Author: Atlantic BT

Ten E-commerce Storytelling Tips

1. Be Quiet

2. Be Simple.

3. Craft A GREAT About Page.

4. Clear Calls To Action.

5. No Talking To Yourself About Yourself.

6. Connection Economy is about CONVERSATIONS, so have some.

7. Be Consistent, avoid telling conflicting stories.

8. Easy to find “like me” signals.

9. Be SPECIAL.

10. Save The World

Storytelling Is the New SEO

Storytelling is the New SEO hit such a nerve on Slideshare with almost 8,500 views in a couple of weeks including a brief stint on Slideshare’s homepage as a “trending” presentation (fun) following up and answering questions about how to tell stories on e-commerce websites feels like a good idea.

Telling Great Stories Is Important, Here’s Why

In 1999, when I crated FoundObjects.com (now RIP) ecommerce was so new and exciting you could rack the pins almost anyway you wanted. Any ball we rolled was sure to win. Not so much any more (lol).

Why is telling great stories beyond important on your e-commerce website? Google has always been “Pro Content”. Perhaps the easiest explanation for why storytelling is key is Google wants your website to engage and nothing “engages” better than great stories and storytelling.

Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates put renewed emphasis on website heuristic measures.

Heuristic Measures Include:

• Time On Site.
• Pages viewed by an average visitor.
• Repeat visitors.
• Bounce rates.
• Mobile engagement (monitor heuristics for your mobile visitors too).

Regular Atlantic BT readers know I attribute making over $30M online in large part to doing what Google “told” my team and me to do. “Told” in this context is hinted in the strange black magic that Google SEO is, was and will be. I’ve fought Google and learned to ride their waves. Surfing Google is much more fun and profitable than fighting.

Ten Ecom Storytelling Tips

The rift between content and conversion is tough. As a Director of E-commerce we could increase engagement metrics with videos and other ideas, but conversion was hurt. We could increase conversion often damaging engagement. In the old days we lucky few ecom Internet marketers would have gladly made that trade – hurt engagement for money.

Our new social connection economy is backed by Google’s algorithm changes. Abandoning engagement for money is short-term unsustainable thinking, old thinking. Yes you can hurt engagement and increase conversion for a bit, but as your engagement metrics trend bad the whip comes back around.

Your website’s traffic slows as Google punishes lack of engagement. You can’t convert traffic you don’t get. E-commerce websites must balance conversion with engagement.

Storytelling is the key to balancing LOVE and MONEY on an e-commerce website.

E-commerce Storytelling Tip #1: Be Quiet – (ZipBuds.com)

“Quiet” in website design can be destroyed by the smallest error. Here is an example of site that could be “quiet” if it did one thing:

I’m not a fan of homepage hero images rolling, but most websites roll their heroes (“heroes” refers to the largest image on a webpage). Zipbuds.com rolls their hero WAY TOO FAST. Roll too fast and is the same as shouting, “PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOW”.

Zipbuds.com is within striking distance of “QUIET”.

Ecom Storytelling Tip #2: Be Simple (ZipBuds.com)

I was going to say, “Be simple AND clear,” but simple implies clarity. Let’s go back to Zipbuds.com and ask a simple question every website must answer in seconds, “What does Zipbuds.com want me to do NOW?”

Zipbuds.com is a good example of a website created by passionate people. Websites SHOULD be created by passionate people, but our new ecommerce also needs someone equally as passionate about conversion. Conversions protect engagement.

When visitors spin back off into space because they don’t know what to do Google gets MAD and your ecom website’s Karma takes a hit. Zipbuds.com is an ecom website that looks and acts like a B2B infomercial.

Your ecommerce site should SELL SOMETHING on its homepage even if that something is YOU. The closest ZipBuds.com comes is this image:

Love that Derrick is looking directly at the Shop Now Call To Action. (CTA). Do you see the problem? That great visual directing my eyes right into the Zipbuds  CTA is all but LOST due to its muted colors. CTAs should be big RED or ORANGE unmissable buttons. There are times to be QUIET on an eCom website. Call To Actions IS NEVER one of them (lol).

