0 Multiply to Shut Down All Operations at The End of May 2013

Trending now from various blogs and readers is the full shutdown of Multiply effective 31 May 2013, following a series of shutdown of its service operations in 2013,

Multiply merchants mostly located in South East Asian countries should have received an email that the site will be online till 6 of May and will discontinue operations on 31 May.  Other merchants are yet to confirm. 

Reports say that Multiply’s country managers in the Philippines and Indonesia have been contacted and updates will be posted once confirmed.  Below is the letter sent out to merchants today:

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Dear Multiply Merchant,

We regret to inform you that Multiply will be closing the marketplace on May 6, 2013 and discontinuing all business operations by May 31, 2013.

Multiply will maintain normal site operations through May 6th and will wind things down through to the end of the month. We will use the rest of May to make sure that all accounts are settled and that you receive all funds you earned on the platform. We hope this provides you time needed to identify and migrate to alternative ecommerce platforms, settle all payments on items bought and delivered, and try to minimize disruption to your business.

In order to ensure that all your earnings are disbursed to you in full prior to May 31, we will cut off buying activity on May 6, 2013. This will ensure that all orders have sufficient time to be completed and delivered to your customers before the end of the month.

If you have a Trust Badge, please contact our customer support team and we will ensure that you receive a pro-rated refund for the remaining time on your subscription.

If my team can be of any assistance to you during this transition, we will do our best to help.

0 3 Things Your SEO Company Won’t (Openly) Tell You

Great sales professionals never lie.  They however highlight truths that favour the product they are selling.  They use this to infect their subjects with enthusiasm on their product and get the sales quotas they want. 

The case is true with “SEO Companies” telling you that they will put your website on Google page 1, let alone, in the top listings of search engines, and this in turn would drive traffic to your websites, and more traffic would definitely mean more sales.  This is true in a certain point of view.  But if I were to use this analogy in “optimising” your personal profile for dating sites, this would say: “Your profile will be seen on the first 10 views on dating sites, therefore you would be highly visible and would soon find the love of your life.”   It’s funny how it does not take into consideration your looks, your profile, your views, your beliefs, your compatibility factor, etc.  I’m sure you know where this argument is going so let me stop by ramble and go straight to the point.

For purposes of experimentation, I have revised a separate Linkedin profile (see screenshot) so that it will rank on a fairly competitive keyword on Google Australia.  I did no optimisation on the content of the keyword rather than those which will assist in organically ranking in Google AU search.  As expected, I ranked number 1 on some targeted keywords in 2 weeks.  While my content is clear, and my proposition is concise, I received no real leads, only hundreds of emails from offshore offering their outsourced services to me.  In short, Good SEO did not work based on this specific case.  This brings me to three things that this page lacks before it can potentially generate REAL leads.  And these things are not openly discussed on every SEO pitch given to you.  These are the “other” factors most SEO companies won’t highlight for you:

1. Good SEO does not guarantee Good Traffic

Good SEO guarantees traffic.  But search terms and keywords are tied to specific customer intent and this need to be thoroughly analysed in order to attract the kind of customers you want.  In this case, people who are searching for my target keywords aren’t actually my customers.  They are outsourcers and even competitors wanting to analyse my case study.  Does your SEO work and Google Analytics give you the traffic you want, but you somehow have no increase on your sales leads?  You need to ask your SEO (or yourself) if they keywords you have been spending time and money doing are actually the ones your customers use to search for you.  You might need to survey or interview a customer to do this.  There is no exact science in doing this, but you have to think through the mind of your customer.

2. Good Traffic does not guarantee Good Conversions

Let’s say you have gone past #1, and are driving the right customers to your site.  Are you properly engaging them to convert?  Do you have a unique selling proposition that your customers cannot resist?   How is your bounce rate?  Do you have funnel data on your Google Analytics which helps you see customer online behaviour?  You might be missing out on a lot.

3. Good Conversions does not guarantee Good Leads

Conversions are usually classified as an online purchase or an online lead.  Online purchases are easy.  But not all websites are online stores.  Online leads need over and above services as well as good and reputable brands to guarantee conversions.  While traffic and conversions are the job of digital marketing companies, they can only bring the right people to your doorstep.  How you build your brand and how you provide your customers service is up to you. 

0 What are Google Enhanced Campaigns? What’s in It for You as a Digital Marketer?

Google Enhanced Campaigns

Australian digital search marketing professionals should see something different in Google Adwords this week. When you go to your campaign dashboard, you will see an “Enhanced” column beside your campaign status.  Your campaigns would generally default to “Legacy” until you change your settings.  Enhanced campaigns is a new feature from Adwords launched in Australia this month, Feb 2013.  This coincidentally comes right after winning a case with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).  The ACCC has previously argued that some settings in the Google Adwords Platform were misleading to customers because they seem to present commercial links to companies that are not related.  Google denies the launch of enhanced campaigns has anything to do with the timing of the win against ACCC.

Before we go off topic, Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns are a new way of connecting (or separating) your Google ads across various platforms (desktop, mobile, tablet).  Since the original Google Advertising platform was catered for the desktop, these new settings enable ads to display seamlessly across all platforms.

What’s in It for Digital Marketers?

We actually don’t know yet. It has just appeared in some of my clients Google Adwords campaign overview platform.  We have mixed reviews so far.  Digital marketing professionals argue that while this is a good platform to target all audiences, and it presents new features for digital advertisers wanting to target mobile audiences, it automates everything and takes off advanced bidding options as well as other features, such as creating mobile-only campaigns.  Because the ad control is limited, enterprise digital marketers like myself lose the ability to change online advertising settings to maximise spend.  This may be a subtle way to increase costs per click, increase Google profit, but increase our clients budgets as well.

