Internet marketing is all about the sensitivity of your clients in an specific environment to specific impulses. If you have an amazing web site with accurate information, with great design and valid content but yet your client is not impacted by it, then you have absolutely nothing. In my experience I have seen the ugliest web sites generating lots of clients because they don’t fail to address their clients sensitivity.

So what is sensitivity? Sensitivity is the capacity of an organism to respond to stimulation. How do I stimulate my audience? There are many ways to stimulate audiences specifically for marketing purposes. I am going to share two:

1. Repetition. Repetition is called the mother skill. Advertisers use it all the time. You need to be able to repeat over and over again who you are and what you do. If your website sales tires, then the most important thing that your client should remember when leaving the site is “tires”, repeat not only the word tires many times, but inform your clients extensively of all available tires (even the ones you don’t offer). When building the web site think of new ways of repeating “tires” in your clients’ minds -big tires, low rider tires, extra-shinny tires, radial tires, traction tires, temperature tires and all things you can think regarding tires.
2. Interaction. When you allow your clients to not only access your website but also to interact with somebody they will be much more willing to be sensitive. Following the tire example, create a tire blog where your clients can discuss about tires. Create a forum about new tire technologies. Allow clients to communicate to you their needs online and adjust your business to their needs.

The web is the most important media channel in the world today, because it’s the only one that allows you to inform, interact and transact with your clients in a multimedia environment. Take advantage of all the power that is available and start using internet marketing for your benefit. I have said this a million times: dn’t just build a nice website, if you do, your clients will be gone. Do some interactive marketing and you’ll succeed in the long run.

If you are interested in how Merkados can you help you implement an effective interactive marketing strategy please contact us today.

1. Your website must focus on capturing email addresses

2. Stuffing your home page with way too much information

3. Loading the site with slow-loading graphics (more about this can be read at Mr. Nielsen’s usability website)
4. No attempt to discern what the prospect wants

And the next four common web design mistakes related to online business are:

5. No invitation to converting. Many websites have everything in place, good design, good colors, amazing corporate image and great content. But when it comes to inviting their visitors to perform an action they fail miserably. Often I see multitudes of designs out there without contact information in every page and sometimes after reading all the content you believe that you were being informed of their products and services and not being invited to purchase from them. Determine if your website is informational, interactional or transactional. If you are after lead generation then make sure that you prepare the channels and the design to capture leads.

6. Follow trends because they are trends and not because they are useful. With Web 2.0 we are starting to see how many websites have a clean look, better navigation and better inter-browser support. Sometimes though, website owners include elements just because they are being used in their competitors website or because they thought they were cool.

Examples of this awful practice is the use of blinking text to attract attention, or the use of sound and music in Flash without the possibility of stopping it! Be careful to include only elements of design that would improve your audience experience. Also, never use sound in your site unless it is user-initiated.

7. “Let’s make some space”. The mistake of pushing the limits of the home page because we have new products and we have new banners and we have new… STOP! Instead of including new elements in your home page remove something in order to add something and always plan ahead your space.

Many websites decide that they want to include advertising banners, flash images, extra links, new headings and many other things that don’t fit into their initial conception. The recommendation is that if you find that you need new elements then redesign your site. If redesigning sounds unnecessary then those elements are probably not crucial. Adding some things here and there is ok, the problem is when your next big idea of the day ends up in the footer of your homepage.

8. The “I don’t like it mistake”. This mistake is the biggest and most often mistake in my opinion. If you don’t like your design that doesn’t necessarily mean that your web site will not appeal to your audience. When you are tempted to say to your web designer: “I don’t like it”, think for a second who is going to buy from this website? and think if they would like it.

This is specially important for “generation X business owners”. Generation X kids like video games, skateboarding, X Games, surfing and what not, but the owners of the business that sell products for this audience have difficulty to separate their own preferences with their audience preferences. The best way to avoid this mistake is to proof read your design with members of your intended audience.

