The other reality of running a website is that it can be quite expensive. Even discounting web design, you have fees for hosting and domain registration, hiring social managers and content producers, and more. This can stretch a budget to its limits, and then it comes time to build traffic only to find the best methods require paying for ads and exposure. It’s just too much.

Thankfully, you can still earn traffic without paying a cent, it just isn’t as fast or as targeted as it could be. Try out these ideas and see if they get you started.

1. Implement Detailed SEO

The best possible SEO probably requires hiring an SEO firm to go over all of your content and all of your pages but this is a list for free traffic generation, which means hiring a firm is out. You’re just going to have to make an SEO checklist and go over it each time you post content.

• Site factors: make sure your site loads quickly and the user experience is unhampered by poor design decisions.
• Linking: each piece of content should link out to a relevant source, and should link to one or two other pieces on your site. Internal links can be dropped if you have a related posts widget.
• Keywords: research the primary and long-tail keywords for each article you post, and include them in the post. Don’t shoehorn them in just to have them; integrate them in a meaningful way.
• Meta: optimize your meta titles and descriptions for best visibility and attraction in the search results.

This is a basic start, but it should give you a foundation from which to begin your research.

2. Guest Post on Industry Sites

If your site is in a position where it needs to build traffic manually and can’t attract it based on its own critical mass, you’re likely a new site. This means there are likely a few other sites in your niche with larger audiences than yours. Approach those sites and ask about guest posting opportunities. Posting on those sites with a link back to your site will help draw their traffic to your page. Since their site is in the same industry, chances are they will be interested users. Just avoid paying for guest posts, which defeats the purpose of free traffic creation.

3. Use and Engage Through Social Media

Social media is free to use in terms of money, for the most part. Facebook is growing less so, as they encourage paid promotion and advertising. Other sites, like Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn, are all good sources of potential free traffic. Pick relevant social sites, learn their ins and outs, and put them to use.

It’s important when you’re using social media that you don’t use it as an advertising platform. You’re there to humanize your brand and engage your users, not to post billboards and TV commercials.

4. Create Deep, Detailed Content

Of course, you can’t draw users to your site and expect to keep them without content. The best content – that is, the content that tends to dominate search results – tends to be detailed, in-depth articles that provide plenty of value to readers. At least 1,000 words, digging deep into a topic and providing insight that can’t be found anywhere else. If you’re struggling to decide what topics to cover, look for what other industry blogs are doing and try to do what they do, only better.

5. Create Video Content

Video content is useful in a few ways.

First, it’s an automatic way to prove your attention to detail and dedication to a topic. Making a video is a lot harder than writing an article. It requires more resources and more research to make presentable.

Second, it’s extremely visible in search results. Relevant video content gets snippets including a thumbnail, and that image on the otherwise imageless search results page is incredibly attractive, just based on human psychology.

Third, video content opens up YouTube as both a source of monetization and a new social network to leverage for more users.

6. Use and Optimize a Mobile Site

Mobile users are quickly taking over the Internet, with a huge amount of standard traffic every day coming from mobile users or site-specific apps. It may be a bit of an investment to create a responsive design to cater to these users, but it’s well worth it in the end.

If you already have a mobile site, make sure you’re implementing all the same SEO as you are on your main site. This is easy if they’re both the same via responsive design; if they’re separate subdomains, make sure to carry over the optimization. Don’t forget to promote your mobile site in any advertising you choose to pay for.

7. Build and Leverage an Email List

An email list isn’t necessarily going to get you new users; after all, you have to attract the users to get them to sign up in the first place. What it does, however, is allow you to put new platforms and new content in front of an automatically interested group of users. These users can then share your new content and follow your new profiles, allowing you to begin with an immediate base of users. For example, use your email list to promote when you sign up for Instagram, to get any current Instagram users automatically following your profile.

8. Claim and Use Off-Site Profiles

Most businesses end up having profiles on review sites and other such locations, aggregated from industry skimmers or user submissions. Local businesses with physical locations have the most, with sites like Yelp aggregating reviews. Search for your business name and look for any site that has a profile for your business. Contact the site and claim your profile page, fill it out and treat it as an off-site advertisement you completely control. You’ll be able to turn these into passive traffic funnels with relative ease.

