​Nobody likes to see a high bounce rate on their website - it tells us that we're sending people away rather than pulling them in and sending them through our funnel(s). So, here are some intelligent ways to fix your bounce rate.

​As mentioned above, we want to send the right website visitors through our sales and conversion funnels. If they’re leaving our page right away, that’s never going to happen. But, when it comes to bounce rate, how high is too high?

The idea bounce rate for a website is 26-40%. 41-55% is average. 56-70% is above average. Anything higher is alarming. If you can keep your bounce rate in the green zone - between 26 and 40% - you know your site is optimized and visitors are staying about as long as you can hope. Here’s how you can do it.

[Image source: RocketFuel]

​6 Simple Tricks To Fix A High Bounce Rate on your WordPress site. Well, any site, really. These tricks will help keep'em on site longer.

Click to Tweet

Sample of Google's Page Speed Insights

​Geek ​Recommendation

​My personal favorite theme provider is Thrive Themes. They offer beauitful, speed optimized themes with integrated features many theme providers don't. Ask me how I can get you a free theme.

​Set all external links to open in a new tab if you want people to stay on your page longer.

Ashley Kimler has been helping all sized businesses with their digital marketing for the past decade. She now works with Heroic Search in Tulsa. If you’d like to follow along to see what she and her team get into next, follow @ashleykimler on Twitter.

The post 6 Simple Tricks to Fix a High Bounce Rate on Your WordPress Site appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

So you've launched your blog and setup your very own WordPress website - now all you need to do is create lots of engaging content, sit back, and watch your audience grow, right?

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

WordPress is often touted as the world's most popular open-source software - in fact, approximately 25 percent of all websites use WordPress, making it equally popular among hackers looking to wreak havoc.

The good news is that securing your WordPress site is relatively simple, quick, and affordable - in most cases, all you need to invest is a little time.

Here's five easy ways to boost the security of your WordPress site:

A reliable security plugin is an always-on security system for your WordPress site - think of it like your own personal cyber-guard.

​One of the leading security plugins for WordPress websites is Wordfence, and it's available in both a light, free version, and a robust, premium paid version that includes features like country-specific blocking, password audits, and a spam filter for your comment feed.

Regularly backing up your WordPress site can save you a world of heartache if your site gets hacked or you accidentally lock yourself out of your own site (it happens more often than you'd think).

Check out Updraft Plus, BackUpWordPress, and WP Time Capsule - the latter two are completely free, while Updraft Plus offers both free and paid versions.​

One of the hallmarks of a WordPress site hack is repeated login attempts, and today's hackers use complex automated scripts to crack your password using a technique that's often referred to as 'brute force'.

Unlike with popular social media sites, online banking sites, and even your email account, WordPress allows unlimited login attempts - that's why it's a good idea to us a login blocking plugin like Jetpack.

The right WordPress hosting company can make a world of difference when it comes to your ability to grow both your WordPress site and your audience. Pricing ranges from under $50 per year to over $60 per month, so be sure to shop around before signing up with a host.

If you're using your WordPress site to sell a product or service, look for a host that offers Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) - it's that little green padlock that appears on your address bar to let you know the site you're on is safe and secure.​

Honorable Mentions​

Another WordPress plugin that's worth mentioning is Cloudflare - it's a content delivery network (CDN) that acts like a virtual 'bouncer' for your WordPress site. With Cloudfare, visitors to your WordPress site are automatically screened to see if they are legitimate web users or hackers. The hackers are blocked, while visitors are given access to your content through a fast, local data center, resulting in better security and a better user experience.

With a little up-front work, you can help keep the bad guys out of your WordPress site, increase your audience base, and sleep a little better at night.​

Sam Martin - Daily content & marketing grinder @ Hosting.co.uk online @ FaceBook - focused on making the customer journey simple, technology lover, dog caring human.

The post 5 Simple Ways To Secure Your WordPress Site appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

WordPress is what I teach my 1 on 1 coaching students who want to learn blogging, online branding and building traffic to their small business websites.

But I’m getting a lot of complaints from them about how “hard it is” to do WordPress updates, and keep the plugins and themes current. And it doesn’t matter if it’s easy to me, my clients don’t feel the same way. So I decided to do something about that.

Outsource Your WordPress Worries

I created a new “service plan” that allows my clients to “outsource” the part of managing their blog that they didn’t like. To me. I call it My Personal WP Geek.

This new service allows you to select the things you don’t want to do, and outsource them to me on a weekly or monthly basis. Include as many or as few of these services as you want and let me keep the plugins playing nice so they don’t break something. How many times have you updated a plugin and had it break something else? Or have the plugin you just updated, stop working altogether?

