Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category
Search engine traffic – what marketer doesn’t want more of it? In the online world, good quality traffic equates to having the top spot at the shopping mall. So just how do you get more search engine traffic? Here are our top tips:
#1 – Write and distribute articles
You may have heard this tip already, but it is without a doubt one of the absolute best ways to drive traffic to your website. Each articleyoudistribute to the directories could mean many potential one-way links back to your websites. This means more visitors who read your content and click over for more information. But it also means higher ranking within the search engines themselves. Search engines love incoming one-way links, and the more articles you distribute the more back links you’ll get.
#2 – Optimize your website
Search engines are sophisticated but they still can’t find your website unless you optimize it fully. Ensure all your pages include a title tag, the appropriate keywords and a short description about your website. A clear navigation structure as well as a thorough site map will also help both the search engines and your human visitors find you.
#3 – Write great content
Great website content is to search engines what honey is to bees. They absolutely love it. The content on your website should be helpful, informative and as up-to-date as possible. Adding regular fresh content will be appreciated by your human visitors as well as the search engines.
#4 – Do your keyword research
Search engines and human visitors use keywords to find your website. Your keywords are the lifeblood of your business. It pays to take a little extra time to get this step right. Some keywords can bring thousands of repeat customers to your website for years. Other keywords won’t be found or rated at all. Use a good keyword tool like Word Tracker to find the ultimate keywords for your market. Then use them on your website intertwined with fantastic quality content.
Getting quality search engine traffic does take a little work, but it’s very well worth it in the long run. Taking the time to set up your website properly from the start will pay you back over and over again.
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
Pay-per-click advertising campaigns like Google’s AdWords is still one of the most effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. However, it can take a bit of trial and error to get your campaign working the way you want it to. Here are some successful pay-per-click advertising tips to help you skip the error and get right to the profits.
#1 Put your keywords in your headline
This is important. People are searching by keywords and keyword phrases. When your keywords are in your title they notice your ad. It stands out.
#2 Make your headline really capture attention
In addition to your keywords, you really want to go get the biggest bang for your buck with those 25 characters. Grab attention with controversy, questions, or hard-hitting emotional copy. Know your USP and use it to craft a compelling headline.
#3 Place the benefit directly under the headline
With most PPC ads you get four lines of copy. You get the headline. You get two lines of copy and then you get your URL. With Google AdWords you get 25 characters for the headline and 35 for each respective line of copy and then your URL. Placing the benefit of your product, service or offer under the headline holds their attention long enough that they read the next line.
#4 Place your features and/or call to action on the second line of copy
For example, credibility can be demonstrated with data: "5000 Satisfied Customers" or "Spend the Day with 6 Bestselling Authors". The third line of your ad leaves room to add credibility or to mention specific features. It also leaves room for a call to action like “Call Now” or “Learn More.” With the URL placed directly beneath this sentence, the action is clear.
#5 When it makes sense, combine your two lines of copy into one sentence
For example, “25 things you don’t know about your spouse’s thoughts but should Learn his secrets now” With the quotes that has 74 characters. It includes a call to action and some pretty emotionally driven copy if you doubt your relationship or your spouse.
#6 Don’t waste space on punctuation unless it serves a selling purpose
You only have a few characters to work with in a PPC ad; don’t worry about commas and periods. Use capitalization to help divide thoughts and phrases.
#7 This is perhaps the single most important tip – test and track your PPC results
Learn what headlines work best. What calls to action work best? What URLs work best? Test and track everything. The more you fine-tune your PPC ads, the better results you’ll get for your money.
#8 Switch it up
Running the same ad forever will not generate the same results forever. Keep it fresh by occasionally running a new and different advertisement.
#9 Remember, it’s not just about the CTR (click-through rating), it’s also about the conversions
You want to make sure that the people who are clicking through to your website are also paying customers. If you have 1000 people clicking through a day but no one is buying, then the ad needs to be adjusted to attract only qualified prospects. (You might also want to tweak your sales copy.)
PPC advertising isn’t rocket science. However, it can take a bit of time to find the magic formula for your audience and goals. The best results are found when you target specific keywords with a well-written ad designed to attract a specific type of customer or prospect. The key to success, therefore, is found in the details and the planning. Know what you want to achieve before you try to write an ad to accomplish it.