For more information about web design and internet marketing make sure to visit: www.merkados.us or www.merkados.com

We all have real needs such as: a car, a house, a cell phone, a lottery ticket, friends, love, hosting, bananas and others, or it can be an abstract desire: I want to know the secret because it is secret. For example: a tv show says: “in a few seconds we are going to show you the biggest secret of all times!” and instantly they create in the viewers the abstract desire of completion. You want to know what it is. What for? It doesn’t matter. In fact before you started watching the show, you probably didn’t even have an interest. The same is applicable with sports. You may not be interested in a particular sport, however if you start to watch it, soon you’ll side with one of the teams.

The abstract desires can be created at any given moment by websites in many different ways. You can create this desires by creating un-conclusive statements to marketing phrases, for example: ” This product comes loaded with all your favorite features! What features are they talking about? Your favorite! How do they know my favorite features? By un-conclusive statements you transform the perception of the customer, because no matter what your copy says the brain has to process it and agree or disagree.

For example, right now you can agree or disagree with this article, but by reading it you are changing your perspective because you ask yourself if you agree or not. The moment you say: I don’t really care, that would mean that you are responding to the article.

You can direct the attention of your online users by the way you transform their emotions. For example if I say:

* Think for a second about the smell of the ocean, the warm sand and the breeze, feel the sun burning your skin little by little, think about the feeling later when your skin is all red and it hurts to touch anything.

If you read the last paragraph you don’t only read it and keep going but you actually set yourself in the picture because most of us has experienced that and it is painful.

You can use online copy to create sensations that will move the understanding of your audience in many ways. Some will make them buy, some will not.

If you go into a sweater store in the middle of the summer and it is 115 F. out and the store has this huge carpet with long hair and you happen to realize that the A/C is broken inside you probably won’t buy. That is why retailers make sure to set their A/C to 72 degrees.

Same situation, the hottest day ever, you look up an you see a beach bar selling bear for half price, the bear is 33F. just when it is starting to ice, you can feel the little pieces of ice – yes, it is very probably that you would buy.

Statement number one in Marketing: Life is about value. You, as everyone else, is fighting to be, to become. Things give us pleasure because they allow us to get closer to becoming or being. We buy food, cars, houses, pens, cds, magic cards, plastic bags, ice, cheese, stationary bikes. Just to become. The value of everything is determined by the ability to give that power > a bottle of water from a friend won’t be of value most of the time, however think of the value that it creates if you haven’t had any for a week in a remote desert…

The same bottle of water, however the perceived value is much higher the second time. The perceived value is based on 1. The location, 2. The especial conditions or circumstances 3. The belief system and others.

Imagine what happens when somebody writes a book. The book itself is written once. In other words the main effort is done once. The printing and distributing is a variable costs so technically you don’t really create true value every time that somebody buys the book. What you do create is perceived value because a new reader can use your information to his benefit.

Summarizing: Create perceived value for your products or services today, if you don’t, you’ll always regret it.

If you want to market sucessfully products online, find that one characteristic that makes people become, and share it.

Day 1. In the morning: Have a cup of coffee and a bagel with creme cheese. Ok, ready with that? Perfect. Now go ahead and sit back for 1 hour and take in this introductory video. It starts by telling you the very basics of jQuery:

After watching the previous video you should have a good understanding of how jquery works and what it does. Next is to start to practice with selections. So go ahead and create an html document with at least one div with an ID. Then make sure that you can select the div by id and that you can perform a method on it, perhaps animate it. That is it. Once you have the $().something(); clear in your mind the it is time to move on.

2. Go ahead and take a look at using Jquery with AJAX. Ajax is one of the most exciting technologies of the WEB2.0 wave. Don’t reload your pages when all you want is to refresh one element: use AJAX!

Alright, awesome. Now that you have an introduction of AJAX and the load method, it is time to practice. To practice with the load method do the following:

1. Create an xhtml file with some content in it.

2. Create a second xhtml file with an unordered list that contains li elements.

3. Now make a call using the load method from the first html. Load the elements in your main html. Now make the document.ready.