Well, no more.

WordPress Expert Access

There’s nothing quite like haveing a WordPress expert to reach out to when you do have a problem (just include the geek hour option on the plan).

Backup and Restore

And if you select the backup option, you can have me restore from backup in the event your site was wiped out by a hardware faliure or an online hack. I will make any restore requests a priority as well, since I know having your site up and working for you is your top priority.

Site and Security Review

As a part of initializing our service agreement, I will perform a security audit and make suggestions (as well as implement) updates to harden your site using WordPress and site best practices.

Uptime Monitoring

Uptime monitory the part of the plan that monitors your site (every 5 minutes) to make sure it’s still online and working correctly. If I get a report that it’s down, you’ll get an email or SMS notificaiton so that you are then able to take steps to get your site back online. Need help with that? Just include the Geek Hour option on your plan and immediately after the notification, I will get started doing what it takes to get it back online.

Just click the My Personal WP Geek link and let me get started backing up, updating, monitoring and managing the updates you need to stay secure, safe and unbroken.

The post Stop Fighting WordPress Updates Before You Break Something appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

Before you can increase website traffic, and improve your online marketing and personal branding, you really need to know a few things. Installing a way to track traffic is the first step in learning how to increase website traffic.

Today, I wanted to address a little bit about tracking traffic, a necessary component to improving your online marketing and branding efforts. That’s tracking where your visitor comes from (how they found you) and where they go within your site. Their navigation path is a wealth of information if you will take the time to follow along.

What page are they on when they lose interest and move on? That one website tracking metric alone could be worth a sack of gold coins to you if you know what to do with it.

There are quite a few different types of website tracking scripts and plugins you can use for your blog, but for today, let’s not get fancy… let’s get detailed.

Tracking Traffic with Google Analytics

Google is probably the single best form of traffic tracking you can have on your site. Multiple views into the exact traffic patterns of your visitors — means understanding how to increase your blog traffic If you know what is working, do more of that. See what’s failing? Do less of that.

It does require a Google Analytics or Adwords account though. If you haven’t taken the plunge on one or both of those yet, it’s time.

There are a few reports that I strongly recommend you get into the habit of checking if you are a blogger (which you are or you probably wouldn’t be reading my site).

1. Referring Sites
   This report is especially important to you if you and your blog are heavy into social media sites like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon. This tells you exactly which domain referred traffic to your website.
2. Keywords
   You are spending your nights optimizing for specific keywords (right?) so use this report to tell you if you are succeeding or not. What other keywords are being used to find you? How many visitors are coming from each keyword? It’s all here.
3. Content by Title
   We all want to know what posts are being read and this report will tell you. It’s worth paying attention to the “Time on Page” and “Bounce Rate” columns, since a short time on page and high bounce rate might indicate a page driving visitors away from your blog. A quick look at this report is also a great way to generate that “Most Popular Posts” list.
4. New vs Returning
   This report details your visitors into two major segments. New visitors (meaning first time only) and returning visitors. Again, a wealth of knowledge can be gleaned just from the fact your fans come back (or don’t).
5. Map Overlay
   You’ll probably have to drill down to the country level for it to be useful, but knowing where your readers are in the world can be important information. You may discover that your audience is more international or localized than you would have guessed, allowing you to better target the content and timing of your posts. Are all of your visitors in Arizona? Time your post for 8:00 MST so it’s at the top of their feed readers in the morning.

The Google Analytics interface allows you to save these reports to your dashboard (using the “Add to Dashboard” button at the top left), so you can quickly review your favorite reports without all the fuss.

For more advanced tricks, here is a PDF I found on the net that I used to get up to speed on some of the other features. It goes into a lot of detail so print it and keep it handy: Complete Google Analytics Power Users Guide

Tracking Traffic With FireStats Plugin

I love Firestats for the quick views and immediate traffic patterns that are visible when you view the dashboard. There are a few sections to the statistics tab, all of which I review pretty frequently.

• Status
  There are only four numbers in this section. Visits in last 24 hours (think unique people here), Page view in the last 24 hours (what those people looked at), Visits (unique people since the plugin was installed) and Page views (unique pages viewed since the beginning of time – or rather since you installed Firestats). While it doesn’t have the detail of Google Analytics, I use this plugin more for a brief overview type look-see.
• Recent Referrers
  Again, think overview here… this section shows the top 10 domains that are referring traffic your way. There are three settings in this section you can change. The number of items to show (10 in this example, but can be anything you specify), the number of days to include in the view and how you want it sorted (most hits first, or most recent first).
• Search Terms
  One of my favorite sections, this tells me how my visitors found me. Exactly what keywords were typed at Google (or MSN or Bing or Yahoo) to get to one of my pages. Like Recent Referrers, there are a couple of settings… Number of items to show and time period to include. First time I looked at this data over a 90 day period blew my mind. People were finding me on keywords I hadn’t realized I was even optimizing for.
• Recent Popular Pages
  Again, 5,000 foot overview here… but which of my pages are getting the most views? Typically, the blog’s index will be on top as the logical entrance point into the blog, but sometimes and well optimized page or one that went viral on the social media circuit can out weigh even the root domain.

