marketing tools

DataFeed Import the easy way

Marketing Fan — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:14:44 +0200

Last week Stefan Everaet, the owner of Niche Content Packages (a top quality PLR content provider), released a new site building tool called DataFeedR which promises the painless creation

of datafeed driven sites based on Wordpress.

Well – thin affiliates sites – (as Matt Cutts calles them), driven from a database that was replicated 1000s of times over the whole web were killed years ago by Google’s duplicate content filter – back in 2005 or so. The idea of DataFeedR is bascially the same – import a generally available database into your wordpress, and manage it from there… but…

DataFeed Sites a’la 2008

The improved concept of filling up Google’s index with product descriptions and images from big vendors here is the augmentation with content written by yourself, your writer or maybe your users (i.e. blog comments). Of course the fine line between success and failure here is HOW you do that job… imported the datafeed and leaving it as is would probably be just a waste of money…

DataFeed Pre Processing

One major feature of DataFeedR is the possibility of creating a selective mix of products from multiple merchants and even affiliate networks (big ones like CJ, LinkShare and ShareAsale are supported). One word on the datafeeds: it IS required that a datafeed is PRE-processed by DataFeedR before you can actually blend and download it for you own use. That means whenever you come across some niche, you have to tell Stefan first. This means two things – first they check if that feed is really (technically and semantically) usable. This might take some time, but in the end you save some work for yourself. But second this means that you expose this feed to other users, and if that is very narrow niche that you just discovered or want to test with, that might be something you do not want to do.

But at least you get Stefan to sort our and clean up the merchant’s datafeed mess for you and provide you a quality download. And judging from the quality of his content packages those feeds must be killer quality.

And on the other hand, assuming that you have some funky programmer’s inhouse, you could still builld your own converter tools for feeding into this plugin and then use it “only” as a data management tool and forget about Stefan’s feed processing service at DataFeedR.

I mailed Stefan about the selection of merchants supported currently and got confirmed that not all CJ and Shareasale and Linkshare merchants are yet available but several times a week they add more merchants to Datafeedr. As Commission Junction (CJ) has around 1000 merchants with datafeeds at this moment they focus only on those with good network earnings (EPC) and which are already several years in the network (and this is another pre-processing work done for you).

Unfortunately there is no converter tool available to use datafeeds other than the ones included in Datafeedr. But if you want specific merchants just let Stefan as mentioned above. I guess a full documentation of the DataFeedR import format is the missing link we need here and will ask Stefan about it.

Merchant’s supported so far

Stefan made some quick screenshots of merchants supported currently here and here and here

DataFeedR’s price

The price tag of $97 monthly recurring for DataFeedR is not cheap.

In fact it’s a pretty hefty price for a word press plugin.

But what you get for this is a rock-solid data feed management solution with attached data pre-processing services I’ve yet to find. And it supports Wordpress 2.2-2.3 AS WELL AS the new 2.5.x

Other features

Support Forum – the young forum is there – it’s up to Stefan and his team how he lives up to our expectations

Update only parts of products – obviously you need to rewrite and optimize the product descriptions, so when you update your product list, the following values are updated with new product information: Affiliate Link (URL to the network), Price, Image URL, Thumbnail URL – This means that when you have changed product descriptions and product names these changes will NOT be overwritten by uploading a new datafeed version. But you can customize that behavious as explained in the forum

Embed products within your blog posts – you can add multiple products to your WordPress Posts or Pages – check this out

I’ll keep you posted about DataFeedR and comparable products (which all seem to suck compared to DataFeedR) and my experiences with them. Some impressive features that are announced to be here soon are

Meanwhile you can go check it out yourself

SpeedPPC - PPC campaign setup automation tool

Marketing Fan — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:53:03 +0200

So I came across the new tool SpeedPPC which promises roughly 72,000 % speedup in setting up campaings on Adwords & MSN ... well – sounds too good to be true, or?

What it does offer:

permutations of keywords (like all 50k+ cities) thru your keywords, ads and landingpages
generation of proper ad groups (Google Adwords only allows 2000 lines per group, so if you are bidding broad,exact,phrase that means no more than 666 REAL keywords)
a datafeed script that allows you to populate your landing pages with product info from merchants (good if you are to promote video recorders or other retail productc)

Thereby a close to perfect match between

Keyword >>> Ad Text >>> Landing Page

which in turn means a good CTR (click thru rate) to your ads and (jopefully) a better QS (quality score) on Google Adwords (GAW).

SpeedPPC also allows tracking on the keyword/ad/landing page level…

What it also promised is to lifts conversion rates by dynamically changing the landing pages based on the original search keywords used. That means injecting the keywords into the landing page – which isn’t new or hard to do at all. but still.

For roughly $ 500 this tool is not cheap.

For $ 500 you can buy nice things, but keeping in mind that this is a one-time investment (compared to subscription based tools) this new SpeedPPC could offer a nice all-in-one-solution for stomping out full “long tail campaigns” and this would be perfect for things like bidding on “lawyer in ~~city~~“ ...

I read, that SpeedPPC has a promotion for $497, which implies that they want to raise the price, so maybe today is a good day to buy that tool… give it a shot!

Update Feb’08 : I came across Efficient PPC today and it looks like it offers the same functionality minus datafeed integration as Speed PPC

why no YSM? because you need a gold account for importing files, that means you have to spend 500+$/mo

Conversion Rate Optimization

Marketing Fan — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:38:48 +0100

The importance of the target market

Ask any marketing student, and he will tell you that it is constantly drilled into them to always remember and have the target audience in mind. A product or service may be the best in the world but if it is not known to its target market much less the public then the quality that is being brought by that product or service would not matter. The most powerful force is the consumer and they should never be forgotten in any kind of plan in order for a business to be successful. Many businesses have closed shop not because they were selling an inferior product or service but because they have forgotten their market and have not been effective in bringing the company’s message out to the public.

