Would love to help to figure out how to model life time value for mobile ad revenue for an app user.
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Jay’s Answer: For your case, it’s likely that your ad revenue is simply: retention time (in days) x ad views/day. To compute ad views/day, you’ll need to gather some statistics of actual use/engagement.
(Photo by Esparta Palma)
How can you get people to actually read your newsletters?
Step 1: Get past spam filters. With people ever-inundated with emails, it’s harder and harder to get your email to someone’s inbox. There are two hurdles: your content and your IP address. To ensure your newsletter’s content doesn’t look like spam, use some free online tools to validate your email’s content before sending (such as Spam Assassin, Is Not Spam, and Mail Tester). Spam filters also regularly identify certain IP addresses (the computer that’s sending the emails) as being likely spammers (with “low deliverability”). Many newsletter marketing services – often the free ones – suffer from IP address problems, because your wonderful newsletter may be sent from the same IP address as a spammer is using. To spam filters, you’re just like them. For additional fees, you can get a dedicated IP address to avoid any spam filter confusion.
Step 2: A great subject line. Since you want someone to read the email, you need a subject that’s not spammy and clearly of interest to your audience. A recent trick that improves open rates is to start your subject line with “Re:” to give the sense that your reader has already engaged in a dialogue with your company.
Step 3: Short and sweet. The goal of the newsletter itself is to get them to continue reading to the end. And that requires a deeper understanding of who your audience is and what they’re looking for from you. It should be something quickly read (easily digested) and leave them wanting more. A long newsletter often scares off people. A short email can be quickly scanned immediately. Great newsletters are beautiful to look at as well.
Step 4: Make the newsletter a gift. Don’t confuse a newsletter with a direct sales ad. It’s much more subtle than that – it’s about showing the reader that you understand their needs, so when they have a problem like you’re focusing on – they’ll contact you (or refer a friend to you). You build strength by connecting your newsletters to your website or video library – to keep them “in your world”.
A single newsletter is unlikely to suddenly make your reader sit up and take notice of your offering. Your goal is to get your name into their long-term memory, and that takes repetition and quality. Respect flows both ways.
I am setting up an online showcase aimed at small businesses and groups, individuals, entrepreneurs and professionals. The categories are creativity, fashion, services, specialty and wellness. I need copy for the ‘about’ page which refers to the convenience to the user of online browsing, exposure to new business etc without stating the obvious like saving time and money and the one stop shop concept.
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Jay’s Answer: What is the true benefit of what you’re offering to your audience? Why would they stay on your website for a while, investigating what you are showcasing? What makes your list of professionals better than other lists? How can the website visitor know that these people are perfect for their needs?
Don’t worry too much about the “About” page. Focus your efforts on the landing page. If that page doesn’t grab the reader, then they’re not going to read your About page.
We are providing monthly reports for our social media channels (FB, T, LI, YT). The reports are using the “internal” metrics each channel provides: Facebook Insights, YouTube Analytics; Twitter Analytics; etc. What are your recommendations for when exactly each month to gather the data, for the previous month, and why – the 1st of each month? 15th of each month? last day of the month? For example, If we want to gather data for the month of January, should we pull the data today Feb 1, or next week, or Feb 15, end of the month, etc.? Thank you.
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Jay’s Answer: Since your goal is to detect trends (a single data point for metrics isn’t as useful as your trends, so you can compare both against your baselines and others’), be consistent. First Monday of each month, for example.
My company is quasi governmental toll road company. Meaning that we have strong legislative ties and are constantly bombarded with negative media and customer complaints about paying their bill.
Everything that I have seen in webinars, company examples, and tips/tricks all focus on when the customer base generally likes the company. Since we have government ties we are put into the political realm where very opinionated people like to blast negative comments on everything and anything. In addition the comments rarely fall under the topic of the post, making it very difficult to post anything in fear of getting bombarded with “I don’t want to pay my bill”, “you’re stealing from me”, etc.
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Jay’s Answer: It sounds like it’s time for you to be proactive, since people aren’t actively sharing their love for your services. Can you identify people and/or organizations who truly benefit from your toll roads (and remember the way things “used to be”)? Can you figure out how much money/time people are saving using them, and have an animated clock on your website that keeps track of the savings minute-to-minute? When you get a negative post, how do you handle it – publicly or privately? Are the complaints warranted or just people griping?
So I recently broke into the Game Industry. Started working for a game developer that also has their online digital distribution store (pretty much like Valve with their Steam, but of course on a much smaller scale). In fact, there are 2 of them: one for a specific region, and one is worldwide. Incidentally, the first one is the one
bringing in most income (the 2nd site has a much more limited games choice). Within the company I’ve been working mostly on their websites and also in tech support.
