INDUS NET JOURNAL

Indus Net Technologies is participating at Internet World 2009 to reach closer to UK based companies and offer its digital marketing and outsourcing services. This is their 3rd consecutive participation in the show.

Internet World is Europe’s longest running, best attended and biggest event for digital marketing and online business, attracting over 13,000 visitors and more than 300 exhibitors. Now in its 17th year, Internet World features its legendary, world renowned Education Programme, showcasing over 200 enlightening seminars and 20 revealing keynotes. It is being conducted at Earls Court, London from 28-30 April.

Indus Net Technologies will be showcasing its Web Programming and Digital Marketing competencies to the visitors. Abhishek Rungta, Founder and CEO, believes “What sets us apart from our competition is our exclusive focus on Internet strategy which is well complemented by a 11 yrs of experience and a well-trained team of about 350 professionals working from UK and India”.

Abhishek Rungta, Mukul Gupta (VP – Marketing & Operations / Head of Operations) and James Blakemore – Senior Business Managers, will be representing Indus Net Technologies during the show.

“Although James are based out from UK, we will also remain in the UK for a considerable time after the show to visit prospects, clients and other stakeholders” , added Mukul.

Indus Net Technologies is open for meeting invitation during its UK tour from companies thinking of reducing their costs by hiring a virtual team of professionals in India.  The company already has achieved a lot of success with this model and works with large Financial Companies in the UK as well as SMEs.

Indus Net Technologies can be contacted at Earls Court 2 and booth no E4004 during April 28 to 30, 2009 at Earls Court, London, UK. Call on 0208 144 4070.

For meeting request kindly contact  Mukul Gupta at 0208 144 4070 or drop an e-mail to info@indusnet.co.uk.

I made the last post about the mental state of your typical web prospect. Go read it first, if you haven’t already and then come back to this article.

If you want to make money from your website (either directly or indirectly), you must only assume that you are dealing with uninterested, zombie – even if they typed in your keywords.

Assume anything else and you will achieve less than what you have achieved, or may be nothing at all.

A typical television surfer has an attention span of approximately 7 seconds. That means, the advertiser has got less than 7 seconds to grab and hold the interest of the person sitting in front of the box, failing which, the channel is simply be changed at the flick of “the thing” or, the zombie keeps tuned off, even though he is looking at the television.

The job is easier on the web. You got 2 seconds more to sell. The addictive nature of web browsing leaves us with an attention span of nine seconds – the same as a goldfish.

That’s it fellas ! 9 Seconds.

How you use the first nine seconds is the make or break thing. In these nine seconds, you got to get the attention of the zombie and jolt it to normal a state of conscious attentiveness.

The first step of all salesmanship/marketing is to get people’s attention. Examples would include dressing yourself up as a penguin and jumping in front of the every passing prospect, using proper headlines, focusing on content you present above the first fold etc

It is any method, technique, trick or basically anything to get attention. You can’t do anything to sell people if you don’t have their attention.

Here is a step-by-step experiment:

1) Buy a stop watch
2) Ask a volunteer to sit in front of you and look at your website
3) Give him exactly 9 seconds
4) Ask him what he understands about your business.

Now, Don’t jump off the building with the result!

Now you need to keep modifying the website or the landing pages until all you want to your prospect to know and understand about your business, is communicated in less than 9 seconds.

Happy selling!

-Mukul Gupta

In my last post about keyword psychology, I used the word “your zombie prospect”, with tongue in the cheek.  But, why do I think your and mine prospects are zombies? Am I a zombie too? Are you one too? , let’s do a quick test:

Can you remember which car was parked beside you in the parking lot today? Who was standing outside the door when you entered the office? Heck, can you even remember the color of the shirt the guy sitting right next to you?

Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!

If you are like 95% people on the planet, then you cannot recall any of the above. We dwell most of our lives in the zombie state of unawareness.

This preserves out mind to focus only on the things that interests us at the cost of ignoring everything else.  For example, if you are looking to buy specific model of a car, you suddenly start seeing more of those cars on the streets. If you want to buy an apartment, you suddenly start seeing “For Sale” signs everywhere.