That is it.

Most people know that in the game of Chess, knowing the rules of the game is simply not enough to beat a good player. Mature strategy is certainly necessary. Internet marketing is far more complex than the game of Chess. Strategy and tactics are fundamental to the success of your business online. Of course knowing the rules (and the secrets) is important; but understanding the components of a competitive strategy is critical.

I have put together in this short post, three tactics that may help you improve your business online.

Techniques:

Technique 1. Pay attention to your clients, not to your company. If you pay attention to your own company, then you would have a lot of trouble providing the web content that your clients are really
looking for.

Ask your clients directly and indirectly what are the things that they are more interested in when they come to you. Directly means, ask them by phone or by interviewing with them. Indirectly is by checking your access log files in the server. You can check where the clients are clicking and how many time they view each page. You may check what are the most visited pages and get a
better idea of the content they are most interested in.

Technique 2. Offer content for free and once you have enough knowledge of the most visited material, then charge for extended knowledge in those matters. The most common short term
problem on the web is that some websites want to get their client’s money(value) without offering anything in exchange (no value). Exchange in the web, as in the world, is a very powerful technique. Give to others and naturally they are going to be willing to give back to you, it is the law of reciprocity.

Technique 3. Offer interaction. If your clients are able, not only to access your information, but also become part of it by providing input, you will experience higher ROI. The reason is simple, interaction creates interest. You may call the attention of your prospective clients by offering free content and perhaps sometimes get them interested with the information itself. However a sure way of creating interest in your content is if they have personally interacted with it. Examples of this interaction can be games, simple quizzes, share-with-friends applications and others.

Summary

1. Start by understanding your target market.

2. Offer free content to them to get their attention.

3. Provide interaction to gain their interest.

Until next time,

Alex Centeno MBA.

Creative Director and Digital Media Strategist

Merkados™

The new website of the city of Raleigh is, in my humble opinion, a waste of tax payer dollars. As a professional website developer and strategist and having developed hundreds of websites myself, I can tell you that this website is overpriced and under-designed.

I am going to give you ten reasons why I think that this simply doesn’t work. But before I do, I want to let you know that I spent under 10 minutes finding these reasons. In other words, if I actually had time to take a deep look at this web property, I would certainly find way more.

The problems

1. The price. At $500,000 you would think that a website would have every single bell and whistle. You would expect that it works flawlessly and that is simply has an infrastructure that is second-to-none, right? To put in perspective imagine that I could hire 20 people for 6 months straight at a salary of $50,000 a year to build a website with this budget.

Imagine what 20 people that know what they are doing can do for SIX MONTHS!!!! I mean, seriously a good team of web developers could be comprised of 10 people and if you payed $75,000 each for 5 months straight, you would have an amazing website anyways. But that is not the case. This website is full of bugs, problems, the technology it utilizes is not the latest and therefore is outdated already.

2. It doesn’t display properly in the Apple iPad.You would think that with that amount of budget, the designers would test the design in at least the most popular browsers right? Well, one of the hottest products is certainly the iPad from Apple. You would have to live under a rock to not know that.

Well, try visiting the new website from an Ipad and you would notice that the entire left bar is cut off. That simply shows that the design wasn’t created with great standards.

3. Some images are not optimized for the web. I navigated to some deeper pages and saw some images taking an extra time to load and I was kind of intrigued. Sure enough, I loaded the image by itself and noticed that the image had bean uploaded to the site without resizing or compressing for the web.

That is basic web design theory! Come on, a company that pays half of that budget would never accept mistakes like that. For those non-technical readers, let me explain something. Images on the web are different that the images for print. The images on the web have been sized and compressed to match the pixels actually needed, no more and no less. Why? Simple, the more information you have the more time it takes to load.