E-commerce teams remember your visitors eyes GO WHERE YOUR MODELS ARE LOOKING. Direct the people in your pictures  vision somewhere important. I also like having people looking directly out at viewers on homepages. When your models look AT your visitors your website engages and welcomes.

When you enter someone’s home they look at you, shake your hand and thank you for the wine your brought to dinner. When people in your image look out at your website’s viewers you are welcoming weary web travelers.

Never have people in pictures look OFF THE PAGE:

This view drives visitor vision OFF THE PAGE.

Ecom Storytelling Tip #3: Craft A Great About Page

Who would have thought the once lowly ABOUT page would become the key to telling great stories online. As I outlined in Storytelling Is The New SEO, your About Page is where you outline the three to five themes your ecommerce storytelling will return to over and over.

Common Ecommerce Themes (many stories can be told within each theme):

• Your Creation Story.
• Your Quality Story (make sure it is distinct and rooted in your creation story).
• Elicit Joy Story (* Stengel).
• Enable Connection (* Stengel).
• Promote Exploration Story (* Stengel).
• How your products or service provokes pride (* Stengel).
• Save The World Story (*Stengel).

The *Stengel notes refer to former P&G GMO’s book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth And Profits At The World’s Largest Companies. For a more detailed look at how to use Grow to align your Internet marketing read:

How Unique Greatness Meets Customer Aspirations.

Look at ZipBuds.com’s About Page:

Ironic that such a STORY RICH team doesn’t tell a story on the most important storytelling page on their website. There are strange links AWAY from their website. Where there should be a link to take advantage of that great Derrick view right down where a CTA should be there is NO link.  There are no explanations, no story at all. What a waste of great images.

And what a story they COULD tell. Great example of how About Pages became a chore, something people think about the least. If you want to tell me a story, and stories are the key to traffic and traffic is the key to money, then your website’s About Page should be your storytelling hub. Storytelling Is The New SEO covers two of my favorite About Pages (REI and Patagonia) in detail.

When Ten E-Commerce Storytelling Tips continues tomorrow I promise to pick on someone other than Zipbuds.com. Tomorrow we tackle the social side of e-commerce storytelling. ZipBuds.com is within striking distance of greatness. Like most websites a tweak here and there and Zipbuds.com makes millions.

The distance between creating sustainable engagement generating traffic, money and LOVE is inches. Sad to think how many websites are working hard to only miss by inches.

Tina Fey’s Master Class In Improvisation

Prior to this amazing and hilarious improvisation with James Lipton (video below) from the Actor’s Studio Tina Fey discussed her 2nd City Improv roots. As Fey shared “The Rules of Improvisation” they sounded like many of  “The Rules of Content Marketing”. Keep in mind we are writing these new “rules” of content marketing almost as I write this, but see if Tina’s Palin doesn’t make you laugh and cry at the same time.

The Rules of Improvisation

• Always Agree.
• Say Yes, AND…
• After the “and” add new information.
• Focus on the Here and Now.
• Establish the location.
• Be Specific, provide details.

Fey didn’t cover all of the rules of improvisation. She went one better by turning in a masterful improvisation as Sara Palin demonstrating nearly every “improv” rule:

Improv and Content Marketing

The best content marketing follows many of  David Alger’s First 10 Rules of Improvisation. Let’s examine a few of the most important similarities:

• Always Agree.
• Agree And (add information).
• Set time, place and location.
• Be specific.

Creating Agreement In Content Marketing

Even when your content is going to disagree don’t start that way. Sentiment is everything online. As an entrepreneur and Sales Director I’ve written hundreds of letters. I like to start a letter by finding something to thank the person receiving the letter for because thank you letters really do work. Creating content is similar. Content embarks on a journey.

