Will you make a purchase from a stand-alone Landing Page that you’re visiting for the first time?

To elaborate, lets take a sample scenario. You’re surfing around, looking for some particular service vendor (products are much easier to sell online, I believe). You click on a sponsored result, and come to a page – a stand-alone landing page that lists their package offerings, with a call-to-action to buy. Lets assume that the page is of decent quality, and you are kind of inclining towards these guys.

Signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form – a typical visitor would probably do that. But would you actually spend money and buy something from this page? What would impress you enough to go “wow” and immediately start subscribing to their services?

Here is my answer.

1. The identity of the seller must be clear, preferably verifiable, and there must be a way to communicate with him/her offline
2. There must be conditions under which I can get my money back and a clear method of doing that. If a third party is involved (like Clickbank or PayPal), that’s even better, because I will feel protected
3. It must be absolutely clear what I am buying through the content, the images, any videos, testimonials and so on. For some things, the only thing that will make me buy is a demo, but screen captures come pretty close in most cases
4. The testimonials must appear to be from real people, who have gotten actual value out of the product/service and who describe their personal experience in sufficient detail to inspire my trust. Any website link and the testimonial is disqualified as biased. People who have just finished a workshop have not done anything with their new knowledge, so they are heavily discounted. Real, personal, raw life experience = trust
5. The way things are laid out and the style/tone of the text give me a feeling. If the writer is confident, I will buy. If the writer tries to sell too hard, I will not buy. Good things are easy to sell, because their value is readily apparent. If the seller is not convinced he/she can sell without an effort, there must be something wrong with their offer
6. I HATE pop-ups. If anything pops up, that’s the end for me

The more real value you provide, the easier it will be to present it. Your feelings about your product, your service, your company and yourself as a person shine through your website pages and you can’t fake them.

As a life coach, I believe deeply that the world is our reflection and that by working on our inner peace will give us better results than trying to manipulate anybody or anything else. It’s the same when trying to sell something online. Love your product with all your heart. Truly feel you would buy it yourself and the sales will follow.

This is why I am an ethical Internet marketer.

Happy online business,
Gal

Most of my clients have an offline marketing mindset when they venture online for the first time. Offline marketing is all about branding and creating an image for your company, or so they think, because they’ve seen all those TV ads for “big money” companies.

By Internet marketing is very different.

According to the world population clock, there are 6,860,146,847 people in the world today. Let’s say that only 10% of them have Internet access. That’s 686,014,685 potential customers.

Can you ever hope to service them all? Nope.

Could you keep in touch with all of them, even if you have a large team? Not likely.

Is it possible that out of these people, 1 in 1,000 will love what you offer and want to buy it? Yep.

That leaves us a nice group of 686,014 people. For a small operator, even that’s a big undertaking and it’s probably best if they don’t all take out their wallet or sign up on the same day.

So why not be yourself? Why pretend and work so hard to create a false image? After all, once people actually come to your business, they will quickly find out what you are really like and, if it’s not as advertised, they might just go away.

The main purpose of having a website is to have yourself represented online 24×7 and for as many prospects as possible to find out more about you, learn to trust you, buy from you and then tell all your friends about how wonderful you are, so that they too come and visit your website, except they will jump straight to the buying step.

This is why I always tell my clients to find ways of being present on their website – through the text style, through the images, through audio strips and video clips – so that website visitors will quickly discover who you really are and get excited from your personality. Attracting lots of traffic with promises you can’t fulfill is pointless. Attracting a continuous stream of visitors who will feel at home with you, buy and refer others is very much to the point and will create an endless online business for you.

So be yourself online, because you’re worth it!

Gal

“Sure”, I say, “Would you like fries with that?”

OK, not really. What I do say is, “What do you mean by ‘SEO’?”

The conversation then goes as many ways as there are clients.

Now, personally, I think that if you’re going to ask for professional help, it’s better if you stick to what you want to get for yourself and don’t try to use jargon, because that will get you both in trouble.  Leads? Great. Sales? Even better. Profits? Awesome. But SEO? Is that a business word?

