Zap Bang Done Blog

5 Reasons Why Your Company Needs an iPhone App

You’ve heard the news and you’ve read the reviews… the iPhone is a huge success and iPhone apps are super popular among a very important demographic – early adopters.

Apple has reported that users have downloaded iPhone apps over a half a billion times in the first year iTunes opened the App Store. The market is growing tremendously with smart phones being compared to the laptop computer boom.

So, how does your company reach these influential movers and shakers? Consider making an iPhone app to promote your business. It’s inexpensive and very effective.

Here are five key benefits:

     1. Expand your company’s exposure to influential consumers.
     2. Set your company apart from the competition.
     3. Give your customers added value.
     4. Keep your customers up to date month after month.
     5. Increase sales!

Be an early adopter yourself. Join the growing number of companies that have discovered the power of marketing their company through the development of an iPhone application. Top companies including Amazon, Target, Starbucks, Zippo, REI and many more are doing it. With an iPhone app, your company can be seen as a cutting edge pioneer.

How do you do it?

Talk to people in your company that have iPhones and visit iTunes app store on your computer (even PC’s can get iTunes at iTunes.com). With a little bit of brainstorming you can come up with some great ideas. Now, look at what your company has to offer and make an iPhone app that represents your company.

Here’s the formula…

Create something that is both useful and entertaining based on what your company does best. Hire a company to create the app. Then, give it away for free so you can get thousands of influential people using your app and seeing your company name.

You can have webpages, rss feeds, videos and even an info screen in the app that tells all about your company and you can even offer special promotions from within the app.

How do you get thousands of users?

That’s the easy part. Once an app is submitted to iTunes, Apple does the promotion for you simply by including it in the App Store. Users will see it in the store and get to immediately download it for free.

Now, as you probably know, you shouldn’t stop there. Send out a press release and promote it on your website. Free is easy to buy. If the iPhone users like your “free” app, it will spread like wildfire.

Where can I get the app produced?

Zap Bang Done makes iPhone apps. We can make one for you if you can dream it up. Give us a call at 1-800-713-2891 or check out our website at http://www.zapbangdone.com/iphone-dev.php

Tags: create iphone applications, iphone, iphone app, iphone app development, iphone application, iphone application development, iphone applications, iphone apps, make iphone applications, make iphone apps

Marketing Your Products Using Online Marketplaces

Comparison Shopping Sites and Online Marketplaces offer a tremendous opportunity for retailers of almost any product.

 It started as a novel idea in the late 90s and soon became one of the fastest-growing web technologies. Comparison shopping engines and online marketplaces made the online shopper’s life easier by providing up to the minute information which includes streaming price data that would normally take the internet user long hours of browsing to collect manually. Concurrently, entrepreneurs spotted an opportunity in this new application of E-commerce and it was not long before cyberspace saw a new major player enter every month or so.

Online marketplaces and comparison shopping engines constitute an important part of today’s E-commerce world.  To help you understand this technology, and profit from it, we made this quick tutorial.

What is a Comparison Shopping Engine?

In the most basic form, comparison shopping sites and online marketplaces collect product information including price data from a collection of merchants and then display it to online shoppers. The biggest advantage of this service from the perspective of the web surfer is the variety and the ability to purchase products at the lowest prices available.

From the merchant’s perspective, they gain more exposure and therefore, market share. From the service owners perspective are compensated for the service by charging the merchant a fee every time a user clicks on the listings and/or every time a sale is made.

What is an Online Marketplace?

As the name implies, an online marketplace is a large collection of products from multiple merchants usually arranged in categories. The concept is relatively simple but due to the web’s ability to hold massive amounts of information it gives customers access to many more products than they could find in an offline brick and mortar store.

Merchants generally pay a monthly fee for listings and/or a fee per sale or by the click. Some sites will charge a monthly inclusion fee plus a per product listing fee but most do not generally include additional fees. Of course, each site has their own method.

What are the Advantages?

Listing your products in comparison shopping portals and online marketplaces can expose your products to millions of consumers in a short period of time. A summary of the most important benefit are listed below:

• Create A New Sales Channel.
• Gain Product Exposure and Visibility.
• Strengthen Brand Awareness.
• Drive Targeted Traffic.
• Improve Conversion Ratio.