So yesterday I was offered a great opportunity – to take over the online digital distribution store that is focused on worldwide audience. Needless to say, I could not pass on that opportunity and took the job. However…
I have never run anything of such scale before. I always wanted to, but never got the chance. So now here is my chance, opportunities are potentially endless, but I have no idea what to do. I have done some online marketing and promotions before, but nothing like that. For example, I have never signed a contract with a
publisher or developer to sell their games in my store.
I need to come up with a structured plan for myself on how I am going to develop this project. There seems to be overwhelmingly many things to do, and I have no idea what to start with, and from what side to approach it, so to speak. What research do I need to do first?
So my main questions is: what steps do I need to take first? Second? Third? What sources can I read about running a digital distribution website?
I understand that this is a great challenge for me, but also a great opportunity. And I am more than willing to make it work and eventually be a big part of the gaming industry. I hope you can give me some advice and show me the direction I need to go from this point on.
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Jay’s Answer: If I were in your shoes, I’d start by gathering analytics about your website (visitors, language, search terms, pages visited). That’ll give you a baseline to be able to judge the results of your actions.
Next, I’d ask a lot of questions of your management team: what are their goals, their expectations, resources they’re willing to commit, and how they think they would achieve these goals. The point here is to ask, listen, and learn.
After I gathered all this data, I’d send a summary of what they said. The goal now is to ensure they’re consistent with what they say and how they react to the “big picture”. I wouldn’t yet commit to these goals – the point is to document the conversation to understand the internal needs.
Next, I’d try to reverse engineer how my competition does their marketing. What is their traffic, their pricing model, their SEO data, etc. The goal of this is to begin to start a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) – so you can leapfrog the competition’s efforts (or borrow some great ideas from someone who’s not a direct competitor).
If I was planning on courting developers to sell their products on your site, then I’d start talking to them about their needs and also learn about your competition through their eyes. By doing these informational interviews (you’re not promising anything – you’re again asking questions and learning) you’ll build some strong allies with a vested interest in how you proceed.
After this, I’d have a good idea of what management wants and how best to proceed. I’d start slowly, measuring the results of my actions (compared to the baseline analytics).
I have recently started a forum MD – Modern Dignity Forums and am stuck in marketing it. could you give me ideas on what to do to get more visitors and high traffic?
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Jay’s Answer: It all starts by knowing specifically who would be interested in your forum. Where are they located? What are they interested in? What information/knowledge can only be found on the forum? How are you better/different from your competitors? What’s the “culture” of the site like – why is it a fun/good place to spend time?
If you’re trying to monetize traffic, then your best bet isn’t to try to get a lot of 1-time visitors. Your best bet is to ensure you have a site that encourages people to return, and invite their networks. This isn’t a short-term quick strategy – it’s a long-term key to having your business/site flourish.
Our site is www.starbinaryoptions.com. We want to put a web form in it to help our clients subscribe to us with their e-mails and want to have an opinion about where to put the web form to reach highest level of exposure and subscription. In site, star binary options. Guidance materials for building strategy is offered to clients and also trading platforms to do business with.
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Jay’s Answer: The key question to consider is: “Will a person stumbling onto your site, quickly understand what you’re selling, and be interested enough in it to give you their contact information?” My suggestion: focus on improving your home page’s content/presentation first, showcase your successes (and those that you’ve taught), and then put the signup form after you’ve presented this key information (or in a side column). If you’re unsure, do an A/B split test to ensure you’ve got the best placement based on traffic/signups.
We are in the process of starting an online advertising agency that will develop/create our own ads. We would also like to hire a sales team to approach the advertisers and publishers for our ads. How do we approach the advertisers, and how much do we charge? We are contemplating on designing the ads for free. Just not sure on how to charge these Fortune 500 + companies. As well how or who pays the publishers for their “cut?”
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Jay’s Answer: You need to prove whatever value you offer, and the best way to do this is find a client (ideally, multiple clients) and create a white paper on the effectiveness of your advertising. With some data, you can start to make a good case to enlist new clients, and figure what it would be worth to them.
If company ranks well for a brand called “paper jewellry” and at the same time ranks first in organic search for the same keyword, What will be the best PPC strategy to use and why?
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Jay’s Answer: I’d start by asking “are prospective customers actively searching for those keywords?” Next, before investing in PPC, I’d ask “what % of the traffic I’m getting organically is converting to sales?” If you’re already getting good traffic that’s converting, then PPC will only improve your results. If you’re not getting conversions, then focus on your website first. If you’re not getting traffic, then your keyword ranking aren’t valuable, and you need to focus on related things that people are searching for.