But I shouldn’t argue with reality and the reality is that most people use jargon, so if you’re about to look for someone to “do SEO” for your website, at least you’ll know what to expect.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  Oddly enough, it involves no changes to search engines at all.  Google, Microsoft and the other search providers can do that just fine without me and are continually improving their search engines.

The optimization actually aims to bring your website the biggest flood of visitors from the search engines.  A good optimization aims to bring your business the biggest flood of paying customers by making your site feature prominently in searches that are relevant for your business and starting to engage with them on the search results page.

Good SEO, like many other things, involves the 3 steps: keyword research, on-site optimization and off-site optimization.

Keyword Research

In short, this step is aimed at discovering the best online identity for your website.

In the same way you can’t see your own face without the help of a mirror, your Internet marketing consultant can show you hidden gems in your business by looking at things differently and by using specialized tools to discover good keywords.

Even in systems like Facebook, which seem unrelated to search, keywords reign supreme. Even when search results are not provided by Google or one of its large competitors, you’re sure to find a search function on nearly every site. Keywords are used to find and filter information online and so they are at the foundation of all Internet marketing work.

Once you know your keywords, you must put them in order of value for your business by asking “Which keyword represents the largest number of potential customers for my business?” or “Which is the keyword phrase my ideal customers are most likely to use when looking for my products and services?”

On-site SEO

In short, this step is aimed at making your website relevant for the best and most appropriate keywords out there.

Your topmost keyword phrase should be used as your domain name. It should be used as often as possible in your headings, page titles, descriptions and links. Your Internet marketer will make sure this keyword appears in all the right places.

But your secondary keyword phrases will tell you how to structure your site, each one of them becoming the topic of a page linked from your home page and linking back to it. Again, each page’s title, headings and various other elements must contain that page’s keyword phrase enough times for search engine crawlers to be convinced it is indeed the topic of that page.

Although this seems like straightforward work, it is complicated by the need to appeal to people and by the search engines’ increasing ability to detect unnatural content that is solely aimed at attracting traffic. As a business website, what you are really after isn’t traffic, it’s leads, sales and ultimately profit. If people find your site and read weird heaps of keywords, they won’t buy, so what’s the point in such traffic?

An experienced Internet marketer can weave keyword phrases into page content in just the right amount and make the text and images appealing to human beings who will take the desired action and make you, the site owner, successful and happy.

Off-site SEO

In short, this step is aimed at making your website even more relevant for your top keywords, but also popular.

Search engines keep track of references to your site from other places on the Internet – directories, articles, news feeds, social profiles and more. Those links imply that other people are telling people about your site because they have found it valuable and authoritative, so the more “inbound” links, the more valuable your site must be. This is how Google determines the famous Google Page Rank.

When searching for sites matching a keyword phrase, Google displays relevant sites in descending order of popularity, so the more links, the higher your site appears within search results. Get enough inbound links and you can be first!

Well, almost. See, links also have “link text”, which is very important in determining what your site is about. In fact, when you start building enough links to your site, that link text can become more important than your site’s contents. Here are two links:

1. Click here
2. Gal Baras – Internet marketing consultant

If you hover over link #1, your will see the words “What now?”. If you click it, you will be taken to Google’s home page. When a crawler finds this link, it will associate Google’s home page with the expressions “Click here” and “What now?”, neither of which are very useful for a search engine’s home page.

If you hover over link #2, however, you will see the words “Internet marketing consultant”. If you click it, you will be taken to my home page. Crawlers will then associate my website with two instances of “Internet marketing consultant” and with “Gal Baras”, both of which are very good for getting this site the kind of traffic I want.

Of course, it can be difficult to insert your ideal link text and link title into some paragraphs, but wording the text around the inbound link cleverly can yield a natural referral.

Did I hear anyone say, “No problem, I’ll just do some link exchanges”? Do you honestly believe Google hasn’t figured that out already? Getting a link is quite a bit easier than getting a valuable link, one that appears natural and can stand the tests of time and contact improvement of search engines.

Remember, search engines are doing their best to deliver the most similar results to what a human would, but of course, experienced Internet marketers already know this, which is why online competition is getting fiercer by the minute.