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
Often times internet marketers go to all the trouble of having great sales copy, a great process like email sign-ups, and so on. What’s the one thing they forget? Their website speed. No matter how good your website is, if it loads slowly you are costing yourself sales. People aren’t willing to wait forever. The load time is one of the main things that impacts the site’s overall usability. Studies have shown that if a site takes more than 4 seconds to load, the visitor will leave. You don’t have long to capture people’s attention. Therefore, if you don’t succeed immediately it won’t get done. And load time helps with SEO as well. Many people don’t realize this, but it’s true. This is because performance is one of the variables the search engines use in their algorithm to rank sites. It might not make a huge difference. However, it does impact your rankings some.
So now that you know the importance of having a fast loading site, how do you speed things up? Here are five tips that work:
#1) Eliminate every image you can
Images are one of the biggest reasons sites take a long time to load. Therefore, eliminate the ones you don’t need. If it doesn’t enhance the look and feel of the site, get rid of it.
#2) Shrink your images
Big images slow things down. So after you’ve done the first step, you need to make your remaining images smaller. Do the same for other content. Getting rid of all unnecessary content is key for speeding up your site. Many sites contain lots of filler content that could easily be gotten rid of. This could mean pictures, videos, and so on - not simply written content.
#3) Declutter the code
Getting rid of unnecessary line breaks and other things in the code will help your site to load faster. Again, this might not make a huge difference, but every little bit counts.
#4) Get a good host
Your site can’t perform to its optimum if it has a bad hosting company. The majority of hosting firms are good enough for sites that don’t get a lot of visitors. However, it’s when your traffic increases that you will notice a difference. When your site starts to slow down, try changing hosting plans or companies. You might find your speed issues disappear altogether.
#5) Eliminate unnecessary widgets
Often when you put something on your site like AdSense or a Twitter feed, you will see a slowdown. Therefore, test the site with and without it, and see how much of a difference it makes. If it slows things down dramatically, and it’s not increasing your profits, you will probably want to get rid of it.
The bottom line is, there are a number of steps you can take to increase your site speed. Implement these five tips and you will see results soon.
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
A lot of people don’t realize it, but there is a huge difference between passive and non-passive income. With non-passive income, the second you stop working, the money stops coming in. With passive, you can do whatever you want and the money keeps on coming.
Most people have the “job mentality.” In other words, they believe you always have to work to make money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Money is only half the equation. The other half is time. Somebody who is making one hundred dollars a year and works eighty hours a week is much less powerful than someone who makes the same amount but only works four hours a week. This is because the second person has far more time to be able to spend their money. So passive income should be the goal. This will free up your so you can spend it living your dreams, instead of doing mandatory income-producing work.
What’s the best passive income strategy? There are a number that work. Here are three of the best:
#1) Stock investing
This is one of the most famous examples of passive income. Here you simply invest a certain amount of money in stocks. All the profit that comes from that is achieved entirely without effort. However, not all stock investing is passive. For instance, day trading requires you to constantly be buying and selling to earn money. Fundamental analysis does not. This is where you invest with the intention of holding that investment for a long time period. It requires much less effort, and is therefore more conducive to the passive income goal.
#2) Real estate investing
Some forms of real estate investing are better for passive income than others. Renting is the way to go if you want your money to work for you. This is where you would buy some property with financing. As long as you can rent it out for more than you are paying per month, that’s a long-term passive income stream. Then you just keep finding more properties. Flipping is similar to day trading. This is because the only way to keep earning is to continually find more houses to sell. That’s why renting is the best passive income strategy.
#3) Online marketing
The internet is hands down the best place to get passive income. Why? This is because there are so many different ways to achieve it. Think about it: once you find a profitable steam of traffic, you just set it and forget it. That will continue making you money indefinitely. What’s the best way to make money online? It really doesn’t matter what strategy you use, because there are many ways to make passive income. This could be from Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, drop-shipping, selling information products, and so on.
So as you can see, there are a number of ways to make money without lifting a finger. All these methods will require some effort at first. However, as long as you are willing to put forth the initial work, you will benefit for years to come. It’s much smarter to spend your time now investing for the future than to look for the quick buck now, and have nothing down the road.
