Some of you may have noticed that more items are clickable on the blog now, and that is all because I installed the brand new Highlighter plug-in from Unique Blog Designs who is notorious for making affiliate oriented themes and getting more people to share items on your website. This plug-in allows your visitors to literally comment on just about anything that they highlight and/or pictures they like without leaving a standardized comment.

You should definitely go check out this plug-in and see if it is for you, it is 100% free so you have nothing to lose. Additionally, they are giving away an iPad through a random drawing based on those who install it on their WordPress site!

Check it out here: http://www.highlighter.com

How does a company who runs in a highly competitive field continue to acquire users? With the rising cost of Google AdWords for affiliate companies, they are running out of cost effective options to reach new publishers as well as advertisers but still need to get their name out there in order to even maintain their current volume.

So what are some of the options? You can obviously target ‘authority’ publishers within your space which most of the top affiliate networks already do (read: Shoemoney, John Chow) in order to raise brand awareness, even if the CPM rate doesn’t make since from a pure ad performance standpoint, they are able to make it back in the perceived valued of their brand.

So how is Affiliate.com trying to utilize their resources in order to build awareness, backlinks and a little bit of grass roots press? They are sending bloggers a pretty sweet T-Shirt in exchange for a blog entry. Their incentive is not only the shirt, but additionally they are going to award a $1,000 donation to the American Red Cross Haiti relief fund (which fits in nicely with my beliefs that investing in people is simply good business), but they are also offering the winning blogger a $1,000 bounty. So what would I do with this bonus cash if I am to be selected as the winning post? That money will be directly invested into my philanthropic web startup http://www.mybiggive.com.

This tee made for a good party shirt last weekend during some card games, fun socialization and an overall good time. Rocking the King of diamonds may just be my new good luck charm, and I am sure this network won’t complain about me wearing this shirt in a social setting since it has it’s URL plastered across the back

Affiliate.com has made a good move here by offloading the shirts they had originally produced for Affiliate Summit West by getting a little extra press, some back link love in addition to some good will from bloggers and users! So if you are looking for a good group to be working with make sure you check out Affiliate.com as either a publisher or an advertiser.

So you have worked so hard in order to get users to your website, now what? What is it specifically that you want those users to do once they get to your site? Getting users to  operating specific goals is referred to as your “Marketing Funnel” because, much like a regular funnel you have every web page hit at the top, and only a certain percentage of users ultimately end up completing the action(s) you want them to.

An important aspect to remember when deciding how your users will interact with your goal is that each layer, or step that you add for the visitor to do, the greater the probability there is that they will “abandon” your funnel for either more content or worst case scenario even leave your website entirely.

Goals

Before you get rolling, you need to decide what exactly you want your users to be doing on your website. More complex sites can have multiple channels for their users to start down individual funnels, but for this example let’s assume you only have one primary objective to achieve with your users; what is it?

Tracking

Once you have decided what needs to be happening to create value from your users on the site, trace the path that a user would need to take from landing on your home page to completing the intended action. Each click or decision should count as a “checkpoint” for this funnel in order to track where you need to improve the process.

Action

What action is worth value to you as a site owner/operator? If you are an ecommerce site you would be wanting customers to purchase a product. What about content sites? Maybe your funnel includes getting that user to sign up for a newsletter, or other action that makes them more ‘sticky’ to your site to ultimately improve pageview counts, conversions into affiliate programs etc.

One you have nailed down this action, along with critical checkpoints along the way you will be able to start testing conversion rates and generate a value that each customer is worth. Start with trying to improve abandonment rates (i.e. reduce the number of users ditching your funnel at each step). A great tool for this is Google website optimizer, however it does have a bit of a delay on the data that will force you to take a little time in order to make the right decision.

Lead Value vs. Lead Cost

This is one of the last, but probably the most critical portion of your business that you need to understand. How much money is each lead worth to you after they have been pushed through the funnel at your best possible conversion rate? It is actually pretty simple to figure this out by taking the total amount of revenue calculated against your conversion rate.

For example:

If I had a funnel that starts with 100,000 leads that initiate the funnel with a 6% conversion ratio (to funnel completion) and that generates a total profit of $20,000; this would mean that as long as I spend less than 20 cents per lead I should be making money.