I hope this clarifies what SEO is. If you still have any questions about it, please post them below and I’ll be happy to answer them to the best of my ability (kindly refrain from self-promotion and stick to things other may want to know too).

Happy online business,
Gal

I’m great with SEO, so most of my sites do well over time without advertising, but I use Google AdWords to launch sites, boost their performance and run time-sensitive promotions.

Recently, I was so busy I decided to engage another company to take care of my AdWords campaigns. I figured someone who solely does this for a living has to be better than me too. If they were good enough, they could justify paying for their services.

So I called a Google AdWords Certified company, which I’m not going to name, so let’s called them AW. They said they would audit my own campaign, make some generic suggestions and if I wanted, they were happy to take it over for me.

When I received their report, it was indeed generic. The recommendations came straight from Google’s standard documentation and seemed to ignore what was happening specifically in my campaign, but I thought that was all they had promised, so never mind.

I rang them and agreed they would run my campaign for 1 month, then stop and call me for a detailed phone review. They said I would have to double my budget for the campaign for best performance and pay them $150 for their services. Since this campaign had to do with a parenting workshop, for which each ticket was priced at $250, I figured I would do well anyway, so I agreed.

When I saw the AW-proposed keywords, I wondered why they were all singular. “Google doesn’t care about this”, they said, “It matches singular terms to plural queries. That’s not a problem”.

“OK”, I said, “You’re the experts”.

After a few days, I wondered if I could monitor their progress, so I asked to link the new campaign to my Google Analytics account.  What I saw in the following days was my ads appearing at the top of search pages for their chosen keywords, but very few clicks each day. My budget wasn’t being spent, but my business wasn’t getting any traffic either. My confidence did not improve by seeing a single plural term outperforming every other (singular) keyword phrase by a mile.

A month passed and I heard nothing. I waited a few more days and then inquired about the campaign. It was still going, so I asked to stop and have that detailed review they promised.

… and all I got was this lousy Excel spreadsheet (not even a T-shirt). The sheet didn’t even have a column for the one thing I wanted: conversions – people who bought tickets for the parenting workshop. The number of clicks was oh, so small, no wonder there were no conversions.

“Bugger!” I thought, “I’m going back to doing my own thing”.

To show you what happened in detail, here is a comparison of my first campaign, the AW campaign and my new campaign and you can judge for yourself:

Basically, if you gave AW $100 today and told them to run a parenting workshop campaign for you, they would take 49 days to deliver 75 visitors to your site. I would deliver 97 visitors to your site in just 18 days.

Like I said before, I win!

[Disclaimer: I am NOT a certified AdWords partner, but I'm happy to help with your AdWords campaign on a consulting basis or by managing it for you. Contact me for more]

How long does it take to get your site listed?

One of my clients recently found out that, with my help, it can take as little as 6 hours!

I met this young man at a networking function and he told me his website had been launched 4 months before, yet there was no trace of it in Google Search results. In fact, if anyone typed the full site URL into the Google Search box, Google would tell them it didn’t know about the site.

When you try to offer your products or services to people and you tell them you have a website, one of the first things they do to check you out is search for your website. This man had given business cards, sent out emails and used various other ways to let people know about his site and he was embarrassed it was not indexed by Google.

“Leave it to me”, I said to him, “I’m going to do some thing real quick and your site should get picked up by the crawlers a lot faster than it would otherwise”.

I didn’t want to commit to a timeframe, because nobody controls ol’ Googlebot, but I had a good feeling about it.

So I went back home and spent about an hour creating some inbound links to my client’s website. No big deal, right? But by putting those links in places frequented by Googlebot, including social media sites, some magic soon took place.

After 24 hours, I searched for my client’s site and saw 6 results listed. “Not bad”, I thought, “Not bad at all”.

When I rang him to let him know, he said, “Are you kidding? I got up and checked first thing in the morning and already saw 3 results then. This is such a relief, man! Thanks”.

But actually, one of these search results had been labeled “18 hours ago”, which means it was picked up only about 6 hours after I did my work.

At the time of posting, there are 23 search results for my client’s site, including some PDFs.

Is you site not getting listed? Contact me

Too many business owners, when they consider taking their business online, can only think about costs and risks. They ask for detailed quotes and specific explanations of how each piece of work will be done.