Journeys are better started with a whistle and smile than an attack.

Don’t lay traps or be inauthentic, but find something about even an opposing argument to appreciate. Count the agreements in the opening of How Your Unique Greatness Meets Customer Aspiration:

Clutter Marketing

Clutter describes our marketing world these days. What author Seth Godin calls our Connection Economy is creating content so fast most of your customers are overwhelmed, time stressed and short on attention. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted we create as much content every two days now as from the dawn of man until 2003. The world is cluttered and becoming more so every moment. When everyone has a website yours better be GREAT or why bother.

The opening to Unique Greatness demonstrates how agreement with trusted sources creates trust.

My assertion of the need for greatness in web design is bolstered by agreeing with Seth Godin and bringing in one of my favorite quotes from Eric Schmidt. The need to create great websites sits on top of two powerful quotes. The assertion of the need for great web design is my “and”, the additional information moving the “improvisation” (content marketing) forward.

Telling Stories With Time and Location

A favorite storytelling technique is to set a sense of time and place immediately. “TIME” is not clock time, but a sense of OUR time, the time of our collective consciousness. Connection happens when we AGREE and feel we walk together on this PATH now. Path is a construct of distance and distance is another form of TIME.

Easier to demonstrate with another recent example from A Rocker, A Brand Doctor and GIVE and ASK at TED:

Magic at TED

It never ceases to amaze. During a serendipitous conversation withRed Maxwell, the Brand Doctor, he did it again. The last time, several years ago, we were having lunch discussing my obsession with altruism in marketing.

Red began to share broad stokes of, “An amazing guy I just had lunch with at TED”.  I realized he was describing one of the three legs of my new altruism stool – Michael Shermer author of Mind of the Market. The other two legs (at that time) were Robert Wright’s NonZero and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (turns out the selfish gene isnot be as selfish as the title implies).

Today Red shared a great story about helping rocker Amanda Palmer. Red’s latest random share comes two days after I wrote a long a long post on Google Plus, a note to Amanda (below) and thanked my friend Phil Buckley (@1918) for sharing Amanda’s TED presentation on the ASK and the GIVE (embedded below).

This intro wanders more, but on purpose.

The piece is an intimate journey down a new street – the idea that those who have ASKED (we lucky few marketers) need to GIVE more now and vice versa. I’ve discovered, after writing more than half a million words on blogs such as this one, how new ideas are scary and don’t scale (get the shares, links and likes needed).

I’ve learned to use ideas from the Heath brothers highly recommended book Made To Stick.  Made To Stick teaches how to wrap The Radical inside of The Known to create acceptance.

The Rocker and Brand Doctor introduction sets place and time without saying, “It is TODAY and three o’clock”. “Place” can be a MENTAL place, a state of mind such as the agreement between Godin, Schmidt and me in the previous example. Don’t be literal. Be open to different kinds of openings based on the content you’re creating and the messages you want your story to deliver.

Always start with agreement and work your way on. Agreement means we are brothers and sisters working together. Agreement means your reader’s minds are OPEN and willing. Agreement starts a journey that can incorporate the most RADICAL ideas especially when wrapped in the Heath brothers STICKY CLOAK. Agreement sets Shakespeare’s stage and begins the covenant of conversion. Agreement rocks as Tiny Fey explained so hilariously to James Lipton.

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Raleigh SEO Meetup Twitter Study

If you’ve never attended Phil Buckley’s “most popular SEO meetup in the country” monthly meetup held on the last Tuesday of the month you are missing a great experience. You missed a GREAT event last night.

My friend Mark Traphagen (@Marktraphagen) did a great job live blogging. He also embedded the video from the Google Hangout. Phil’s SEO Meetup is going global virtually these days via Google Hangouts with amazing help from Meeting 3.0 pioneer Nikol Murphy’s company Talking Moose Media.