Like Google Analytics, there are also views into my visitors machines, operating systems, browsers, and country of origin to help me understand my target audience a little better.

There isn’t a reporting mechanism yet, but the daily view is very intriguing to me and worth the time to review from time to time.

You can start tracking traffic by downloading FireStats for WordPress here.

Tracking Traffic With Psychic Search

Not strictly a tracking metric, this plugin shows me what my visitors were searching for on my site, once they got here. This is more about learning what they want from me, once they find me, than how they found me.

And this can be very powerful information if you think about it. They found my site because of a keyword they typed in, but once they got to explore a little and see what I offered, it prompted them to look closer. For something specific. Hear me?

Now, all I have to do is deliver what they are looking for. Can you say … this is my next post?

You can get Psychic Search from MaxBlogPress right here. And check out some of the other plugins he offers. I use two or three of his since they are so well written, do exactly what they say they will do and are a bloggers best friend.

Okay, this isn’t all the traffic tracking I use, but this does represent the minimum I put on each blog.

I also use Where Did They Go From Here? A WordPress plugin modeled on the Amazon feature that helps them sell millions of dollars of products by placing unique views into their other products. Same concept, you just show them that visitors that read XYZ also enjoyed ABC. But that isn’t really about tracking traffic either, and is probably best served by a post all its own.

The post Tracking Traffic: Where Do They Come From, Where Do They Go? appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

So, to help me see the process and organize my thinking, I created a MindMap as I came across information. It wound up being broken into 10 different ways of pulling in traffic. And while a couple of them aren’t directly about driving traffic (like testing and tracking), without these steps, you’re spitting into the wind.

To help you, if you are attempting the same thing, I both made a video briefly explaining the 10 ways, and am making the MindMap available in four forms. Pick the one that works best for you. You can also interact with the MindMap below the video. I hope this helps someone out there in Internet Marketing Land.

Complete Explanation Video On
The 10 Surefire Ways Of Getting More Traffic

Download/Review The MindMap and/or eBook

To help with those who “consume” information differently, I’ve provided the content in a variety of formats. Download the one (or more) that works for you. I would also appreciate it if you could share it on any one of your social networks.

• eBook of content and links in PDF Format
• Audio version of the eBook and Video
• Adobe PDF Format (zoomable)
• 10 Ways Of Getting More Traffic JPG Image
• FreeMind Compatible Version of MindMap
• Download Free Version of FreeMind MindMap Software
• 10 Ways Of Getting More Traffic Actual MindMap at MindMeister

MindMap Of 10 Ways Of Getting More Traffic

There is a link above for seeing the map at the MindMeister site. This is an embed allowing you to interact (limited) with the map. Feel free to visit the live map, make a copy for yourself if you like.

Use your arrow keys (start with Right Arrow to advance) to walk through the Slideshow I setup. The links within the mindmap are clickable while in the slideshow!

Let Me Hear Your Experiences

Since I do have a pretty big project upcoming, would love to hear if you’ve found something else that works. And please, no spam comments about adding spam comments! For the love of Pete, legit suggestions please.

The post 10 Authentic Ways Of Getting More Traffic appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

Wait, what?

During the course of the research into the issue, he discovered suing people for penalties has become a business model. There are companies springing up which crawl sites looking for images that a photographer has copyrighted. Once found, they contact the copyright holder and suggest they can help. They, in fact, attempt to extort fees and penalties on behalf of the copyright holder with cleverly worded email’s and easy to use claim payment pages.

When he called the number in the email to explain the image the threatening letter “claimed” was the exclusive right of their client, wasn’t in fact exclusive and had been purchased from another site he met with a brick wall. A rude, loud and obnoxious “agent” refused to back down, threatened legal action and various other time consuming tasks for him to prove his ownership of the image in question. Needless to say, they went round-and-round.

Rather than deal with the continued harassment and continue wasting valuable man-hours, my client paid the fee. Which to my mind is a form of extortion. This company, no doubt receives a portion of the fees and penalties they collect. And many site owners are no doubt going to be intimidated into forking over the funds, even if they own the image rights, but can’t readily find their license info.