This marketing tenet has permeated not only the traditional markets but also new markets and new media as well. The tenets of marketing apply to whichever market or sector that I have discovered that the tenets of marketing still apply to the internet. In fact, the internet is such a new form of media and practically a new frontier for businessmen and marketers that a number of new concepts and philosophies are being formed as a way of trying to put well established marketing beliefs and then apply it in innovative ways to new media.

The importance of conversion rate optimization

A good example of the use of marketing techniques in new media is the concept of conversion rate optimization. It is considered as an important tool in ensuring the success of a website. This new type of conversion rate optimization is now a well established service being offered by some top website content and design companies with the purpose of helping website owners make their websites more effective in drawing customers while also ensuring that customers’ experience in the website is also enhanced. Conversion rate optimization is both a science and an art that seeks to improve the online experience of a visitor who visits a website or sees a web based ad. The ultimate goal of this is to turn a website visitor into a customer.

What is conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization is borne out of the discovery that human behavior – particularly ones that would influence a sale or susceptibility to positively react to an ad campaign – is not at all consistent as it fluctuates at any given time or set of circumstances. Using statistics, studies are made on large population samples in order to determine particular patterns where none would usually exist. The resulting conversion rate optimization methods are then applied to a real time environment and the data collected as well as the messaging that is the product of it would serve to further increase the effectiveness of the online ad.

The foundation of conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization is actually rooted in actual mathematics and analytical thinking using various elements that include data collection and processing, optimization goals, rules in business, real time learning as well as decision making. Marketing a website is not as easy as it looks and that for any website owner or business owner it will always a good idea to improve the whole browsing experience of a visitor because it will ultimately be for the benefit of his business.

PHPSurveyor 1.08 notable new features

Marketing Fan — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:57:09 +0200

PHPSurveyor my favorite CAWI tool that I am using for 1,5 years now and wrote about here now got a new alpha version out with some nice features like

Completely overhauled interface icons.
Added answer limiting based on a previous question for array question types – wow – more dependency features!
Added drag’n‘drop re-ordering for groups and questions … yummy yummy – very handy
Lots of fixes for the spss export – oh well – expectedt those badly – export wasn’t always funny
Added page-by-page saving of the answers usability!
Changed the mailer class to PHPMailer which is alot more reliable and easier to configure. I remember when I had manually restart mailing just because the old version hit the max 100 mails per hour limit of my smtp server
Added Feature to save the referring URL. Kind Donator: Lawrence Weathers —- mmmh one could abuse this as a sort of affiliate tracking
Added random survey number generation to make guesses on the surveyid harder —- hmmm people want to hack into surveys once you can win something there I guess
Changed upgrade feature and added DB Versioning for easier updates to the DB in the future —- maintainability

Cool – I really feel asured for my selection for this tool last year and since found a lot of online surveys being done with that tool. I will also use that tool for my online community research survery that I’ll conduct with BIG portals of 35000+ members!

tech-note, they also got new requirement for minimum MySQL 4.1, PHP 4.1 and either gettext OR mbstring library installed.

But remember… this is an unstable alpha version. Do not use it for production purposes.

Ether: Sell Therapy, Counseling, Tax Advice, Computer Help, and More - Sell what you say

root — Tue, 23 May 2006 09:52:50 +0200

Ether is a new pay-per-phone service that allows bloggers and other experts in field to sell their phone-calls via a free phone number provided to clients.

Their claim:

Quote:

Get your free Ether Phone Number.

Set your rate. Set your hours.

This is an interesting approach with a tool that might spread like fire…

I just need to checkout if they offer options for Europe, either calling experts there or providing free numbers there…

Meta Article Submission tool

Marketing Fan — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 13:32:13 +0100

Articlesender is a quite powerful meta-article submission engine, that allows you to submit your articles to a huge list of sources and sites

Their claim "Article Submission is the Key to Targeted Visitors" underlines the marketing perspective they are powering with their service.

The idea is very similar to pre sell pages as they want to create real human traffic and inbound links by good quality content that is good for the users, not the search engines.

Article submission has advanced to the more sophistiacted marketing methods, just like pushing out press releases... in fact a whole "article syndication site" world has been established in the last months, just for the purpose to host all that content.

I wonder when Google, yahoo and co will see these "article sites" as "low-quality" sites compared to huge news networks ... and maybe even go to the lengths to call them "web spam attacks" ...

Open Source Survey Tools

Marketing Fan — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 01:19:57 +0100

performing online surveys are important instruments for gathering your clients opinion, demographical data and in general learn more about your audience...

I found the following open source solutions for later evaluation:

PHPSurveyor

Unlimited number of surveys at the same time
Creation of a printable survey version
Unlimited number of question groups in a survey
20 different question types with more to come
Ability to set conditions for questions depending on earlier answers (branching the survey)
Re-usable editable answer sets
Ready-made importable questions
Assessment surveys
Unlimited number of participants to a survey
Anonymous or open surveys as well as closed surveys
Optional public registration for surveys
Sending of invitations, reminders and tokens by email
Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time
Cookie or session based surveys
Back-office data entry possibility
Survey start & end-dates for automation
import and export functions to text, CSV and MS Excel format
Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility
more than 15 different languages

phpESP

ModSurvey xml based survey configuration

Open Survey Pilot another nice solution for survey creation, altough these have less diffent question types and a bit more instable look/feel than PhpSurveyor... the german main page is here