Whether you have a unique product or one that is a commodity, online marketplaces allow you to test and research how your particular product and your sales efforts compare to others. Many people think that low price is king but you may find that higher prices give customers confidence in the product’s quality and in your company. If your product is going to sell, this is the environment to test it in.

How Marketplaces and Comparison Shopping Engines Work?

It is not difficult to participate in this new sales channel. You may want to choose one and test there before moving on. Of course, this is optional.

Below are the three main ways that you will be charged.

• Cost Per Click (CPC): Whenever a user clicks on your listed product, you will be charged the agreed upon rate per click. This is a good model for most merchants since it guarantees traffic to your site which should produce sales. Even if it does not produce sales, it is sending traffic to your site where you can then gather data and find out why visitors are, or are not, converting to customers.

• Cost Per Action (CPA): Every time a shopper makes a purchase at your e-store, you will be charged a predefined percentage of the order amount. The advantage of this method is obvious. No sales, no cost. You only pay for success.

It’s worth mentioning that there are also sites that offer their services for free. Many employ crawlers like the ones used by search engines to collect the product data. Others require manual products submission or data feeds.

How to Get Started?

To get in to the marketplaces and comparative sites all you have to do is join and put down a nominal deposit. This is usually between $25 and $100. Then you need to add your products. This will be very similar to adding your products to your estore. Each marketplace has an interface to load products one by one and almost all of them will let you upload using a data feed.

A data feed is simply a spreadsheet file. They will have specific extensions like txt, xml, csv…etc. These files contain product information that includes product descriptions, pricing, sizes and other important product attributes. The data feed file takes the burden of manually adding and updating each product off your shoulder as it provides an automatic solution not only for listing many products at once but also for updating and editing products efficiently.

If you do not know how to create a data feed of your products, you can give Zap Bang Done a call (800-713-2891) and we can create a data feed feature for your site that will allow you to download files at any time. We can even set up auto updating of your files with most marketplaces.

How to Choose a Marketplace?

Choosing the right marketplace for your business can be a headache given the large number of choices available. There are two marketplaces that we have used often and know to be good sales channels and a great beginning for any merchant.

Founded in 1996, Shopzilla is the leading comparison shopping service. The company’s mission is to enable shoppers to easily find and compare products sold by virtually anyone, anywhere. Each month, Shopzilla connects millions of consumers with many thousands of stores. Back in June 2006, Shopzilla attracted over 18.9 million unique visitors according to ComScore. Shopzilla also operates BizRate. A consumer feedback network that collects millions of consumer reviews on stores and products.

NexTag - the leading comparison shopping site for products, automobiles, real estate, education and more. At the core of NexTag are proprietary technologies and algorithms that enable shoppers to quickly compare many prices and to find the best deals on millions of products and services. For thousands of merchants, service providers and individuals, NexTag is an extremely efficient sales channel with highly qualified traffic and a performance based pricing. More than 17 million people per month use NexTag.

Niche Market Marketplaces

You will also be able to find certain marketplaces with your niche market in most cases. Etsy is a great example. It is a marketplace for hand-made items only.

• Etsy is an online marketplace for buying & selling all things handmade. Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.

How to Save Money in Your Campaigns?  

Many of the marketplaces are CPC based. These CPC-based campaigns can put a strain on your budget if not handled right. Here are few tips that will help you manage your budget and simultaneously get the best results in terms of conversion rate and exposure.

• Keep an eye on your products: Monitor the performance of your listed products closely and don’t hesitate to de-list poor performing, inactive or out of stock products. Taking this action will safeguard your budget wasted money on clicks that do not convert.

• Pick the categories carefully: Take your time to review the categories available before including your products within. Try to follow the logic of customers when searching for products online.

• Update your data feeds: Keep your data feed files updated on a daily or weekly basis. Following this advice will increase the conversion rate as shoppers will be informed of the latest promotions as soon as they are unveiled.

• Check your listed products: Wear the hat of your customer and go through the marketplaces clicking randomly on your products. This will show you whether your images show or not and the links are working and leading to your website or not. Doing so will help you discover problems and fix them before they drain your budget needlessly.

• Consider the move to dynamic data feeds: it may sound counterintuitive to suggest migrating to dynamic data feed system given the high cost associated with this move. But I am confident that you will appreciate the decision once the results are out. The system reduces the time required to manage your listings and provides you with a much easier way to update your files. A time and money saver solution in the long term.

