a digital marketing expert based in the UK. Over the past 10 years Harry has helped over 100 businesses develop online marketing strategies to help generate more sales and expand their locations. For more information on any marketing, business, investing or tech consultations visit the contact page.

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