Image Review Suggested

I’ve setup a few sites. Clients often didn’t want to, or didn’t know how to search, find or suggest images to use and left that task up to me. When searching for images to use on client sites, I frequently started with Google. Google doesn’t accurately indicate if an image is copyrighted or not. I would try to determine if an image was copyrighted, but in the early days especially, this was a process.

And since it’s become a *business model* for some businesses to threaten, cajole, extort or demand payment — you might be at risk if you let me select the images. With this in mind, I am reaching out to let you know, it might be time to consider a review of the images being used on your site.

What To Do If You Have Copyrighted Images On Your Site

There are things you can do to continue using an image you’ve determined is *copyrighted*, such as purchase the image from a site like ShutterStock. They offer unlimited use for an unlimited duration and up to $10,000 in protection against someone claiming a copyright infringement.

They have plans for those who need lot’s of images, and a pay as you go option for 2, 5 or 25 images. The pay as you go option allows you to select your images up to one year after purchase (in the event you don’t select all 5 images at once – for example).

The subscription method offered is a little pricey unless you really need a lot of images on an ongoing basis. The plan is between $199 and $249 a month (depending on how you pay (monthly, quarterly or yearly)) but offers up to 25 images per day, every day.

Which Images Are Copyrighted?

Now, I know the next question is “how do I know if an image is copyrighted?”. Good question.

There are a couple of methods to search out images and determine if they are copyrighted. I now use TinEye which allows you to search by the images uploaded, a URL you type or paste in, browser extension (by right clicking on the image) or dragging and dropping an image from your local computer to their search engine.

Homepage of TinEye Reverse Image Search

If there are results, they will be displayed in a list, with the URL’s where the images can be found, to the right of the image. If you see links to ShutterStock, Alamy, iStock, Getty or any of the other image providers, the image is “copyrighted”. If there is a watermark on any of the images, the image is copyrighted. And yes. I know this is a tedious process to clean up your site, but once done, it’s not so bad going forward. Just remember to do this step on each new image you add.

TinEye doesn’t find all the images, all the time. Sometimes, even if it’s NOT found in TinEye, it might be copyrighted. Either stop using that image, or purchase the image for use on your site.

Another way to find out if an image is copyrighted, is to search the United States Copyright Office website. This is a bit harder as their technology isn’t quite as nice, but it can be done manually. Additional, you can request help with this from their researchers (for a fee of course).

Public Domain Images – An Safer Alternative to Google Images

Optionally, you can replace a questionable image with a public domain image. There are sites which aggregate public domain images into a searchable list. I’ve listed a few of those I have bookmarked for myself here:

• morgueFile
• dreamstime
• Pixabay
• Free Stock Photos
• Skitter Photo

These offer Creative Common licenses and are searchable by keyword (such as “laughing woman”). Please note, some of these site or others that offer public domain images also have a “sponsored section” which can list images from sites like ShutterStock. Careful which image you click on.

General Signs Of Protected Images

It used to be enough to know the general signs of a protected image, and steer clear. However, it’s not as easy these days with the proliferation of social media, photo sharing sites and ease of use in finding images on blogs, and personal websites. However, any of these is proof of copyright, so avoid these.

Watermark
Any type of overlay of a symbol or text that may be hidden covertly or displayed upfront to protect an image from being used without owner’s approval.

Copyright Symbol
Like watermarking, embedded a copyright symbol directly onto the image is a common way to express copyright.

Official copyright listing in the Copyright office
I highly recommend using TinEye or Google images to help you find out if an image is copyrighted for several reasons. However, you may visit the United States’ Copyright Office to conduct a free search of copyrighted files. If you would like to request an official report from U.S. Copyright Office records, be prepared to spend about $165 or more per hour (with a two hour minimum) based on search fees.

Are Your Images Going To Get You In Trouble? Answer Now, To Save Yourself Some Grief

This is not something you can let wait… with so many new “businesses” popping up trying to collect fees on behalf of copyright holders, it’s better to get this done now, for peace of mind.

Can You Suggest Other Sites Or Methods To Stay Safe?

If you’ve come up against something similar, I would love to hear how you handled it. Where do you find your images? Do you feel it’s important to have some “eye candy” on your site?

The post Are Your Images Going To Get You In Trouble? appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

An Example of a Signature Line on a forum post

It’s a social world now-a-days, with people spending more time in forum’s, discussion groups and in their email program. Did you know that each of these places can send free traffic to your web site?

If you read any posts in a forum or joined in a conversation in a discussion group, I know you have seen them, those small blurbs at the bottom of each post. Perhaps you just didn’t know how to create them.