Tips From Content Marketing Ninjas – = Mark Traphagen’s Live Blog of Raleigh SEO Meetup 3.26

Content Marketing Is The New SEO Twitter Analysis

Great meetings start with awesome topics. Phil created a great one for his 3.26 Meetup – Content Marketing is the new SEO. I signed on to discuss how important Storytelling is to SEO these days due to Google’s angry insistence on always improving website heuristics such as time on site, pages viewed and number of returning visitors.

Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) signed on to share how she gets engineers at Cisco excited to create content and Casie Gillette (@Casieg) shared amazing tips from her client work as Director of Marketing at KoMarketing.

Watch SEO Raleigh Meetup Google Hangout Video From 3.26

Twitter Analysis

Great event, great audience in the room and virtually via the hangout. I wanted to deep dive into the event’s Twitter patterns to see if some “best practice” guides could be unearthed and debated.

3 Raleigh SEO Twitter Graphs
I manually created a spreadsheet of the top tweeters from the event to answer 3 questions:

1. Who put the most “impressions” into the market for the event?
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2. How many tweets did top tweeters tweet?
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3. What per tweet characteristic did top tweeters share?
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Clutter Marketing

Clutter describes our marketing world these days. What author Seth Godin calls our Connection Economy is creating content so fast most of your customers are overwhelmed, time stressed and short on attention. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted we create as much content every two days now as from the dawn of man until 2003. The world is cluttered and becoming more so every moment. When everyone has a website yours better be GREAT or why bother.

What Makes A Website Great?

Think of the Internet as one huge lie detecting amplifier and you won’t be far off. The web doesn’t create greatness it rewards it. The web doesn’t cure marketing problems it broadcasts them. Before creating a website or next quarter’s campaigns it is  important to know yourself, your company and your important points of distinction – your Unique Selling Proposition.

Unique Selling Proposition Video

Here is an Atlantic BT Conversation I had with Andrew Bartlett one of our business consultants about Unique Selling Propositions:

USPs should use words such as “longest”, “world class”, “leader” and “Best” painting a clear line of distinction between your company and its competitive set.

Atlantic BT Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Atlantic BT creates cross functional teams with deep business and technical expertise to design, develop and employ unique technological processes such as Customer Quality Score (CQS), Employee Quality Score (EQS) and GoTime to develop awesome and award winning software and websites that exceed customer financial and aspirational goals helping clients save the world in some quantifiable way while creating a powerful “word-of-mouth” recommendation growth engine.

Quick Tips To Create Your USP

• Be specific (note the reference to CQS, EQS and GoTime our project time audit trail).
• Think BIG.
• Include your customers.
• Think bottom lines, but don’t be limited to money.
• Leave some mystery to explain later (such as the double meaning of the “word-of-mouth” engine).

Unique Customer Aspirations (UCAs)

Knowing yourself, while an important first step to creating great Internet marketing, is not enough. Your marketing must match your customer’s aspirations or you risk being ships who pass each other at night without ever knowing the other sails nearby. Customer aspirations are more than the resolution of pain points partnering with or buying from your company is sure to resolve.

Aspirations speak to your customers dreams, hopes and fears. Your customer are not always fully in touch with their aspirations, but you and your marketing must be in sync. Every partnership or union of buyer and seller must be mutually beneficial or scale can’t be achieved and the interaction isn’t sustainable. You both (your company and your customers) need to WIN or neither of you do.

Start With Jim Stengel’s Brand Ideals

Jim Stengel, author of Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profits at the World’s Greatest Companies and a fellow former P&Ger, believes brands aligned to “ideals” are more successful than those who are not. I agree and have used Stengel’s simple brand ideals definition over and over.
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Stengel’s Brand Ideals

• Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility.
• Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways.
• Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences.
• Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, strength, security, and vitality.
• Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, including by challenging the status quo and redefining categories.