9. Create and Give Away Free Content

After you’ve been running a blog for a while, you can fairly easily take your most popular posts and convert them into longer, more detailed ebooks. Sell or give away these ebooks, with only a social media share or other metric as payment. Word of the quality of your content will get out, and people will come around to claim a copy.

If you have in-house developers, consider creating apps as well. Having a presence on the iTunes store and the Google Play store can be very beneficial, particularly if the purpose of your app is generic enough to attract users based on its function alone.

10. Interview Industry Veterans and VIPs

Users trust you when you give an interview. The concept is that you have to be in a position of some authority to give an interview, when in reality anyone can ask anyone else a few questions and frame it as an interview.

When you interview popular veterans and important people in your industry, you’re getting easy, free value out of their answer. If your interview is compelling enough, the people you’re interviewing may very well link to your site to show their users the Q&A session. This funnels more traffic to your site, and all you had to do was come up with a few interesting questions.

The post 10 Free Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

What is StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon came about as a solution to the problem of never finding anything new on the Internet.  The idea was simple; a huge database of websites categorized by interest, a button that pulls one of those sites, and a profile that you can use to set interests to pull specific sites.

StumbleUpon set out to solve the problem of Internet boredom, but it instantly brought up the problem of stumble addiction; the inability to focus on any page without stumbling on to the next within minutes.  Very few websites manage to capture the long-lasting attention of stumble users, but with the proper advice, you can become one of them.

How to Submit a Page to StumbleUpon

You can add a page to the Stumble database in one of three ways.

1. While logged in, go to your profile.  The drop-down arrow next to your username gives you a set of options.  One option is “add a page” and allows you to add a URL when you click it.
2. In your profile, go to the likes page.  There will be a large gray button with the “add a page” text next to the search box.
3. While using the toolbar, navigate to the URL you want to add and click the thumbs up.  If the page is not already in the Stumble database, you will be prompted to add it.

You cannot add a page by disliking it.  You also have an unspoken limit on the number of pages you can add, particularly in a short amount of time.

Stumble Page Restrictions

There are a number of restrictions on how and when you can add pages, as seen on the Stumble knowledge database.

• You cannot add any page that is blatantly promotion or that is selling a product.  Specifically, StumbleUpon bans the addition of commercial pages unless you are using their paid discovery feature.
• Attempting to elude Stumble’s restrictions, or attempting to slip a commercial page past their filters, can get your account frozen and your access permanently revoked.
• It is against the Stumble terms of service to offer an incentive in exchange for a site submission or thumbs up, including money, reciprocal likes or another reward.
• There is a cap to the number of pages you can add from a single domain.  StumbleUpon does not specify what this cap is.  However, this is a common occurrence among bloggers adding every post as they make it.
• You cannot add any site with a shortened URL, a .tk domain, a raw IP address or a domain that has been banned in the past.

Answering the Question

So, to answer the question; is it bad to submit every page on your site?  The answer is a firm yes.

Submitting every page on your site is liable to flood Stumble with your site too quickly.  They will then flag your domain and/or your account as a spammer and will either ban your domain or revoke your account, if not both.

Additionally, there are some pages you have no reason to add.  Category pages are valueless.  Shop pages are against their terms of service.  Boring content doesn’t attract lasting users.

How to Use Stumble for Fun and Profit

If, despite all the warnings, you still want to submit your site to StumbleUpon, you should at least do it right.

First of all, you need an account older than 24 hours to submit sites at all.  This is to prevent spammers from registering new accounts just to spam a site.  You should ideally spend some time using the service before you start submitting.  This is reinforced by the fact that you can’t submit sites until you’ve racked up a certain number of stumbles.

Once you have registered your account, you should choose interests.  Choose a small handful of interests, particularly those related to your industry.  Stumble will gradually adjust these as you rate content, and you can change them at any time.

Create and upload a profile picture.  You should probably avoid using a brand logo, and instead choose an actual human picture.  This is to avoid being labeled a business spammer, with all the negative implications that go along with it.