In this article, I will show you exactly how to build a signature line. From now on, every time you post or reply on a forum, a mini ad will display, directing web visitors to your site. These additional “eyeballs” on your site can add up over time, especially if you are participating and an active and well indexed forum.

I guess I don’t have to tell you that *good copy* is important. However, discussion of what “good copy techniques” are — is a little outside the scope of this post. I invite you to visit Ben Settle or one of the other copywriters that specialize in teaching you.

Just the mechanics first.

A signature line can look like anything you want, but a Heading, Description and Link are pretty standard. I will use those for these examples.

Example Signature Lines: HTML Version

Some forum’s or bulletin boards allow HTML, and some require BBCode. Don’t panic. It’s really not hard and they are pretty similar. We will start with the HTML version of an example signature line.

The HTML Code

<strong>Stop Buying Leads And Start Attracting Prospects</strong>
My free videos will show you how to become the <strong>Hunted</strong>,
rather than the <strong>Hunter</strong>.<br/>
<a href="http://Recommended.byCenay.com/stop-buying-leads">Help me stop buying leads</a>

If this looks a little scary, don’t panic. Just copy and paste from above and edit the parts that are unique to you. This is what the ad looks like *in real life*.

Live View

Stop Buying Leads And Start Attracting Prospects
My free videos will show you how to become the Hunted , rather than the Hunter .
Help me stop buying leads

I guess I forgot to put my name in it, as would be proper in any signature line, but I did that on purpose. (I tend to *sign my name* without even thinking about it, so I didn’t want my name shown twice, which would look down right silly, or perhaps even worse, a bit egotistical).

Example Signature Lines: BBCode Version

The BBCode is slightly different. Basically, there are only three major differences.

• BBCode uses square brackets ( [ ] ), instead of angle brackets ( < > )
• BBCode doesn’t require the quotes around the web addresses
• BBCode uses “b” for bold, not “strong”

Otherwise, they are almost identical. Here is that exact same ad, written in BBCode.

The BBCode


[b]Stop Buying Leads And Start Attracting Prospects[/b] My free videos will show you how to become the [b]Hunted[/b], rather than the [b]Hunter[/b].
[url=http://Recommended.byCenay.com/stop-buying-leads]Help me stop buying leads[/url]

Signature Line Standard Practices

I probably don’t have to say this, but I will. It’s generally acceptable to have 1 or 2 links in your *sig line*, but frowned upon to have more. Obviously, there are exceptions, but it’s a good rule of thumb.

It’s also acceptable (and might be preferable) to actually display the URL as the final line. If you are in a forum where the members might be printing out the content and sharing it with others, you should show the URL. Clickable links are great, but the address doesn’t print if they send it to the printer.

Yep, you lose a little *link love* when your anchor text doesn’t contain your keywords, but if the content is *likely* to be printed more often than not, show your links. Also note that Google, when evaluating your anchor text’s from all the links pointing to your site, expects to see some URL’s, some “click here” and some targeted keywords… it s a more natural appearance to Google.

To do this, just replace the link text with the actual address.

Hope this helps. Drop me a note if you have any other questions. Feel free to leave comments below on any other tips you would like to share about increasing click rates!

The post Examples of Signature Lines (Forums) appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

Apparently it was October 18, 2011, when Google announced some big news for website owners. “Going forward, when a search is made on a secure Google webpage and the result clicked, the search term would no longer be passed to the destination website. Instead, these visits would simply be grouped together in Google Analytics under the keyword “(not provided)”.”

Slow Creeping Nightmare For Website Owners

This little tidbit crept up on we site owners. Check your Google Analytics account for keywords people use to find you. What’s in the #1 spot? I’m betting it was “(not provided)”, like it was for me.

On the surface, the official reason was that this was done in the name of privacy. Google is suggesting that those searching using a secure Google connection would not want their search term to be passed on to the destination site.

Except beginning in June of 2011, with the advent of Google+, anyone logged in to Google was now on the “secure” Google webpage. Meaning all of those searches were now “protected”.

Google+ is Google’s “social layer” that enhances many of its online properties. Google says that it is not simply a social networking website, but also an authorship tool that associates web-content directly with its owner/author.

Referrers Are Now Hidden As Well

It used to be that when another site linked to me, Google passed along the “referrer” info as well. In other words, if someone typed “signature lines” at Google and found site A, and site A linked to me, I would learn that the keyword used to find me was “signature lines” from the referring site.

No more.

There are rules about what can and can’t be passed. A secure site (one with https instead of http as the protocol) will pass info to another secure site. And an unsecured site will pass data to another unsecured site. But, a secure site (Google for anyone logged into any of the Google services), won’t pass info to an unsecured site (that’s you and me).