Most companies work will touch several of Stengel’s brand ideals. Atlantic BT’s work designing software and websites touches every brand ideal in some way, but our work is concentrated in creating connection. The websites and software we develop helps our customers connect with  supporters, buyers and advocates.

Atlantic BT Unique Customer Aspirations (UCA)
Atlantic BT’s customers want to understand the “inside baseball” secrets of Internet marketing well enough to be able to expand their thinking about how to communicate their Unique Selling Proposition to create the word-of-mouth and social support needed to sustain an ever more profitable company, brand or distribution of products via online marketing.

Quick Tips for Creating Unique Customer Aspirations

• Remember UCAs is about how your customers are changed by your interaction.
• Speak to universal concerns such as scale, profitability and brand health.
• Speak to what is happening now such as social media marketing and always changing Internet marketing.
• Tie in your Stengel brand ideal.
• Be specific to what YOU can impact.

Your customers have many aspirations, but focus your UCA on those aspirations you can impact. Knowing how your company aligns to Stengel’s brand ideas, articulating your USP and UCA creates an outline for great marketing online and off.

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* Image at top of this post is a painting from Shepard Fairey named Duality of Humanity and is part of his “Obey” series.

Magic at TED

It never ceases to amaze. During a serendipitous conversation with Red Maxwell, the Brand Doctor, he did it again. The last time, several years ago, we were having lunch discussing my obsession with altruism in marketing.

Red began to share broad stokes of, “An amazing guy I just had lunch with at TED”.  I realized he was describing one of the three legs of my new altruism stool – Michael Shermer author of Mind of the Market. The other two legs (at that time) were Robert Wright’s NonZero and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (turns out the selfish gene isnot be as selfish as the title implies).

Today Red shared a great story about helping rocker Amanda Palmer. Red’s latest random share comes two days after I wrote a long a long post on Google Plus, a note to Amanda (below) and thanked my friend Phil Buckley (@1918) for sharing Amanda’s TED presentation on the ASK and the GIVE (embedded below).

The Ask and the Give

Red helped Amanda rehearse. I shared how confident and sure her pace was in the video, how calm. “She was scared to death,” Red told me humanizing Amanda. You see nothing but a beautifully paced, practiced storyteller at the height of her craft on the video:

Lessons For Every Marketer

“Cool and everything Marty,” I can hear some readers thinking, “but what is in this story of the rocker and brand doctor for my company or personal brand?” Red and Amanda created a nexus presentation, a presentation that beautifully connects themes let’s wrap and pack as Save The World Marketing including.

• The line between FOR PROFIT and NONPROFIT is fading fast (core idea).
• Everyone who used to only ASK will need to GIVE (implication 1).
• Everyone who used to only GIVE will need to ASK (implication 2).
• The NATURE of ASK and GIVE is changing fast (see David Amerland).
• The TRUST necessary for ASK and GIVE is key (see Mark Traphagen).
• When choice spreads toward infinity, we buy from those we LOVE (Me).
• Be remarkable or be obsolete (Red Maxwell).
• Give your art away and it comes back to you (Amanda Palmer, Seth Godin).
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Trust, Love & ART > Money: Godin’s The Icarus Deception

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Memories and hearts belong to LOVE and love is many things boring, ordinary and routine almost never.
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Amanda Palmer Is An Artist.

Here is the quote from Amanda’s video I listened carefully to hear and copy after Phil tagged me on his Facebook share of Amanda’s TED Talk:

The perfect tools are not going to help us if we can’t face each other and receive fearlessly and more important to ASK WITHOUT SHAME”. (emphasis mine).

I would add, “…and give without expectation”. How do we eliminate SHAME and EXPECTATIONS? We need to rethink some core capitalist ideas such as:

• Zero-sum – I win by your losing. (NonZero)
• Competition – Can we collaboratively compete?
• THEM and US – Lines are disappearing fast.
• Control – Who is in charge here? A: The sentient mob.
• ROI – What does a GIVE and ASK P&L look like?
• Exchange – “currencies” abound how do we “pay” or get “paid”.
• TRUST – How gained/lost in our Social + Mobile times?