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
How do you have a successful opt-in email campaign? There are a number of strategies that work. However, here’s a common question: Should you focus on the sale or the opt-in? It’s well known that the vast majority of people won’t buy from you on the first contact. It takes multiple tries. For this reason, your main focus should probably be getting them on your list. So how do you get people on your list, and then convert them to paying customers? Here are two tips that work:
#1) Have a “squeeze page”
Having an opt-in page means that nobody but your most serious customers will see your sales page. Some have even seen great success with double opt-in rates. The problem with putting the opt-in form on the sales page is that it doesn’t require anybody to sign up for your list. Therefore, you are losing a good amount of potential subscribers. Since most people won’t buy until you’ve contacted them multiple times, you are likely leaving money on the table. So the key is to test a number of formats first, and see what works the best. Whichever format pulls the best response is the one you want to keep. Then you can start focusing on driving a lot of traffic. Focus on conversions first, and then getting the traffic. Many people do it the other way around, but this is less likely to be successful.
#2) Give good information
It’s not enough to just get people on your list. You also want to make sure you have an effective auto-responder. In other words, it should be one that converts your prospects to paying customers. How do you achieve that? One thing that often works is to give away a certain number of steps for free. For instance, there might be five steps separating your prospect from the main result they want to achieve. You might give away two or three for free, and then leave the remainder for the product itself. Of course, this would only work with an information product. However, no matter what you are selling, if you focus on educating your customers, profits will be the inevitable results. Be generous. Many people don’t want to give away any good information for free. They think that if they do, people won’t pay for the product. However, the more free value you can create, the more you are going to wet the customers’ appetite for the paid product. If they take action on the first few steps and see good results, they are going to be chomping at the bit to get the whole story. However, if they get no positive results from your free information, they aren’t going to be very motivated to buy the paid product. There is probably nothing better you can do for your business than have an auto-responder.
Implement these two tips, and you will see great results shortly.
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
It seems like everyone and their mother (and grandmother!) has a website these days. That’s why it’s important to be able to build a quality website to help promote your business and sell your products. Here are ten quick tips to help even a novice build a quality site.
1. Know your audience
If you watch the latest hot cartoon and then watch reruns of shows from the 60s, you’re probably going to see not only commercials for different products, but they’re going to be totally different styles. In the same way, a website whose audience is older shouldn’t have things that will appeal to teens or a younger generation. Knowing your audience is the first step to meeting their needs.
2. Keep it simple
Simple websites are not only easier to navigate, they also load faster so your customers don’t get frustrated waiting to find what they’re looking for.
3. Ask for feedback
Always have a way for your users to send you feedback. This will help you make changes your customers want to keep them coming back, and even recommend you to their friends. You can put feedback boxes or questions on different pages, or you can add a message board with a feedback section.
4. Don’t branch out too much
It's best to focus your website on one area or product. If you offer several different products or types of products, you need to have several websites to promote them so visitors aren’t bombarded with things they don’t want.
5. Be consistent
Make each page the same format, font, color, etc to keep visitors from getting confused at where to find what they’re looking for.
6. Be readable
Not only do you need a font that’s readable and colors that don’t hurt the eyes, but it’s also extremely beneficial to have correct spelling and grammar. Customers aren’t likely to stick around if they think you’re lazy or don’t know what you’re talking about.
7. Add RSS feed
Many people keep themselves updated by using RSS feeds instead of checking websites constantly. By adding a RSS feed, you can not only catch these users, you can also tailor feeds specifically for their interests.
8. Keep it current
Besides the danger of having out-of-date information, pages that are updated more often get visited more often, and give you a better chance of keeping more customers.
9. Make things easy to find
Everyone wants things fast, and adding a search box or an easy site map will help them find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
10. Have fun
Ultimately, if you do everything right, but your site is just like every other well-made site, you still may not be able to make money off it. Your site needs to have something unique that reflects who you are and what you can provide.
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
If you want to get your website noticed, the easiest way is to get to the top of popular search engines. While all search engines have different formulas, they all have one thing in common: links. All of these engines base you higher the more high quality sites link to you. That’s why it’s important to get quality links to your site. In addition, links not only bring in search engines rankings, people occasionally follow them too! Here are a few easy ways to get links to your website:
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are designed so people can save their bookmarks online and then share them with their friends, family, business associates, or pretty much anyone. You can also use this to post links to your website. Plus, if other people see your posts, they might just go and recommend your site to someone else.