(not provided) Percentage

Google initially claimed the percentage of “(not provided)” keywords would only ever reach the single digits, but recently, that number has soared to over 56%.

You’re On A Secure Page If…

• You’re signed into any Google account such as Gmail, Google Reader, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Analytics, Google Adwords or Google+ account.
• You’re using Firefox 14 or above which now makes all Google searches over to secure
• You’ve just signed out of a Google account and didn’t close the tab/window. You are still on a secure page
• You simply opted to use secure search for your own reasons

Of Course, There Are Exceptions

And before you get all giddy with excitement that you might be one of them, know this… the exceptions that Google makes are for the ADVERTISERS! Those folks who pay to advertise on Google Adwords, WILL have continued access to MY keyword data.

Google is seemingly willing to overlook privacy issues when it comes to paid ads, because sites using Google Adwords continue to receive full keyword data as they always have.

It would seem that Danny Sullivan was right, Google Has Put A Price On Privacy.

What Can You Do About It?

I snagged some additional info from NotProvidedCount.com. There are some excellent guides on how you can try to make sense of (not provided) and get back at least some actionable data about your organic visits:

• Google’s (not provided) One Year Later (RKG Blog)
• Smarter Data Analysis of Google’s https (not provided) change: 5 Steps (Occam’s Razor)
• How to steal some ‘not provided’ data back from Google (E-Consultancy)
• Recovering (Not Provided) Keyword Data (Search Engine Watch)

So, I say again… What the hell Google? It’s time to rethink this policy.

The post What The Hell Google? appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

1. You can build the very best website on the planet, but unless people can find it, you won’t sell a thing.
2. You can get hundreds, even thousands of visitors to your site every day, but unless you are offering what they are looking for, you won’t sell a thing.

Both of these concepts are what search engine optimization is all about. Getting found for exactly the phrase (or product/service) that your potential customer is looking for.

The marriage of search engine optimization and online marketing techniques is what this article hopes to clarify for you. You see, building an effective business utilizing online marketing techniques takes more than just coding web pages.

It takes a plan. It takes a deep understanding of who you are talking to and what language they use. It takes an automated sales funnel. It takes an automated follow up system. And it takes optimizing each page of your website for the keywords they are already using to find a solution their business pain.

Let’s break down the essential elements of a successful online business plan.

Defining Who You Want To Talk To

This step isn’t as simple as it sounds. The knee-jerk answer is “anyone who wants to learn Real Estate Investment Strategies” or “anyone who needs a blue widget”, but that doesn’t really tell you anything about who you are talking to.

It doesn’t tell you their current business or personal pain. It doesn’t tell you why they are online looking for a solution. It doesn’t explain what the solution for them would look like.

You need to spend a little time really getting specific here. You want to define your ideal audience. Your perfect prospect. Your target market.

You need to know exactly what they are looking for and why. You need to know what motivates them, what scares them, and what will inspire them.

Understanding Their Language

If your ideal audience is a real estate professional looking to increase their worth (or bottom line), then you will need to use their “language” in your sales copy, keywords and content. This will include professional terms unique to all real estate professionals (please note, I will be using Real Estate Investing as a sample throughout this document, just replace with whatever term makes sense for your business).

However, if your target market is someone who don’t know anything about real estate investing, but wants to get positioned to profit from an upturn in the housing market, then your “language” can NOT include terms only a broker would know.

This concept translates heavily into what keywords you target. If “John Q Public” with no real estate experience is your target audience, then you can’t optimize for keywords like “short sale buy strategies”, because John Q Public doesn’t know what that means.

He is more likely to be searching for terms like “buying and selling houses quickly” or “profit on flipping houses”. Remember, you are going to have to educate your clients. But first, they have to find you.

Optimizing On The Right Keywords

The obvious keyword choices are often the wrong keyword choices. Remember, you are asking to speak to someone who doesn’t know what you know, yet. He doesn’t even know what to ask at the search engine. He will ask in his “language”, so be sure you are optimizing on the words he is using at the search engines.

Think a little outside the box when doing your keyword research to ensure you are optimizing for words he will be looking for. Be sure to include common derivations. To get a head start on this, ask a friend who doesn’t know anything at all about your business what they would type in the search engines to find “the solution you provide”. Careful you don’t put words in their mouth during this exercise.

Injecting Yourself Into The Conversation

Once you know who your target market is and what “pain” he is trying to resolve, you can inject yourself into the conversation. Remember, there is a sales “process” going on here. Each of your prospects first identifies their pain, starts looking for a solution, compares available options and then purchases.