4. The “En Español” Section doesn’t work. You can click on the link to the Spanish section of the site and guess what? It takes a second to loan and then -nothing. It gives you the homepage again. In other words, it simply doesn’t have a Spanish section. You may say: ” oh well is under construction,” well if that is the case, then don’t include the link in your main navigation. Remove the link to the section that is under construction. Jakob Nielsen would have a heart attack if he saw this. Usability should be first.

And you would expect that a web design agency charging $500,000 for a website would be more careful with usability.

5. It contains 349 Errors, 26 warning(s) in the homepage’s markup. I simply did a quick test of markup compliance and sure enough it didn’t pass. Now, this test wasn’t performed by me, it is an automated test that allows you to see if your markup is written properly. In other words is like a test to see if I know how to write Chinese. I think it is interesting that the homepage of the site would have this many errors. I mean, think about it, this is what this people do for a living. They write in this language.

Imagine what would happen if I wrote a document for the city of Raleigh and they discovered that just in the front page of my document I had 300+ misspellings!  That would be unacceptable right? Well, it is more so when you are paying $500,000!

6. It doesn’t validate for Section 508. Even though the cities are not required to comply with the federal accessibility standard, they should do an effort to make their sites accessible, specially when you have a wide budget.

7. It doesn’t have a contact form. When you visit the contact us page in the website it simply gives you the address to contact the city along with all the traditional contact information (phones, address, etc). But what if people don’t have an email program?

Would it be better to have a contact form that people can fill out and it sends an email to the appropriate people? Well, that is the norm. Not in this website though.

8. It has an interactive flash-based map. Why am I complaining about the flash-based map? Simple. There is no better map than Google Maps. If you really want to find directions you may do so by visiting Google Maps. You can even embed the map in the site if you want for convenience. But to build a complete map application is simply not a good idea in my opinion.

9. The payment of bills is not part of the same website. The payment of bills happens in another completely different website. If you click on the link to pay bills you are redirected to another top level domain. The payment of bills happens in a website that looks completely different from this website. Why? What I think is that this part of the website wasn’t even developed new. It simply was linked to the old platform… perhaps?

10. Sloppy Design. The documents block in the lower left corner of the site contains several pdf documents that when visited with Firefox they “invade” the main content part of the page. That is simply awful looking and shows how careless the designers were.

For crying out load, the average web designer fee is from $75 to $125. So lets say that you hire 2 designers for 40 hours each (one week) to make sure that none of this problems happened before going live. You know how much money that would’ve been? About $10,000.

I think that I am done for now. I just want to vent for a second there. I would like to hear from you. Send me your comments about this by visiting Merkados.com and clicking on the contact us form.

Thanks guys,

Alex C

As an Internet marketing consultant I have seen that many times it is productive to repeat to your clients of potential pain  related to the lack or provision of your product or the pleasure associated to having it. For example: when you are finalizing the cart process and were are ready to buy the laptop from your website, it seems like a good idea to remind us of the possibility of purchasing a surge protector. Surge problems are specially important in this environments because they can get rid of your investment in a second.

Maybe we don’t want to be reminded of the extra charges that may need to be covered in order to feel safe, nonetheless it is better to know the possible problems and be prepared than to not know and blame it on the company we are buying from.

The key here is that we ponder pain very highly. We want to avoid pain now and in the future and therefore sometimes we are willing to experience a small amount of pain now if we are sure that it will prevents us from much greater pain in the future. Now, there is a key word here as well: “sure”. One problem with this technique is that many businesses have used it and it ends up not preventing the greater pain in the end.

For example, you buy a new LCD tv in your favorite electronics store. When you are ready to check out they kindly remind you of their “insurance” program. In case something goes wrong with your new tv, they will take care of absolutely everything. So far so good. The problem is that many people after buying into this programs find even more pain when they can’t get the electronics store to take care of the problems.

Pain is a very good advertising mechanism if used correctly and responsibly.

Start using pain in your Internet marketing strategies today.

If you want to learn more about how to implement successful interactive marketing strategies and tactics for your particular business situation, contact Merkados today.