What they normally fail to see are the benefits.

But realizing the benefits of an online business is really easy and, once you know what’s in it for you, it’s also easy to justify any cost that will leave you enough of a margin.

So how can you tell what good will come out of your new website or social networking campaign or paid ads?

The first thing you need to work out is how much money you make from an average client. This may seem like a simple question, but for most of the business owners I meet, it’s really hard, especially when their business is new.

Basically, you need to take all your business profits and divide them by the number of clients who have generated that profit for you. If you have more than one line of business or group of products/services, you will probably separate them online, so work out each one of them separately. This will also help you decide what is most likely to be profitable online, so you’ll do that first.

If your business is fairly young, use conservative estimates based on what’s going during the past year of a few months, because that’s the closest you’ve got to the future.

It’s important to take into account any additional value brought to you by your clients, such as joint ventures, referrals, barters, etc, because those are worth money too, although they may be indirect. However, if you want to stay conservative, you can just count cash.

Now you know your client lifetime value.

With this figure, most businesses can quickly see that getting just 2 clients – not per hour, not per day, not per week and not per month, just 2 clients – pays for a lot of Internet marketing. The implication of this is huge:

By taking your business online and getting just a small number of new clients that would otherwise not find you, your Internet-based business pays for itself over and over again!

Of course, every business is different, which is why I encourage you to do the math for your own business and see for yourself, but even if it takes 5 clients to pay for your Internet marketing and even if it takes 2 months to get them, you are going to earn back all your investment in 2 months and then again and again and again every 2 months afterward.

What would this do to your life? Could you take some time off? Could you relax? Could you take the family out to a nice place? Could you fix the deck or upgrade your car?

Come on, what are you waiting for? Contact me now.

You see, when you put your email address on your website, it’s very simple to read it, add it to a list and then bombard it with unsolicited email. It’s annoying, but it’s easy to fix in two steps.

Step 1: Convert your address into an image

To do this, visit http://services.nexodyne.com/email/ if you use a web-based service (like Gmail) or http://services.nexodyne.com/email/index_custom.php if you email  account is in your own domain.

Pick colors for text, background and border, choose a font and click Generate. Then, save the generated image to your computer. When you do, use a file name that nobody would link with email addresses, such as nospam.png.

Finally, upload the image to your website. I will use images/nospam.png as an example.

Alternatively, run any image editor, type your email address in as text, (crop, re-size and make any other modifications until you’re happy with what you get) and save the image.

Step 2: Cloak your email address image

In your contact page code, include the following snippet of JavaScript code, which opens up a new message window on the site visitor’s, to be sent to your email address.

Note that in the code below, I have not used terms like “send”, “email” or “address” and I am breaking various items up (like the parts of the email address or the word “subject”) to make it as difficult as possible for bots to guess what’s going on. It’s not bullet proof, but every counter measure reduces more spam.

Replace “[your email ID]” with your real email ID and “[your email domain]” with your real email domain. Your email address is email-id@email-domain, e.g. example@microsoft.com.

<script type="text/javascript">
function useImage(){
var part1 = "[your real email ID]";
var part2 = "[your real email domain]";
var title = "Website inquiry";
var everything = 'm'+'ailt'+'o:'+part1+'@'+part2+'?s'+'ubject='+title;
win = window.open(everything,'anotherWindow');
if (win && win.open &&!win.closed) win.close();
}
</script>

To use your image, all you have to do now is include the code below:

<a onclick="useImage();" href="#">
 <img src="images/nospam.png" border="0"
  alt="I hate spam" align="absmiddle" />
</a>

This will look like a valid email address to a human being, but complete gibberish to an automatic robot.

Final note: bots are getting smarter all the time, so you may choose to do some more editing to your image or use another image generating site to make the image harder to decipher.

That’s it! You’re protected, but your clients can contact you by email.

Gal

To the person searching for something, Google Caffeine will seem like plain old Google – the search page looks the same, the results look the same – so what’s so different and why should anyone care?