What do I Recommend that You Do?

I would not change anything (yet) on my ads.  Since this will become compulsory by mid 2013, I will have enough time to observe how it plays out, gather case studies, and make my own recommendations.  So stay tuned for more as I document my experiments.

0 5 Steps to Check if Your SEO is Bringing ROI

As a follow up to my previous post that says; SEO without User Analysis & Design is Nothing, I would like to share 5 simple steps on how to check and identify if those thousands of dollars you are spending to bring your webpage to the first 3 lists of Google is worth it.  This article is intended for business owners hiring SEO companies and may be basic for your regular digital marketer.  These steps however are the "stuff" your SEO company usually doesn't explain to you.  

You would need to login to Google Webmaster tools.  Chances are, your SEO consultant has already installed one for you, and you just need to acquire access to it.  If not, you would have to require your SEO company that they do this because this is pretty foundational for their job.  Simply go to: http://www.google.com.au/webmasters and follow the prompt.

Assuming that you have obtained access to Google webmaster tools, simply follow this 5 steps:

1) Login to Webmaster Tools
2) Click on: Traffic (left hand side)
3) Click on: Search Queries
4) Set the date to the first day your SEO Comapany started working on your site
5) Plot the clicks vs Impressions (number of times your website appeared on Google)

Here are some questions you may want to ask yourself when you see this data
1) Does my website obtain a considerable amount of click based on its current exposure?
2) Is the customer clicking on the right keywords to get to my website?
3) If I am getting a fair amount of click, do I get the same amount of sales?

Getting this data should give you an idea if you are to continue with your current SEO services or not.



Looking to brainstorm your digital strategy? Contact me on this website or view my professional credentials here:

0 Capture All Audiences AGAIN with Google Adwords Remarketing

In the game of search engine marketing, it's a given that you will lose your audiences as they click towards a conversion, weather it's a buy, or a lead. But what if you can capture all your audiences, and run your ads with just those who have shown interest in your website?  I think the Google Adwords remarketing with be of great help to you.

1) Reach your captured audiences multiple times - One of the primary goals of every search engine marketer is to promote customer engagement, that compliments website traffic. A lot of products require customers to take time to make a decision. Purchasing a land, or shares in stock market is a lot different than purchasing a new shoe. Your audiences may find your website and your brand interesting, but they are not yet ready to make a decision at the moment, so they will choose to click away and research other options. If you can reach your captured audiences multiple times using remarketing, then your brand should be right in front of your customers as when their time to decide has come.

2) Create custom list combinations to reach specific customers - Your brands should always have sub-categories in terms of your target market. Shoes will always be divided into mens or womens, sizes, runners, walkers, or drivers, etc. Adwords remarketing helps you advertise the right ads (and preferably the right landing pages) to people wanting the brands that they specifically are looking for.

 3) Supplement other technologies such as that of contextual targeting, frequency capping, and create ads with cutting edge precision - If a you have properly targeted a customer who has looked at one of your products: ladies runners, size 8, and she continually sees your brand across the Google display network, and furthermore sees various messages such as: "sale on today", "stocks limited", etc, then what are the chances that she would make a purchse today?

To learn more about Google Adwords remarketing go to:

Google Adwords Remarketing Link

To watch these instructions on video go to:

Link to Video

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0 SEO Without UX Design & Analysis is Nothing

People who have done SEO or have worked for an SEO company will always say that if they are to analyse customer complaints (every company should have one), the one that stands out all the time will be the following:
"You promised me that if I rank well in Google, my customer base will expand dramatically....
We I haven't had any increase of sales since I hired you...
What am I paying your SEO for?"

You see the premise that shady SEO companies will tell you: "Rank on Page 1, and multiply your customers!" is an outright fallacy.  This statement is just like "Be the first guy to be seen by all women in dating sites, and get all the women instantly." or it can be something like: "Ill bring 100 customers to your store this morning and I guarantee you that your sales will increase 100%"

Bringing traffic to your store or brand doesn't guarantee you instant sales and leads.  It's a whole different science to convert these customers as potential buyers.

Through website user experience design and analysis, we are able to define the overall experience, in general or specifics, a user, customer, or audience member has with a product, service, or event.

Below are 5 crucial questions you should ask your SEO consultant to determine if they are capable of delivering their promise:

1) What is the general demographic of my customers?  What devices are they using? (browsers? mobile? tablet? PC? etc)
2)  Based on the Analytics Data of my website (if your SEO consultant ever bothered to install one), what can my website goals and funnels say about my customer workflow and information architechture?
3) In which part of the conversion process do customers bounce, or become idle?  What can be done to remedy this
4) Have you installed a click heatmap to analyse where audiences click on my webpage?
5) What are my website competitors doing that I am not?

Your SEO consultant's answer to these questions will definitely determine if they are real or frauds, if they are heavyweights, or lightweights.
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Looking to brainstorm your digital strategy? Contact me on this website or view my professional credentials here:

0 Social Media Management Tool

Most brands invest a huge chunk of their budget to do this thing they called "Social Listening".  

Top brands such as Telstra, Vodaphone, and Virgin Airlines would go out of their way to employ teams to create software that alerts them about what people say about their brands.  They employ another team to monitor and check what is happening in the social media sphere.

While there is nothing wrong about these "social media investments" there is a much simpler and much more cost effective way of accomplishing this task usually hidden under the brand managers noses.  It's called Google Custom Search. 

As they say; Americans have spent millions creating a pen that writes in zero gravity to be used in space missions.  The Russians took the easier route.  They used a pencil in space. :)

I took the liberty of creating this Social Media Mentions tool in this post.  Simply type your social media user name in the search bar below and you will find recent posts and mentions in top social media channels about your search.