Quite a list and I am sure I’ve left things important out. Good enough list to realize everything we KNEW or thought we understood is gone. I’m listening to REM’s End of the World as We Know It and it feels appropriate, on point and true.

The end of the marketing world as we’ve known it, and I feel fine.

I feel fine because Amanda, Red and friends with good brains and rhythm are singing a new tune, the song of GIVE and ASK.

Before Red’s wife called her tired husband, Red was in New York, I asked him to please assure Amanda Palmer I am not a stalker just have too much enthusiasm combined with too little time. Here is the message I sent Amanda on Facbook after being moved by her TED presentation:

Amanda my friend Phil Buckley shared your ted talk knowing I am working on Cure Cancer Starter, a crowdfunding platform for cancer research (I have leukemia).

I think Phil thought I would love that you were so successful crowdfunding on Kickstarter. I am as it gives Cure Cancer Starter hope for raising cancer research donations, but your eloquence on becoming comfortable with GIVING and ASKING hit home too.

Cancer is somewhat analogous to your experience as the 8 foot woman. Cancer Patients MUST ask for help. To do anything else is foolish and means we (cancer patients) exit faster. Like you I’ve NEVER been disappointed by asking.

This is not to say I’ve achieved everything desired. I rode a bicycle across America in the hope we could raise $50K for cancer research, we raised almost $30K. Am I disappointed? Not at all. I remember the doctor in Savannah TN who peeled a $100 bill of his cash and handed it to me, “To help with expenses” he said. And it did. There were expenses believe me. We were not unlike a touring band for 60 days living in an RV and riding a little bit further everyday.

The ASK and GIVE is always more generous on both sides than either realizes at first. Connection is more valuable than MONEY. I spent last week changing all the designations on my life savings to the Story of Cancer Foundation. Nothing makes an idea ring like a clear bell on a quiet morning as much as changing things that will happen when  you are gone (lol).

I am no Bill Gates. Allocating “retirement” funds to do good, THE GIVE, made not living until 80 feel meaningful. I don’t feel owed something I am unlikely to get but I am receiving something valuable I wasn’t owed. The GIVE without expectation of a quid pro quo return is grace.

Long note to say THANKS for your moving definition of what I’m going to do with the rest of my life – ASK and GIVE.

I like to tell my friends they ROCK when they do some amazing thing. In your case you do ROCK and in more ways than you know or realize.

Thanks,

Marty

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Finding Search Engine Gamification Again

There it was again. Sitting with friends Tonia Zampieri (@Finder411) Mark Traphagen (@MarkTraphagen), Melinda Thielbar (@Mthielbar) and George Stevenson (@NCHomeBuyer) an old idea surfaced during our Saturday Free Internet Marketing Consulting lunch at Saladelia Cafe in Durham.

Tonia is co-founder of Finder411.com, a cool hyper-local startup, Mark is one of the preeminent experts on Google Plus, Melinda is my favorite quant and George knows how to help “sell” your home by renting to buy. We were discussing TRUST. I see why now (lol). Not long after our meeting Mark published Trust: The Currency of the New Economy on NewMediaLeaders.com. A must read for anyone wanting to understand Internet marketing.

In Google We Trust

Google is one of the most important TRUST creators in our digital age. Google is a massive legitimacy filter. If you aren’t in Google and don’t rank #1 for your name you don’t have as much legitimacy as if you did. Despite all of our Social + Mobile changes Google still rocks valuable branding support, the kind of support any startup or idea needs to scale and thrive.

This post is about a slip in time I saw working for Bill Bing and Mitesh Patel at Loyalese (now RIP unfortunately). This “slip in time” idea will be worth millions to the team who reads this Search Engine Gamification post, understands the marketing implications and pulls off this big idea – that Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can become valuable partners in SEO.