Online directories
These are like a phonebook for the internet. However, many of them are very selective. They are divided up by type of website so people can find you easily, but since they don’t take everyone, many can provide high quality links to your site as well.
Blogging
If you have blogs you use to promote your business, these can be used to provide links to your related websites. However, if the blog isn’t a quality link, it’s not going to help your site at all. And microblogs like Twitter or commenting on blogs aren’t going to help your rankings either, but they may get traffic directly to your site.
Article Directories
These are online catalogues full of articles free for anyone to copy and use. You put a link back to your site at the bottom of the article. Just remember that if all the content from your site is on article directories as well, it’s going to be less unique and less valuable to search engines. You could choose to only put some of your articles on directories, or you can have two slightly different versions, one for your site and one for directories.
Press releases
If you’re releasing a new product or making some newsworthy change to your business, you can write up a press release and submit it to a news site. Press releases are a great link that will also provide a lot of traffic for your site. Many people will participate in a link exchange instead of, or in addition to, one-way links. This is where you contact someone who already has a web page in your area and ask them to link to your site and in exchange you will link to their site on yours. With link exchange you have to email requesting it and it can take a while for them to reply. It can be very slow and tedious. While one-way links take time, they’re generally an easier way to get guaranteed links from quality sources. In addition, most search engines can find link exchanges and discount their value when determining rankings.
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
An ill-conceived domain name
Your domain name is important. Many business owners make the mistake of neglecting keywords or failing to consider how easy their domain name will be to remember, spell and type into their browser. Make sure to spend time researching and even testing your chosen domain name.
Slow upload times
Flash, dynamic web pages and images that take up too much memory are the major causes of slow download times. The general rule of thumb is to make sure your images are no larger than 10KB. Why is this so important? Your web visitors are impatient people. We’re accustomed to getting instant gratification online, and if a web page takes too long to load, you’ll lose people as they click away.
Neglecting traffic generation strategies
In this day and age it’s silly to expect that just because you have a website means people will automatically visit it. It’s the old “if you build it, they will come” mistake. To have a successful ebusiness, traffic generation tactics are essential. Some strategies to generate traffic include:
- Social networking
- Content marketing
- PPC advertising
- Keyword research and SEO tactics
Messy, difficult to read websites
Website design is crucial. A website that is jam packed with banner ads, unusual and difficult to read fonts, too many colors and distractions will cause your website visitors to leave quickly. Your prospects and customers want an easy to navigate website where everything they want is easy to find. Your website takes their needs into consideration by not barraging them with graphics, advertisements and difficult to read content.
Unclear products and/or services
Have you ever been to a website where you have no idea what they do or provide? Many small business owners make this mistake; they neglect to inform their audience right away, on their landing page, about what they have to offer. Make sure your USP, unique selling proposition, is clear, easy to understand, and available right on your landing page.
Shopping Cart Issues
Abandoned shopping carts are problematic for any business owner. The reason this happens is usually quite apparent. Not enough information about the shopping cart process, requiring too much information (like forcing shoppers to register) and a difficult to understand shopping cart system can all cause people to change their minds and click away – lost sales! Make your purchasing process easy to understand and follow through. Make sure you have a FAQ page to answer commonly asked questions.
Out of date content
Content is an essential aspect of any ebusiness. It helps drive traffic, it provides value and it helps establish you as a credible authority in your industry. If you neglect to provide a constant source of up to date information, all of your business will suffer. You’ll lose traffic and search engine page ranking, your customers and prospects will stop seeking information on your website and you’ll lose credibility. Create a solid content strategy that will ensure you provide regular, valuable content all year long.
Poor customer service
You’ve likely heard the phrase that it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. Good customer service, which includes easy to find contact information, a prompt response time and a FAQ page to address common questions and issues, will go a long way toward keeping your customers. Ticket systems, online chat, and autoresponders are all options to improve your customer service.
Owning and growing an ebusiness is work, but it can be rewarding and profitable if you make sure to steer clear of these common mistakes. To your success!
Deanna Maio, Business Development Strategist & Speaker, teaches women business owners how to grow their business significantly while still having time to live a great life. For FREE tips on how to get more results without working harder, attract more clients, and grow your profits, visit http://www.savvygals.com/