You should also fill out your bio.  Unlike every other profile online, you should avoid linking in a promotional way.  Just fill out your profile as a human being, not as a brand.

Start stumbling.  Rate content as you visit it.  Follow stumblers, if you notice they have submitted content you liked.  This helps encourage others to follow you as well.

Meanwhile, on your website, you should be creating excellent content.  Start making a list of high quality content you want to submit, and prioritize it by value.  Every few days – or even less often – you should submit one or two pages from your site.  Never sit and submit page after page; it makes it incredibly obvious you’re a spammer.  Never submit sites with clear promotional language.  In fact, try to avoid calls to action in the content you submit.

Encourage your users – with incentive, and primarily via newsletter – to use stumble.  Encourage them to thumbs up and share your posts, but try to avoid getting them to do so all at once.  This is where user segregation can come in handy.

Get a few friends or outside agents to submit some pages for you, so it doesn’t look like you’re the one doing all the submission.  The more you can obfuscate the fact that you’re submitting your site for promotional reasons, the better.

Meanwhile, you can also investigate the paid discovery option.  If you want to avoid the subtlety and push as much traffic as possible in a short time, paid discovery may be the way to go.  It’s not free, but the most effective techniques typically aren’t.

The post Is it Bad to Submit Every Website Page to StumbleUpon? appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

What I’ve done below is grouped up similar strategies into sections, both so you can get multiple ideas about the same kinds of strategies and so that you can skip sections that don’t apply to your situation.

Promoting Directly on Facebook

This section is all about organic posting on Facebook. For ads, look for the last section. Organic posting can involve your personal account or your business page, but be aware of the limitations on both. Generally, Facebook takes less issue with business pages promoting affiliate links, but personal profiles have more liberties with joining groups and posting to other walls.

1. Post an affiliate link directly on your personal feed. Now and then, your feed will take it, but neither your friends nor Facebook will like you if you’re posting nothing but ad links every day. You’ll find fewer and fewer people actually see your posts, and it will hamper your friendships.

2. Encourage friends and family to share your link. Again, using this on a rare occasion to promote a good piece of content or a good deal will be fine. I recommend only doing this around holidays and only when the item in question is on sale. Monitor sales on Amazon and link to them for best effect.

3. Post an affiliate link on a page you’ve created for deals. One of the most common methods of using affiliate marketing on Facebook is a generalized “Great Deals” sort of page. The issue is, without a core focus, it can be difficult to take off and you have a lot of competition. Start narrow and broaden your horizons as you grow.

4. Post an affiliate link in Facebook groups you’re a part of. Some Facebook groups will be excellent places to share your links. Others will delete your posts and/or remove you from the group for advertising. Make sure you know the rules of the group before you post your link, to avoid such issues. If necessary, share links to your site instead of your affiliate links themselves.

5. Seek out new groups where you can share your link. When you have a focused product idea, you can seek out Facebook groups centered around those products and join them. If they’re active, they allow advertising, and they aren’t full of other affiliate marketers, they can make great places to share your links.

6. Post testimonials with a link on non-branded pages. Find fan pages for the products or brands, rather than the actual brands themselves. Find posts discussing the products and leave your review, complete with affiliate link. Be careful, though; this can be seen as a spammy technique and can hurt your account.

7. Share image galleries of your favorite recommended products. Facebook loves visual media, so image galleries can be a great way to show off a product you want to sell, even of those images are just spiced up versions of what the Amazon product page already has on display.

8. Create and post video reviews of your product with a link in the description. Video plays automatically but without audio, so make sure you have text to convey your message to those who aren’t clicking to listen.

Promoting Your Website on Facebook

These techniques go beyond promoting just your affiliate link, and assume you have a website of some kind set up. It can be as simple as a narrow niche microsite or as complex as a full and active blog, that’s up to you. Either way, these methods are for promoting the website, which itself promotes the links.

