The following may sound familiar.

My friend, Dr Buzz McHewan, one day came to me with an idea. I was more than a little sceptical, but four years later Buzz runs one of the world’s most successful X companies in the world….

Most likely the website you read this has an incredibly long home page, with plenty of bordered boxes, bonuses and highlighting. There’ll be lots of text, little by the way of information, and your mouse wheel will have a lot of scrolling before you finally find the price.

The other thing that these sites have in common are testimonials that decrease credibility:

Stupid #1: Who sends in a photograph with a testimonial?

Stupid #2: The testimonial looks a little over-optimised for the search engines.

Stupid #3: In the unlikely event that the testimonial is actually genuine, why anonymise it?

I’m a firm believer that a client saying something nice about our company carries more weight than anything I could possibly say. Which is why we sprinkle them throughout our website.

And I know testimonials work. Clients and companies we worked with in the past let us know whenever someone asks about our company. And we see how many of them sign up for our services.

Sometimes a potential customer just needs a little nudge to help them decide.

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An interesting infographic on GIZMODO reveals some interesting information.

1.4 billion internet users worldwide.
1.5 billion televisions worldwide.
4 billion mobile phones worldwide.

600 million IM users.
1.3 billion email users.
3.05 billion SMS users.

Top visited mobile website: Mocospace. (?)

Lots of fascinating facts to impress your co-workers at lunchtime. A handful of impossible to read colour combinations. And one mistake.

The size of the Mobile market

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On March 13th, YouTube are stopping support for older browsers.

The following browsers will be impacted by the change:

Any browser older than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0
Any browser older than Mozilla Firefox 3.0
Any browser older than Google Chrome 4.0
Any browser older than Safari 3.0+

Note that users of these browsers will still be able to watch YouTube videos, but some new features may not be supported.

Quiz time.

Question: What’s the only thing you do in YouTube?

(a) Watch videos
(b) Other

The bigger question: Will Google have the power to move these people to a new technology?

(a) No
(b) Probably not

The biggest question: How many people (1) use these old browsers (2) use YouTube and (3) know how to install a new web browser?

(a) Less than five
(b) Less than ten

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Question: How much time are your visitors spending on your website before leaving?

Answer: Probably a lot less than you realise.

The graphic below shows a typical trend for a product-based website, where the majority of the visitors leave within 10 seconds.

Even accounting for some random and off-target traffic, that should leave you less than happy.

In fact the graph clearly demonstrates what marketing people have been preaching for years. You have very little time to grab the attention of your website visitors.

Take a quick look at the following website home pages.

The key point is that a quick look is all that is required to instantly know what’s on offer.

mediaflex media solutions:

Clearleft:

SoftwarePromotions:

I know. It’s not to easy to communicate what you do in 3-4 seconds.

Those example sites are just lucky.

How does your website match up?

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Two weeks ago we ran a 45 minute webinar on 14 ways to cut your Google AdWords costs.

The feedback we received was fantastic, and some of the attendees (and people who missed the webinar) wanted to know if a recorded version of the webinar would be made available.

We listened. We re-recorded. And we put it on YouTube.

The result? 14 ways to cut your Google AdWords costs – and the whole thing will take up less than 20 minutes of your time.

I guarantee you’ll save money by watching it. Assuming you apply some of the techniques.

Beat The AdWords System: 14 ways to cut your Google AdWords costs

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Don’t you love Google diplomacy:

They manage to make it sound so nice, even though they’re really saying ‘get used to it – in a few weeks we’re forcing it on you’.

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AdWords Editor is used by many advertisers, mainly because it makes our lives easier.

But many users overlook a useful feature – the ability to add comments as reminders to themselves, or as explanations for other AdWords Editor users working on an account.

I personally make notes of dates that I add keywords, pause keywords, raise/lower keyword bids, add negative keywords, change match types on keywords or negative keywords, raise/lower ad group default max cpc’s, raise/lower budgets and more.

Realistically, AdWords is all about experimentation, and some changes you make will definitely have a negative impact. Comments are a quick and easy way of tracking your changes.

But be aware of the main limitations:

- comments on ad groups or campaigns without changes won’t be exported
- comments are plain text, so multiple users should indicate their comment with their initial
- comments are sometimes erased when updating AdWords Editor

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Have you ever seen this girl before?

She may look familiar to you. But you probably don’t remember where you’ve seen her.

And you probably don’t realise that she might be costing you a lot of money.

This girl’s image is on a massive number of websites which are part of the content network. The websites in question have one single purpose: to make money by displaying your Google AdWords ads.

Here is a tiny sample of some of the sites:

http://5starblogs.com/
http://bli-online.com/
http://bodyhtml.biz/
http://cyberclean.org/
http://sharez.biz/
http://superpaylink.com/
http://themp3world.com/
http://thisismydevsite.com/
http://unblocksites.biz/
http://www.pistle.com/
http://myonlinesupportgroup.com/

Most of the sites using this image are basically parked domains, and can therefore be quickly and easily excluded from your content network campaigns.

If you attended our recent webinar, where I showed you 14 ways to cut your AdWords costs in only 45 minutes, you’ll already know how to do this.

If you didn’t attend the webinar, we’re hoping to have the online version up by the end of this week.

Watch this space, and watch those Google AdWords settings.

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