Well, “under the hood”, Google has aimed primarily to improve two things: speed and accuracy. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Speed

Google has made site indexing a lot faster and improved the speed of listing search results in the new version. Faster indexing allows Google to keep up with the growth of the Internet, especially with social sites, like Twitter and Facebook.

Website owners are now expected to help Google index things faster by implementing some coding guidelines that will improve site performance. Faster sites will be deemed better and show up higher in search results. Google has even made special programs available for analyzing site performance and reducing the loading time of websites.

The downside is that non-technical folks who maintain their own sites are now at a great disadvantage compared to professional site builders who keep up with technology. This is yet another reason to let professionals build your website.

Accuracy

Google Caffeine seems to rely more heavily on keywords than the old version. This is not surprising, because it probably helps speed up pre-processing of crawled pages and reduces the size of the Google search index.

This means that do-it-yourself site builders will again fall behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals, who have the know-how to put keywords in all the right places.

Bottom line

Now, more than ever, a professional Internet marketing consultant can help clients rank well on Google Search and get business online. Small businesses that try to go solo and save will end up getting less and less, while those who focus on their own craft and outsource their Internet marketing will benefit.

What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you

Well, I’m here to tell you this saying is really wrong when it comes to getting business online.

You see, the Internet is a very BIG place and it keeps cHanGIng all the time, faster than anyone can keep up with, let alone anyone who happens to be busy making products, servicing clients or doing the accounting.

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

For example, say you want to develop a website and all you know is Microsoft Word. You create a simple site that looks good to you and you publish it online. No niche research, no usability design, no speed optimization, no SEO and no dynamic content. Just an online brochure, really. You think, “It cost me nothing and it looks nice. Now, all I have to do is wait”.

WRONG! Your website takes months to be picked up by search engines and sits at the bottom of page 523, never to be seen by anyone, let alone buyers.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you got some help and your website looks professional and even includes a shopping cart for your products, but you have not done your Internet marketing research, so your keywords are off and your structure is sub-optimal. You cleverly figure out that AdWords can get you traffic quickly and create a campaign.

BAD MOVE! Your ads will receive low quality scores by AdWords, which means they will appear lower than they should and you’ll be paying a lot more than you should. If that’s not enough, you’ll get the wrong type of visitors, the kind that doesn’t buy.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you hire someone to put links all over the Internet back to your site. Surely, this will help bring you site up in searches and get you more business, no?

Nope. It will certainly improve your position, but working outside your site can only improve so much. Incorrect structure and content will still result in a low conversion rate and require a lot more links to make any noticeable difference to your business.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

I could go on for a while, but the gist of it is

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

If you don’t do this stuff (Internet marketing, that is) all the time and stay on top of things, you will pay more and get less than you should and make a lot less profit. Why waste time and money and why frustrate yourself? Find an Internet marketer you can trust (I know this great guy) and hire him to get you business quickly and easily from the ground up.

You new Internet business is not far away.

Talk to you soon,
Gal

When you sell something online, or just when you want to get your name out, social networking sites can be great promotional tools for you. Here are some of them:

• StumbleUpon – very quick to bring traffic, but visitors only stick around if you can really grab their attention. Friends and groups are helpful, but once your page makes it into the SU database, it may get propagated by random users who “stumble upon” it with the toolbar
• Digg – mostly news items and technology, but famous for bringing sites down due to the massive amounts of traffic sent over a short period of time. Requires time to build a following
• Twitter – a “mini blogging” platform, surrounded and supported by a host of applications for filtering tweets, vetting friend requests and grouping friends. Tweets can go to and from your mobile phone while you are away, as well as to and from your website automatically
• LinkedIn – invitation-only website for professionals and business people, featuring excellent group discussions and allowing you to build business affiliations, create joint ventures and find strategic clients online. Self promotion is frowned upon, so participation and adding genuine value are the best approach

Of course, there are others, like MySpace and Facebook, and the social interaction can quickly take up all of your time if you are not focused, so you must do your homework before choosing the best social networking sites to promote your website, pick the best tools and consider hiring people to help you do the work, while you are busy selling.

I’m doing quite well out of the social scene and getting good content, good referrals and lots of traffic for several of the sites I promote. If you’d like to get my help with your site promotion, let me know.

Happy marketing,
Gal