Search Engine Gamification Defined

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) may be the biggest game ever. Search Engine Gamification (SEG) is understanding the game’s rules well enough to enlist the services and support of the KING (Google). It is good to be the king because Kings set and change rules at their whim and based on their needs. Certainly kings don’t RULE with the iron hand they used too, but rule they do as Google proves with each Panda and Penguin algorithm adjustment. Another Panda update hit last week, btw coolest tool to see impact on your website’s traffic of Google’s algorithm changes is the free Panguintool.com tool.

Inside “Search Engine Gamification” there is an implied idea few know and fewer still use. Search engine gamification makes Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) an active partner in your branding and Internet marketing. Once Google created their “float”, that you and I see different results even if we type the same query at the same time, the ability to view SERPs as another feature in YOUR Internet marketing sits like a big, green frog waiting for someone to kiss it and produce the Prince inside.

How Loyalese Kissed The Search Engine Gamification Frog

My friends Bill and Mitesh kissed the frog and produced an amazing prince with Loyalese. I consulted on Loyalese before joining Atlantic BT. I failed a little too. I tried to pivot Loyalese inside of the box presented instead of seeing what I see now – the engine Loyalese built was more valuable than the thing itself. Loyalese “kissed the frog” by connecting browsers, SERPs and website in an infrastructure-like platform, a platform capable of spinning SERPs in a website’s favor based on social signals and THAT realization is the “moneyball”.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is how Loyalese created Search Engine Gamification to alert members to websites whose affiliate money could be paid as tax free “cash back” to members (or their charities):

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Loyalese tied their app to “schema” provided by Google (and available to anyone) to identify member stores (the little Loyalese Logo the green things highlighted above). Stores with the logo were willing to pay Loaylese and their members to BUY from them. Loyalese members earned post purchase “cash back”. Loyalese’s idea was somewhat similar to my friend Tim Storm’s FatWallet.com website (without the Google touch). This post isn’t about affiliate money or chasing cash back, but almost any online purchase, unless you type the URL DIRECTLY into your browser, earns a middleman website a “commission” for sharing your click and subsequent purchase with websites such as Amazon, REI, and Walmart.

Loyalese faced a “login” challenge. Nothing happened UNTIL a Loyalese member logged into Loyalese.com. Since many people login to Facebook or Google in the morning and stay logged in all day now, tapping into the Facebook and Google APIs would reduce much of the “login friction” Loyalese faced three years ago. Add the “always on” ubiquitous nature of Social + Mobile (SMobile) and Loyalese might work today. Other similar plays such as FatWallet.com and QuidCo.com have scaled (and without the powerful Google touch).

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Million Dollar Search Engine Gamification Idea and The Trust Mark Game

We know websites are being replaced by platforms capable of generating increasing amounts of User Generated Content (UGC). We also know that “login via Facebook” et al. is ubiquitous and an easy and FAST way to sign up new users taking full advantage of OPP (Other People’s scaled Platforms). Add these two facts together with the ability to TAG and FLAG the SERPs with a trust mark and you have a million dollar B2B and/or B2C idea.

Trust is the game all Internet marketing depend on. If a website achieves TRUST it can get PAID. Atlantic BT creates websites for B2B and B2C customers. If we create Search Engine Gamification and enlist the SERPs by tying browser, to member profiles to search results we gamify Google.

Imagine I own a 3 store gift chain called MartysGifts.com. I hire Atlantic BT to build my website. Once we create MartysGifts.com it is part of our “ecosystem”. When other members use Google they see a distinct Atlantic BT trust mark next to MartysGifts.com (see Loyalese example above).

“Yeah but the only people who will see the Trust mark are other Atlantic BT customers,” you might be thinking and you might be right, but do the Search Engine Gamification math.