Those cards and signs have forever been there. You have just started to see them now.

Why am I telling this to you?

If you craft your marketing message, or build your website, that assumes that attentive, alert, intelligent people are going understand whatever you are trying to communicate and make a buying decision – It won’t happen!

In order to sell, you must first wake the zombie up!  Keep reading to learn the art of getting attention.

- Mukul Gupta

Here is a pop quiz for all you people who are about to do a keyword research for your website or, next SEO project.

Let’s imagine for a minute that you (or, your customer) are an online hardware retailer that sells Laptops. I on the other hand, am your average zombie prospect – browsing the web rather mindlessly, searching for a Laptop. Can you tell the difference in my thought process when I type following different keywords?

1. Laptops
2. Intel Core 2 Duo Laptops
3. Latitude XT2

No – That’s not the right answer! Think again… harder… focus… Okay… I’ll give it to you.

These keywords represent where in the sales funnel they I am at the moment. I will explain -

The keywords like “Laptops” , “Dentist” , “Carper Cleaner”, “Web Designer”, “SEO Company” tells me that the people searching for these are in “Browse” mode.  They don’t know specifically what you they want.  As a marketer, if you focus too much time and attention on them, you will end up wasting a lot of money because they are mostly non-buyers.  I would term them as ‘Suspects‘ and not ‘Prospects‘

On the other hand, keywords like “Intel Core 2 Duo Laptops”, “Photoshop Web designer”, “SEO Company London” represents a just ripe audience. The people putting these keywords in the search engine are in “Compare” mode.

They have a slightly better defined idea about what they need and this means they have given more thought to it and hence they are more serious. I would term them as ‘Prospects‘ and not ‘Buyers‘.

In most industries, you will find yourself working with these bunches of keywords and this is where you should focus your time, money and energy. Heck, I would even suggest, your website should only serve people who know what they want but are in ‘Compare‘ mode. Sell them on why you are better.
Finally, keywords like “Latitude XT2″ or anything else with brand name, part numbers, price or narrow geographic location represents a “buy” audience.

They are “Buyers” because they know what they are looking for.  It’s low hanging fruit and if you find yourself lucky to get keywords like “Latitude XT2 Repair East London” – by all means pounce on it.  Typically, you won’t find a lot of these keywords very easily and when you do, it’s prudent to run specific PPC campaigns and build specific landing pages for each such keyword.

Take a look at your keywords now. Can you identify the “Browse”, “Compare” and “Buy” keywords?

- Mukul Gupta

Reports suggest that recession in the UK will not be over till 2nd quarter of 2010 and that the money made by Fortune 500 has shrunk by 85% to US$99 billion only.

There are two takeaways from this for you – 1) People are holding on cash and thus, your business will have harder time finding new customers whether you are B2B or B2C and, 2) Your cost of acquisition of new customers is going to go up, purely because of extra money that is required to be spent on marketing.

It is thus, vitally important that you take a hard look at the money you are spending on production of goods and services. If you are an online retailer for example, it means the money you are spending on designing, developing, maintaining and marketing your website.

What you would normally spend £5,000 on could cost you just £1,500, if you a choose value priced vendor.  About an year earlier, that may not seem like much of a difference, but now it makes one hell of a difference.

The cost of web design, development or maintenance is very important and can change everything. Let’s do some basic math. If the website cost £5,000 and you try to sell products worth £50 of which you only get half the money as profit, you would need at least 201 orders to stick (not refund) to make a profit. If you sell a product for £20 you would be profitable after 501 sales.

Now that the website cost is only £1,500 you only need to sell only 16, £100 ticket item to make money. If you go with selling £20 product, you only need to sell 76 of them.

Remember, these calculations about the number of products you need to sell have been made assuming, a jaw-dropping 50% profit margin. Now imagine these numbers taking into account 10% of 5% margin. Can you get 5000 new customers? If not, how will break even?

Working with a ‘Value Priced’ agency alone can mean all the difference between being profitable or not.

Think about it!

-    Mukul Gupta