• Use Google Analytics: This is a must if you intend to make much money online with or without marketplaces. It’s free and can give you a lot of invaluable information. We have a full newsletter about Google Analytics in a future newsletter. http://www.google.com/analytics/

SUMMARY

Marketplaces are one of the few marketing efforts that can show you an immediate response. You can sign up today and see sales tomorrow in many of the marketplaces.

Take your time and test, then test again until you have a good program working. Then duplicate it to as many marketplaces as you can. You will be able to make your products available to millions of consumers this way. We hope you make millions doing it!

For a full and free list of marketplaces, Click Here. You will be able to download a zip file that contains an excel file listing over 50 active marketplaces.

Tags: marketing, marketplaces, Zap Bang Done

Social bookmarking allows people to share their favorite sites and see what other people think about them. If you’re searching a topic, a social bookmarking site will show you top rated links with comments about why other people liked them. It makes the sites more relevant than a simple Google search.

As you have probably guessed, this can have a strong impact on the traffic of favorite sites. And, you are probably wondering how you can get your site involved and highly rated to partake in this very focused and relevant traffic. Read on…

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is no different from the old practice of saving your favorite web pages to your computer except for the fact that in the new method you make your list of favorite websites public. That’s it. social bookmarking is just a public list of people’s favorite websites.

How to Get Started?

It’s straightforward. All that you need to do is to register with a social bookmarking website (more on this point later) and then you can start storing bookmarks, adding descriptive tags and deciding whether to share your bookmarks with every one or to keep them accessible exclusively for a limited number of people. Web surfers can perform searches based on keywords (or tags), username or popularity, and they can also access other people’s public lists to find what other people have found while searching the same thing they are searching.

How does it Work?

Social bookmarking works in a similar way to libraries in the way that they classify and categorize information. Social bookmarking websites utilize user-created “tags” to organize resources whereas libraries classify books by using proper systems for easy retrieval and archiving. The shortcoming of this classification method lies in the informal tagging performed by users. This is also the strength since tags are basically keywords that you, as the user, assign.

Why is Social Bookmarking Important?

Besides the above mentioned advantages of sharing resources and finding valuable source materials, social bookmarking wears many other hats. For instance, it has been employed in SEO strategies as a way to increase the traffic to websites by building backlinks. It’s also been intertwined with other social media tools. One immediate and important upside is the creation of online communities of like-minded users who share the same perspectives on information and resources. For example, you might tag a web page which displays some video with keywords like “Funny” and “Hilarious”, others may think to the contrary and decide to assign the words “Terrible” and “Lame” to the same video. It’s this democratic approach that makes the sites valuable and interesting.

How to Choose a Social Bookmarking Service?

When Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us) started in 2003, the concept of tagging was novel. Since then, the number of social bookmarking websites grew exponentially and as of today there is a multitude of them to choose from. It’s becoming harder and harder to pick the right service that serve your needs as they all promise the same features. We took charge of analyzing the most popular choices in the world of social bookmarking to give you an overview of the services available. As you will see from the lists linked below, there are quite a few. So, buckle up because we are going for a ride.

Delicious is considered to be the pioneer of the new generation of social bookmarking. It was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005 and afterwards it enjoyed a huge success. It’s the ease of use and simplified design that contributed to its popularity. Delicious uses “tags” to organize the content and features a popular bookmarks and tags list on the homepage. It just takes you one minute to enjoy all these features as the signing up process is pretty simple.

Digg is a revolutionary service that makes use of voting and commenting by users to surface the most-interesting news stories or videos. Digg utilizes a simplified categorization system to file the Dugg pages for easy retrieval afterwards. The website also has many facets which correspond to social networking websites such as creating profiles, adding/deleting friends. This networking touch is definitely a plus as it helps in building a large and active community.

StumbleUpon is best described as a discovery and recommendation engine. The term may sound a little bit obscure but that’s the best way to put it in words as it offers its users a new and rich browsing experience. StumbleUpon toolbar is your gateway to this new web adventure; it can be installed on different web browser like IE and FireFox. The most brilliant feature about it, in my opinion, is the high quality search engine integrated with the tool. The search engine crawls StumbleUpon’s database to provide you with the results of long hours work performed by other users.

Furl is an acronym for (File Uniform Resource Locator). It works in the same way as the above mentioned tools but it has one unique feature which is that it makes a copy of every page bookmarked by each user, thus providing the users with an archive of their favorite web pages even if the original content is modified or deleted. It is also equipped with other features like the ability to import/export the saved bookmarks in ZIP format to the corresponding folders in web browsers like IE and FireFox.