9. Promote your site in general via your personal news feed. Generally, your friends and family will be supportive of any creative endeavor or personal business you’re starting, and even more so if you’re successful with it. Sharing it can get some of them on board, and potentially get your friends to share it with their friends, who might follow it as well. Friends aren’t the best or highest converting demographic, but they can be a good supplement or a boost.

10. Promote individual pieces of content using your personal feed. On a similar note, rather than sharing your website in general, you can share specific pieces of content. This is best done when you know someone talking about a product; share a review you wrote that has your affiliate link in it.

11. Promote individual pieces of content using your business page. Business pages have better ability to reach specific groups of people, through organic post targeting and through ads. It’s always a better idea to share content than homepages on a business page, though, so you need to have a content production engine going if you want to keep this up. Consistency is important here.

12. Treat affiliate links as offers to encourage new users to follow you. Where other brands can offer specific deals and incentives, you don’t necessarily have control. What you can do, though, is pretend a sale you see is something you set up and link to it as a time-sensitive offer.

13. Post a compelling free incentive to get people to click through to your site. You can offer plenty of actual incentives, which may or may not be real incentives. Ebooks are a common offer, but you can create a pseudo-groupon deal or even just pitch a daily deals mailing list as an incentive.

14. Promote a deals-focused RSS feed for your website. Most of your audience won’t care about RSS, but those who do might be pretty interested in a reliable feed of your excellent content.

Networking with Influencers to Grow Your Website

Influencer marketing is the current big thing in marketing, and while it’s not necessarily effective for an affiliate marketer, it’s still worth pursuing. The more excellent content you have on your site, the better off you’ll be when reaching out to influences and starting partnerships.

15. Find other affiliate marketers in related niches and reach out for a partnership. I see this most often with food-based bloggers who use affiliate marketing and promote each other’s content. This is great for them because there’s an infinite variety of recipes and personal stories to go along with them. The more personalized and varied your niche, the better off you’ll be.

16. Use Facebook groups to find people who will follow your page. Remember all of those groups you found way back in part one that were potentially valuable but have rules against advertising? You can network with those people in a way that gets them to be readers and gets them to promote your page to their own audiences, and even within the group.

17. Discuss a product on an influencer’s page when they mention it. This one takes a little luck, but if you see someone with a high profile page talking about a product, you can write up a quick review or piece of content about it – or find one you’ve already made – and link to it in a comment. The value is the important part here, you’re basically just trying to become one of their top comments.

18. Promote your content to high profile influencers in hopes of a share. Again, some strategies require high quality content, like reviews and user guides. If you find a blog in your niche that likes and shares high quality content, you can share yours with them and see if they’ll promote it.

Growing a Mailing List Via Facebook

A mailing list is a great resource. You can use it in a loop to get people from your website to Facebook and from Facebook to your website. It’s also a source of traffic and link clicks independent from organic and paid search. Building a mailing list is one way to help launch other sites and to help make yourself independent from reliance on paid ads.

19. Use an existing mailing list to add people to your Facebook page. I don’t recommend buying a mailing list – your content will just end up in the spam folder and you’ll be blacklisted – but if you have an existing list from another business, you can recommend adding your new list.

20. Post compelling links to optimized landing pages. In your organic feed on Facebook, you can post links to specific landing pages that you have spend some time optimizing for conversions. The point of these landing pages will not be pitching your affiliate links, and they shouldn’t even be present. Instead, just have a form users can fill out to sign up for your list, and a bunch of text explaining why they should do exactly that.

21. Offer free content, like in-depth usage guides for products. This is generally the standard “free ebook on X topic for signing up!” offer, but you can spin it to be whatever sort of incentive you want to give away. Just make sure the incentive doesn’t cost you more than the expected value of the people you get signing up for your list.

Using Facebook Ads

A lot of this post is focused on Facebook ads, because frankly, ads are the way to go. I talk about the organic options above because most people don’t want to spend money when they aren’t making money, and because you do need something of an active presence organically before you can make optimal use of ads.

22. Run sidebar ads targeting fans of the actual brand. Sidebar ads aren’t all that useful for conversions since a lot of people ignore them or have them blocked, but the exception is when you know those people are already fans of the product specifically. This works best with brands that only produce one thing, or if you’re targeting fans of pages that are fan pages for the specific product rather than the brand as a whole.