Until next time,

MBA. Alex A. Centeno

Internet Consultant

This unfortunately is big news. Why? Well, Apple wanted to downplay the problem by just saying go ahead and hold it in other ways. However is not that simple. If you start questioning now the reasons behind creating the special Apple cases called bumpers then you might end with the conclusion that the problem was there and that Apple was misleading by saying that the bumpers were to replicate the success of the iPad case. That spells PR disaster all over. And PR disasters are what spell problems for a company more than anything.

Apple is my favorite company, they really are, but remember that you can’t always be perfect. Your flaws eventually will come to light and when you have pointed the flaws of many others (Adobe), it is definitely a bit more difficult to handle.

For Apple, the easiest way out of this mess is first to accept it, as opposed to down play it. The second step is to create a plan to make it right. Finally make sure that your devote followers end with a sense in their mouth that Apple is the kind of company that they believe in. Apple will do the right thing. Apple is not like everybody else.

For us, oh well, let’s try not to forget to hold the phone only with our right hand.

Best,

Alex

The iPhone Classic where mostly black. The 3G was mostly black and the 3GS had a white phone option. Now, reading what the online community is saying, there is a high demand for white iPhones. Why? Simple.

1. Limited Availability. The Apple store had no available white iPhones. Only Black ones. Therefore that instantaneously cause people to desire it more through the law of scarcity. Scarcity makes it more valuable.

2. It is different yet the same. People perceive the white iPhone to be cooler because it is the same Iphone but at the same time it looks different than everybody else’s phone; at least that is the perception. The reality is that if everybody wants to be cool by having a white iPhone they undoubtedly become part of a group and less of unique. In our minds, we want to be accepted and to be unique at the same time. We want to be part of the iPhone user community but at the same time we want to be perceived as special within that group. That is precisely why I think that the “bumpers” or the cases by Apple are going to perform so well. They allow people to have the same Iphone but make it unique  – personalize it and make you unique.

3. It is more visible. The visibility of a white phone is higher than a black phone. The reason is simple, the white color reflects and refracts light, the black color tends to absorb light. By being more visible, others notice the phone a lot more serving as social iconography and allow people to be identified as part of a select group of special users. This can also be seeing in the usage of the white earpieces.

4. It is different. People get bored extremely easily and therefore they need new stimulation to remain interested. That is what a white case can do. That is what 200,00 + apps are doing for the iPhone. That is what the “rearrangement of the icons” in your screen is doing for the iphone. Every single way in which you can change your iPhone to make it different than before is helping produce that particular feeling.

5. It is not different enough. Imagine how unpopular zebra green and pink iphones would be. The reason is simple, that color combination is not popular in the culture. Therefore if it is too different to make it stand out negatively then people wouldn’t like it.

Strategically speaking, we can all learn from Apple’s ability to combine all those elements to make people desire their products with a passion.

Implement this tactics yourself and start enjoying similar results in the marketplace.

Until next time,

Alex Centeno MBA.
Creative Director & Digital Media Strategist
Merkados Interactive Partners

Well you can go crazy trying to figure out what you did wrong. That is the first step. Then you can Google the error to check and see if you somebody else in this world has seen the message. And finally you start trying everything under the sun that the forums say.

In this case however, I am posting the solution to this particular problem so that we all remember how to fix it in the future. The problem happens because of incompatibilities between the version of Insert Module and the ImageField Module.

The Fix

1. Backup your DB (this is for security, if you are a wild person, then don’t do this part.)

2. Replace your fieldField module and your ImageField module with the latest stable version.

3. Run the update.php script in your Drupal installation : yoursite.com/update.php

4. Finally go to the pages and insert images like crazy…

That simple. I know that it sounds simple now that you know the answer, but believe me, when you have to spend a couple of hours in Google trying to figure out the solution, you might as well now take two hours and go to your favorite coffee shop.

Thanks guys, until next time.

Alex Centeno MBA.
Creative Director & Digital Media Strategist
Merkados Interactive Partners