Reddit is a social bookmarking website that has virtually the same features as Delicious and Digg. The only noticeable difference is the implementation of an absolute voting system (+1 for hot, -1 for cold). Another feature is the recommended article page which is compiled based solely on the voting pattern by users.

Newsvine is really an interesting and unique site in many ways. It gives a much-needed space for talented writers and journalists to show the world their skills. The website is run by its users and the website administrators are not involved in editing, this decision was left to the users who determine which news story deserves to stay and which one deserves the boot. Users can also post stories from well-respected news sources like the Associated Press and Reuters. They also can benefit financially from Newsvine, a very fabulous differentiator. Newsvine shares 90% of the ad revenues generated on one’s page with that user.
What This Means for You!

Let’s end on a light note, if you are a webmaster don’t attempt to join every service at the same time as this may backfire at you due to the rules stipulated by search engines. For example, Google penalizes websites that receive too many links in a very short time. The best approach would be to go slowly. If you do, you will be rewarded.

One Last Tip

To promote your site’s pages you can give people a reminder and make it easier for them to bookmark your page by adding the bookmaking site’s chicklets, or icons. These show up at the bottom of your posts and when user click on one of the chicklets, it brings up a new window with the specific site in it. You can see it in action on our blog at http://blog.zapbangdone.com/ and on our site at http://zapbangdone.com/.

Here is a link to a good plugin for Wordpress: Social Bookmarking

Here is a link to a good plugin for Joomla: Social Bookmarks

If you have an html site, you can hand code the links. Here is a great list:
Social Bookmark List

As usual, if you need help installing these or would just rather someone else do it, you can call us at 1-800-713-2891.

Tags: social bookmarks bookmarking seo links

Website design is no longer a best guess proposition. You can now develop a website with a variety of pages focused on the same audience and then put them to the test to find out which ones perform under real world circumstances.

If you plan on spending money to drive traffic to your website, you should consider using Google’s Website Optimizer. It is free to Adwords members. It will help you maximize profits by taking the guesswork out of building your site’s landing pages.

Google’s Website Optimizer allows you to test different pages of your website on the same Adword campaign. This helps you find out what is working for you and what is not.

You have probably heard of A/B Testing which is done between two pages. Multi-Variate Testing with Google Analytics allows you to test multiple pages at the same time allowing you to hone down what is being tested. It speeds up the testing process bringing you to more profitable campaigns in a shorter period of time.

A Basic Understanding of Multi-Variate Testing

Google allows you to choose between A/B Testing or Multi-Variate Testing.

Multi-Variate Testing is also known as Taguchi testing. A/B testing is a comparison test between two website pages.

In most cases, you will want to do multi-variate testing because it allows you more flexibility and a quicker path to your goal.

Multi-variate testing is a scientific approach to the testing of website landing pages to increase conversions from site visitors to members or customers. Multi-variate testing can test multiple parts of a website page (or blog) to find out the best combination of content and design to increase website conversion.

Multiple parts of a website page may include the header of the page, title of the page, sub-title of the page, images, content, etc.

By using muti-variate testing, a website owner or webmaster can find out which headline with which image along with which sub-title and what content is the best combination that will get the maximum conversion rate for that specific website.

What you need to do…

As you have probably guessed, the first step to setting up either A/B Testing or Multi-Variate Testing is to create multiple landing pages. What you may not know is that Google can help you here by supplying javascript code that allows you to test multiple aspects of your test on the same page.

You will also need to identify what will be your definition of success and how that will be tracked. For these tests it usually includes having a visitor land on a page that shows them as a new member or customer. Google will give you code to place on these pages that will show the page elements you want shown based against your control elements.

Once you have your test pages and test page elements along with a definition of success, you are ready to begin. Log in to your Google Adwords account, click “Campaign Summary” and then “Website Optimizer”. On the right are a number of help links. Since Google has a very complete help section, this is where we will end our article and let you begin. Google’s help section outlines much more than we can in this small space and even has a few video tutorials.

Check out Google Adwords: http://adwords.google.com

Tags: A/B, Analytics, Google, Google Analytics, Mult-Variate, Taguchi, Testing

Tags: Component, Joomla, Virtuemart

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