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Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Many entrepreneurs spend time and money increasing their website traffic or search engine ranking, yet pay little or no attention to how many of these visitors actually buy their product or service. Improving your website’s conversion rate is more time and cost effective than trying to bring in new traffic. In this article, I’ll show you the nine adjustments I make to help websites improve their conversion rates.

Before you begin, you must know your numbers. Tracking key metrics of your website’s performance will enable you to make educated marketing decisions. What is measured gets improved. Some benchmarks to start with include:

* Number of visitors
* Number of sales
* Average order amount
* Cost per visit
* Profit per visit
* Customer lifetime value

Once you begin tracking these numbers in Excel or a similar program, you can see the improvement caused by the changes you make.

Step #1: Add Rapport
Trying to sell a visitor on a first visit is like asking someone to marry you the first time you meet. Build relationships by sharing knowledge and giving away value before you try to close the sale.

Step #2: Remove Distractions
Anything that does not directly contribute to making a sale should be removed from your webpage. Reduce the number of clicks it takes to go from the landing page to the sale receipt page.
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The top 8 ways to promote your website free or at next to no cost:

1. Post links on other web sites. In addition to trading links, you can also trade banner ads.

2. Include your web site URL in your e-zine. When people read each issue you can remind them to visit your web site.

3. Share your web site on message boards, e-mail discussion lists and chat rooms. When people know about your web site, they will regularly and search and look for new products to buy.

4. Write articles and submit them to e-zines, web sites and magazines that accept article submissions. Include your web site address at the end of the article.

5. Give away an electronic freebie with your web site address in it. Allow your friends to also give the freebie away. This will help increase your web site’s exposure.

6. Participate in message boards and forums. Post answers to other people’s questions, ask questions and post appropriate information. Include a predefined signature file (with your web site URL) at the end of all your postings.

7. Post your ad on free advertising sites. You can post it on free classified ad sites, free for all link sites, newsgroups that allow ads, free yellow page directories, and more…
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In a recent thread at webmasterworld, when asked if members had 10 people to assist promoting their website, what would they do. This interesting question produced the surprising answer by one member that they would have 9 people writing articles and one person linking.

Articles are a great way to get theme related one-way links, linkable content and can be contracted for around $10 per 400 – 500 word article. Prices vary though, and so does the range of qualifications.

Article writing, like link building, is an excellent candidatate for outsourcing, or perhaps more correctly, Outtasking.

Why Outsource?

Oursourcing is great because you can purchase services you need when you need them. You don’t have to worry about meeting payroll, or providing computers, desks or equipment. While a freelancer is researching and writing you can take care of other things.

Often, a freelancer represents a group, allowing you access to the more resources and expertise.

Misconceptions

One of the biggest misconceptions is you can ‘just give it to them’ and it will all be good. Nothing can be futher from the truth. In fact, the more time and effort you put into it, the better the chances of success.

Example Project of 10 articles.

Before talking to my partners in the Philippines, I research keywords and use the keywords to set up the titles and content of the articles. This usually gives me 6 or 8 of the article titles. Since not all articles get syndicated, I go to several articles syndication sites and research which articles in my area have the most links in YAHOO. This give more data for article topics and titles and general tone. Next, I decide what type of article suits the titles best. Is it to be a “information about this” article or a “how to” article with a bulleted list of actions the reader can take right now?

Once all this has been written out, I send it to my partner and ask to see 4 or 5 articles right away so that I can confirm everything is on track.

Or course, I have specified in advance the articles must be original, and I make periodic checks to make sure. Once you have dealt with a freelancer a few times you can ease up, but it still pays to check all the time.

Don’t use software

There are lots of people offering software that scrapes article syndication sites and/or the web for content, re-arranges it, and spits out hundreds of articles. My experience is it would have been easier and certainly faster to write the articles myself, or hire someone to do it.

Automated re-writes of scraped content seems to work on the Search Engines for now, but how long it is going to last is anyone’s guess. The achilles heel of automation is that it has to use templates and will always leave a footprint that other automated systems (ie bots & crawlers) can easily detect.
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SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic and profits. That being said, you need to understand the inherent conflict that can arise with SEO.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords. Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.
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