Search Engine Gamification Six Degrees Math

1,000 Stores (in Atlantic BT’s ecosystem)
50 People (directly associate with each store)
50,000 people (in the “direct touch” zone of those websites)
300,000 people (in “indirect touch” zone of those websites)

We live in a “triangle” of three cities: Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. The combined population of those three cities is 700,000, so the Atlantic BT’s ecosystem (our “network”) can touch almost half of the residents in our area. What is that level of reach worth to MartysGifts? If you were considering two Raleigh website design companies and one supported your site after the sale with an ability to touch half the people in your area and the other didn’t who would you buy the design from? Now multiply that realization times a million and you see the impact of Search Engine Gamification.

Search Engine Gamification Works For Every Website

Think my example doesn’t apply to your Small to Medium Sized business? You don’t have enough people who will want to “join” your website to make the idea worth anything.

WRONG!

First understand “joining” your website is a simple click of “allow” when the Facebook “create an account with Facebook” app fires. You may be a doctor, lawyer, insurance salesperson or Realtor.  I would NEVER presume to tell any of those professions how to do their jobs, but anyone with a mouse tells me how to create winning Internet marketing (lol).I don’t mind, but I’ve NEVER met an amateur who understands how the Internet marketing game is played.

There are GIFTED amateurs, but the Internet marketing game is a “pros only” zone now. Even pros can fall behind, be too arrogant for their own good or make MISTAKES. The difference between PRO Internet marketers and gifted amateurs is about 5 degrees, but those five degrees are worth MILLIONS and MILLIONS of X where x is traffic, awareness, User Generated Content (UGC), attention, money or any other “currency”.

“But I don’t need something so elaborate, so complicated,” some will be thinking and they may be right. Over the 13 years I’ve been an Internet marketer I watched the bar rise, rise and rise. My Internet marketing friends LOOK FOR keywords and business verticals that are winnable with the “inside baseball” tactics they know. Listen to Gregory Ng explain why he crated FreezerBurns.com.

Gregory created a successful website now generating six figures in income yearly NOT because he loved frozen entrees. Gregory is a PRO and he entered the frozen food content marketing play because IT WAS TAKE-ABLE  He could do a little work, the kind of content marketing and SEO he knows better than most, to generate a big return.

Who will be the Gregory NG of your space? Death, taxes and your space will be rolled up by a PRO are life’s new immutable truths. The question is not IF your business segment will be rolled up but WHEN. Why don’t YOU do the rolling?

“Roll Up” means a particular thing to a PRO IMer. Rolling up a space is when your website’s content and links own the search engine high ground. Google is shifting more and more traffic to your website because it is  the HUB associated with a group of keywords or a business vertical. HUB or Authority status is Internet marketing nirvana.

Badging the SERPs makes any website with a badge  OR any site creating the badges look BIGGER and MORE LEGITIMATE than competitors. Short distance from looking more legitimate to being more valuable in a highly viral and inter-linked content network. The Search Engine Gamification “Sell the Idea” benefit PALES in comparison to those who use Search Engine Gamification (SEG) to create TRUST and LEGITIMACY.

Tonia and Finder411 could offer an awesome value to every triangle “hyper-local” business (restaurants, dry cleaners, childcare) who joins their network. Finder411 could paint the local SERPs with “Finder411 Trust Marks” making those websites and businesses inside their ecosystem stand out ON GOOGLE. When Finder411 businesses stand out the path to TRUST and LEGITIMACY is shorter than for non_Finder411.com businesses.

Q: What is this search engine gamification idea worth? A: Millions and Millions.

PS. I didn’t give this idea to the world. Bill and Mitesh at Loyalese deserve credit for teaching me (and I am sure they had mentors). I got back in touch with the idea thanks to my Free Internet Marketing Consulting Saturday conversation with Tonia, Mark, Melinda, George and joined by Young Fenton. What do I ask if you create Search Engine Gamification and make millions? Share some of your windfall with cancer research and we will call it more than even.

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