23. Run news feed ads promoting your blog content. The news feed is great for posts that look organic, but are paid to reach specific types of people. The kicker here is to be specific with your post targeting, but I’ll talk more about that at the end of this post.

24. Run news feed ads promoting an incentivized offer. Any incentive you’re offering, for blog subscribers, mailing list opt-ins, or any other form of conversion can be enhanced by paying for it to get extra promotion.

25. Run video ads to take advantage of Facebook’s promotion. Facebook has been heavily promoting video ads over the past year, because they’re the new hotness and they’re trying to compete with the likes of YouTube and the now-defunct Vine.

26. Run news feed ads promoting your item directly. This is tricky, because Facebook doesn’t generally like running ads where the target is simply an affiliate link. You will at least need to link to a landing page to get through their approval process.

27. Target your followers exclusively with premium offers. You can save your best deals – which are generally not as profitable to you because of their lower commissions, though they might convert at a high enough rate to make up for it – for targeting specifically to your existing followers.

28. Run ads to promote a landing page for your mailing list. This is a great way to get existing followers to sign up for your mailing list, where they will be exposed to your site from another angle, and can convert from there.

29. Run ads that directly result in an email sign-up. Facebook has a mailing list sign-up ad objective, and when the user clicks on the “sign up” button on the ad, they will directly plug in their email address and won’t even have to go to your landing page. Eliminating that additional step can be very helpful in converting more people.

30. Be very specific with product ads and associated interest targeting. I mean very specific. A good target audience might be “men age 30-35 in the USA with an interest in blenders and who follow 2-3 select blender pages on Facebook.” That’s quite a narrow niche, but with over a billion people eon Facebook, that can still be tens of thousands.

The post 30 Ways to Use Facebook for Affiliate Marketing appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

When it comes to selling a subscription service, it gets even harder to track and monitor in an appropriate way. It’s a simple reason, too: subscriptions aren’t a single fee, so you have to track more data and manage more numbers to have appropriate ROI calculations. That’s what I’ll discuss first, because it’s so important.

Subscription ROI

Here’s a scenario for you. You’re re-selling a subscription service that costs the user $11 per month, with your offer discount. You want to run some PPC ads, but when you set up targeting for your demographic, costs end up running you $25 per click. Do you run these ads?

How do you know what the answer is? The solution is something called Expected Lifetime Value. Calculating the lifetime value of a customer, and the average across all of your customers, allows you to then calculate whether or not such advertising is worthwhile.

Some customers, of course, are going to be dissatisfied and cancel after one month. The lifetime value of that customer is $11.

Some customers are going to use your service for a few months, maybe six, before they cancel it. Maybe they outgrew it, maybe they wanted a change, maybe their business folded and they don’t need it any more. Their average lifetime value might be, say, $66.

Some customers are going to be life-long advocates and hugely loyal users. Your service has only been around for two years, and they have two years of subscription under their belts. The lifetime value of these customers, at $11 per month, is over $250 and rising.

How many customers are in each category? That’s what you need to find out, if you want to calculate the average lifetime value for your audience as a whole.

Actually calculating lifetime value is a simple calculation. Figure out how many customers your service has and how long each one has been a customer. You already know the cost of a month of service, so you simply need to calculate the average number of months a user remains a customer.

In our hypothetical situation, with a subscription costing $11 per month and a click costing $25 per month, you’re looking for an average customer value of at least $25 to break even. That’s 2.5-3 months of service on average.

There are other details to monitor, of course. All of those customers who cancel after a month are dragging down your average. Do you have a way to differentiate them in your targeting, or do you need to include them in your calculations?

This all gets more complex when you have to consider different tiers of service. If your subscription service has a $5/mo plan, an $11/mo plan, and a $20/mo plan, you have tricky calculations to do involving average purchase value as well as subscription length. Additionally, you may want to see if you can target explicitly the kinds of people who buy the high tier plans rather than the low tier plans when you run your ads.