Your part of the conversation has to make sense to them and match up with where they are in the buying process. Are they still identifying their pain? Do they understand what they need? Are they ready to compare options?

The Sales Funnel System

Each online business should have a sales funnel system in place. Like a kitchen funnel, you pour (a whole lot of) something in the top, and it flows out the smaller opening at the bottom.

The top of the funnel is the ethical bribe. It’s your free offer to everyone that wants or needs it. In other words, it’s what you exchange for their name and email address. It’s the start of your automated sequence. (Note: This part does require an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a service that allows you to insert a series of messages into a “list” or “campaign” that will be delivered on a programmed time table. I suggest and use AWeber myself, but any autoreponder service should work. You can learn more about the concept in an article I did titled Marketing Method: Follow Up.)

The middle of the funnel are the qualifiers, testimonials and other automated techniques used to let those who aren’t looking for what you offer, off the hook. (Remember, if you sell something to someone that didn’t need it, your “return rate” goes way up.)

The smallest part of the funnel represents the actual conversion, the sale.

The Opt In Form

The top of your sales funnel is the “Opt In” form to get a free guide or whitepaper. Free software also works well. An audio or webinar replay might also be something worthwhile. Just remember to be offering value. This is where your automation starts. Until they provide their name and email address so you can follow up with them over time, nothing happens.

Critique and Notes:

• Your ethical bribe should be above the fold and attention grabbing (above the fold means visible without scrolling the web page).
• There should be a stated benefit that resonates with your target market. Explain how they would benefit, why they need it, and what to do to get it.
• Never assume anyone knows how to get the guide. Your form should explain what they need to do in very clear language. The more you direct them, the more they will take the action you want.
• Any graphic of an ebook should shouldn’t be cheesy. Remember, you want to appear professional. Spend a few bucks and get an eCover designed that matches your content if you are offering an ebook (for example). Also, if what you are offering is training which is video driven, a CD version of the image might do better.
• Prepare to test and track what is working.

The Automation Part Of The Sales Funnel

Assuming the first part went well, a prospect has traded their name and email address for your ethical bribe. This is really good news since it means they just gave you permission to market to them. It’s called Permission Based Marketing and is the single most effective way to make money online. Here are some ideas to get you rolling.

Each message in your “list” or marketing campaign will have a specific function. Each will walk your prospect one step closer to the result you want. Some will opt-out which is their way of saying, nope, this wasn’t what I had in mind.

Each message should be short and direct them to take the action you want them to take to follow the designed sequence that represents your ideal “presentation”. In other words, message one should state a benefit and then direct them to read the content at the “Pre-Sell Page”.

Message 2 should be delivered the next day, and should offer another benefit, perhaps a testimonial, and then direct them to read the content at the “Sign up” page.

Message 3 should be delivered 1 to 2 days later and should include another strong testimonial, another call to action and offer a money back guarantee. Show them you are taking the risk out of signing up. Direct them back to the “Sign up” page.

Message 4 should be delivered 1 to 2 days later, and should focus on what is called an apples to oranges comparison. Show the benefits and cost of your program and a much more expensive approach using the school of hard knocks (for example).

Each subsequent message should always include a link to the strongest call to action page in your sales funnel as the link listed under your signature, even if the message is just delivering news, latest posts, or testimonials.

This permission based marketing method accounts for a large portion of your sales. Use this wisely.

The Pre-Sell Page

This page should contain images which break up the text and make the entire page easier to read. Bolding and alternating rows make the bullet points stand out as well. This page’s purpose is to get them ready to see the price. This is especially true when your price tag is high. You really need to avoid that sticker shock with good sales copy, strong bullet points and a detailed set of benefits.

Critique and Notes:

• Add more sub-headings so those that “scan” a webpage to see if it’s applicable to them, will be able to grasp the jist. These sub-headings need to tell the “story” in miniature. If the sub-headings connect with the reader, they will read the parts in between.
• Your bullet points should be benefits, not features. A benefit connects with the reader, a feature doesn’t. As an example… you might list “No Down Payment” as a benefit. However, that’s a feature. A benefit OF no down payment is “not having to take money out of your wallet to get started”… which your reader can relate to better.
• Add more social proof and testimonials. You should have at least three (more is better) on the page. Insert specific testimonials near the text that highlights what they are happist about
• If you use a table that compares other products/services/programs to your own, a little visual “que” might be in order. For example, where the two items are comparable, add a graphic of a “dash”. Where theirs is less or worse, add a red “X” in their column and a green “check” in your column. These visual que’s reinforce the message subconsciously.
• Make your call to action strong. People will respond if you tell them what to do. Tell them to click the “Join Now” button and complete the form on the next page (for example). If you don’t ask for what you want, they won’t do it.