Now you may be thinking, “But I can easily just calculate what I am making per lead without knowing the conversion rate, why do I care?”. This is a valid point, but it is key to understand your conversion rate because this will be the most cost effective item to change in order to boost your profitability per lead and be more capable to scale your business. With a 6% conversion rate and $20,000 in profit as stated in the above example this would mean that for each per who converted was worth $3.33 cents in profit. Imagine if you could boost your conversion rate to 12%? Then you would be able to spend 40 cents in order to obtain a lead and still be profitable which puts you above the average costs for highly targeted PPC advertising and thus allows you scale more feasibly.

So now that you know the basics of a funnel, how to optimize them and what numbers should be driving your business building decisions, start figuring out how you can implement these steps as soon as possible so you are more effectively managing your business and producing results.

Do you want money? Duh, yes. How about the chance to win a brand new Tesla? Who could say no?

The idea of big prize giveaways are an age old practice that Las Vegas has been using for decades. {Anybody remember the National Lampoon where they win the Dodge Viper?} Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo among other things has recently put snagged the Twitter handle @auto for automotive related posts. So how do you drive (no pun intended) a ton of followers to a new handle, and make sure they stick around for the long shot? Here is the Jason system:

1. Have established success at building business
2. Have enough money you can buy two Teslas (at put on order)
3. Make people TRUST you, and that you are not a fly by night scammer
4. Get some of the more influential people on Twitter to retweet the contest
5. Voila! Instant follower growth, and likely won’t even have to give away the car!

Jason has built up his personal brand with loads of credibility, in todays social networking credibility most certainly holds the highest value. This point is driven home when you consider that according to Twitter (via @neilpatel) there are over 15k “Social Media Experts”, and in reality they don’t know anymore about the space that your boss who also thinks they are an expert

So what exactly is his catch, and what is the most likely result?

To win the Tesla, you must first become a follower of the @auto account (the car would only be given away to one of the followers). Secondly, @auto has to become the #1 followed account on Twitter beating out @aplusk which would currently require in the neighborhood of 4 Million followers.

The likely result?

It is doubtful that @auto is going to become the number one followed account on Twitter even with titans like @kevinrose retweeting the challenge along with blog support. However, what @jason is likely going to end up with is a heavily followed account of over 1 million users… for essentially free. I believe that he would honestly give away the serial #85 Tesla S that he has pre-ordered because 4 million followers is worth that much, even @shoemoney with 85k followers was able to bring in close to $15,000 in one month due to clicks on advertisements to other peoples content. As any good marketer knows though, if someone else is willing to pay that much for clicks from your feed you are the ultimate sucker because the clicks are worth more than what they are paying.

Have you ever wondered how sites like Google and Facebook are able to retain their user base against worthy start-ups that should be eating away at their market share? It goes beyond just building a good core product, and dives more into the psychological aspect of consumer behavior to make sure the users are “sticky” and have a hard time moving away from the core services.

The goal is simple, make the “cost” of the user switching higher every year (regardless of if it is a free service or not) and try to add value in the process. The value usually comes in the terms of additional services (like GMail, YouTube, Picasa). These services not only offer a value to the customer, but the strategy is to get them using a unified login for each service which solidifies their core use and in Google’s case the driver of their business; Search Queries. This value can be quantified as the perceived value by the user, with a funnel of all the additional services leading into the core product.

In the case of Google’s closest competitor, Microsoft the core business is their Operating System and Office Suite which drive the bulk of their revenues. Therefore their products that compete with Google can be seen as ancillary arms to their core sets of software. Illustrated below however is what Google is betting on for customer loyalty and perceived cost of switching to other cloud platforms. Google also hopes to extend this cost of user switching into the handset market and Netbooks with both their Android and Chrome OS, both of which will serve as terminals for their cloud computing offerings.

Facebook is able to offer additional value and raise the end user cost by implementing an ecosystem culture with their applications, and becoming more pervasive with tools such as Facebook Connect that allow users to only have one login across several websites. This single login allows for comments, use of services (like Chegg) and if the user so desires push the activity back into their newsfeed as a flare to their friends without having to directly tell them about it. This all plays into the “social graph” which is Mark Zuckerbergs description of our seemingly real connections and information sharing with other people online through our Facebook accounts. These snowball of information sharing and ease of access is what is keeping users plugged in, driving pageviews and referring more people to sign up for the service. Many users have simply migrating their photo sharing etc. to the platform and all those requesting to see that type of personal content are often times told by their friends and family to migrate to Facebook because “it’s just easier”.