The Join Now or Sign Up Page

The next web segment of your sales funnel is the Sign Up page, and represents the action you wanted them to take all along. As such, this page needs to really “close the deal”. You can’t afford to back down or do this page second rate. The content on this page will account for 21% of the lost sales, of those that won’t commit.

Although this is an action page, you still have to remind them why they thought it was a good idea. Be prepared to recap each of your strongest selling points.

Critique and Notes:

• For some of you, this the first time they see the “price” so there might be some sticker shock. To reduce that, recap the money they will spend in real world dollars if they attempt to do this on their own.
• Your bullet points should not be single line entries that do not “connect the dots” for readers. For example, an entry that says “Forms/Documents For You” – doesn’t tell the reader what those forms are, why they are important, what it would cost to have them done and what the benefit is having your company provide them. You should recap in bold the main point, but provide the details that those that aren’t scanning require.
• Make sure you don’t tell them to take 20% off the price, but not why. This is an opportunity for you to create a little scarcity. Tell them if they commit in the next 24 hours, you will discount it 20%, otherwise, they pay full price. You can structure the offer to reward the fast action takes, those that make quick decisions because that represents the type of person you are looking to work with. (Please note: The scarcity must be real. If you say the price only lasts 24 hours, take it DOWN in 24 hours. If they come back the next day (or later) and the note is still there, you have lost all credibility with them. It’s over.)
• Throughout your text content (prior to the payment buttons), provide links that will jump them to the payment buttons. Two or three should do it. Use your primary keywords in the link… something like “Get Started With Your Real Estate Mentor Today” or “Let’s Partner Up Right Now” or “I’m Ready To Partner With A Real Estate Mentor Now”. These links also serve to tell Google what you content is about through the hyperlinks (anchor text). This helps.

Conclusions

Your target market should drive the keywords you use and optimize for. What are THEY looking for. Yes, it’s cool to have a keyword that gets a gazillion searches a day, but if everyone that clicks the link is looking for something else, it’s pointless, drives any PPC campaigns into the dirt and frustrates both you and the readers.

To clarify with an example. Let’s say you sell golf clubs. You could optimize for the word “Golf”, but you would be getting visitors who were looking for golf-swing videos, golf shoes and golf balls. You could optimize for the keyword “golf clubs”, and your focus would be more narrow. This means less searches, but better targeting. It might only yield a hand full of people per day, but each one would be looking for exactly what you are offering, and that is worth it’s weight in gold.

Now, supposed you optimize for the keyword “left handed golf clubs”. This long tail keyword wouldn’t have as many searches, but those that were looking, would be looking for exactly what you offer. This increases the likelihood the reader gets what he wants, and you get what you want.

Be specific. Add additional content that focuses on those long tail keywords and use the sidebar opt in form to get them into your sales funnel.

Until you define exactly who your target prospect is and exactly how they search for information, you can’t nail down the keywords though.

Let me stress the importance of defining your target audience before moving on with this keyword research step. (And when I say defining who your ideal prospect is, I don’t mean something like “a new comer to real estate investing”. I mean who is he, what is his education, does he have kids at home, does his wife work, are they in danger of losing assets because of financial burdens, are the kids at home, are they young, and how much time does he have to devote to his education? Be specific!).

Once you are crystal clear on who you are talking to, you can use language he/she understands and will relate to. You can craft a Unique Selling Point that he/she connects with. You can build a sales letter that makes sense to him/her and addresses his/her specific fears, concerns and hopes.

When you know exactly who you are speaking to, it will be apparent in the words you use. Just address your marketing funnel to that one ideal prospect specifically.

I hope this articles helps define your overall process a little better. If you need help getting it all done, I am here for you. Branding, blogging, setting up sales funnels… I can help with any of it.

The post SEO and Online Marketing: Working Together appeared first on Cenay Nailor.

Using an online photo editor called Pixlr, a little forethought, and some creative license, I step you through the process of taking every day photo’s and getting a unique image slide show that supports your blog content, and helps the reader connect with your message.

We will cover image scale, cropping, and resizing with Pixlr. We will also use WordPress’s media library to store the images, and the new Plugin from Elegant Themes called Elegant Builder to add an image slider with some fancy effects.

This video is rendered in high definition so expand it to full screen for best results.
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Tools Discussed In This Video

• Pixlr Online Photo Editor
• Pixlr Grabber Firefox Addon
• MeasureIt Firefox Addon

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• Pixlr: Online Photo Editing
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The post Image Slider, Editing & Resizing with Pixlr appeared first on Cenay Nailor.