Hubspot’s guide to LTV is a good resource, though it doesn’t deal explicitly with subscription models. Still, it calculates the average value of a purchase and the average number of purchases in a customer’s lifespan, so you can adapt those numbers to reflect subscription models.

Only once you know the average value of your customers, can you identify what point your PPC ads become profitable. Ideally, it will be a price you can afford. From there, you need to optimize your ads from every angle you can, which is what the rest of this post is going to help you with.

Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns

Optimizing a PPC campaign for a subscription service isn’t really any different from optimizing a campaign for a single-sale storefront. You always have an expected value for your customers, and you always have a cost per click, so you need to optimize your click rates and your conversion rates. Here are tips for how you can do it.

Build a strong foundation. A foundation in this case is your account structure. It’s very easy to lose track of organization while you’re building up ads, and then you have a jungle where you should have a lawn. Ask yourself some questions:

• How many keywords are you using in each ad group?
• How many individual ads are you running in each ad group?
• How relevant are the keywords to each other and to the ads in each ad group?

You generally want your ad groups to be tight groupings of appropriate, relevant keywords within your niche, with ads making use of this relevance in a narrow context. For example, if you have a content marketing service, you might be advertising your content marketing, or your content production, or your writing, or your outreach, and each of these can be their own groups.

Always make sure your ad campaigns are as organized as possible, and if it doesn’t make sense to add a new keyword to a group, make a new group and expand it from there.

Identify and focus on high performance keywords. Very often, your ad groups will have up to a dozen or even more keywords in them, so you want to drill down occasionally to see how those keywords are performing individually. You’re looking for keywords with a high quality score and a high click-through rate.

Conversely, you probably want to identify and cut out keywords that have the opposite issues. If you’ve found some keywords to run but those keywords have an abysmal click rate, you should drop them before they cost you more money. If your research tells you that those keywords SHOULD be performing well, you should look for other reasons why they might not be working.

Use a tiered bidding strategy. This is something WordStream covers in this article in quite a bit of detail. Basically, when you find a good keyword, you run an ad targeting that keyword with each of the four match types at the same time. They will have different costs and can get you different results, which both gives you more performance and an idea of how to properly use those keywords moving forward.

Constantly grow your negative keywords list. This is another WordStream special, because they have a great write-up on negative keywords.

In case you don’t know what they are, negative keywords are keywords you add to an advertisement to make it NOT appear when those keywords are involved. For example, if you’re a shoe store and you’re selling only dress shoes, you might include negative keywords like “athletics” and “running” to exclude people search for running shoes. After all, if someone searching for running shoes sees your ad and clicks through, they’ll find that you don’t sell what they want. That means you paid for a click that can’t possibly convert.

Negative keyword lists should be a growing and evolving set of lists. You want a general list to maintain for every ad, but you also want to expand lists for ads based on their performance. If you see that people are clicking through your shoe ad on queries for rock climbing shoes because you used “shoes” as a broad match keyword, you can then add rock climbing to your negative list.

Make sure you’re running your tests for an appropriate length of time. You need data on your keywords before you can make decisions about them. You get that data in one of two ways: letting them run for a longer time, or dumping more money into them to get more volume. Generally, with daily budget caps and spending limits, it’s better to let them run for longer.

You almost never want to cut off your keywords if they’ve run for less than a week. Personally, I aim for about 10 days, unless a keyword is obviously garbage before that point, or vice versa. You need enough data to make a decision, and for low volume keywords it can take a while to get that data.

Look for reasons an underperforming keyword is underperforming. The three main causes are low bids, low search volumes, and improper match type. If you’re using tiered matching, the third one drops out.

Low bids are easy enough to fix. You may have put in some keywords with penny bids to try to get cheap traffic, or to use them as placeholders. Don’t forget to increase your bids slowly until they catch and start running. As far as low search volume, that’s simply something you need to check and experiment with. If a keyword that looks good doesn’t have enough clicks, pause it.

In fact, don’t be afraid to pause keywords that aren’t performing up to your standards. You can make adjustments and try again, or you can cut them off entirely and focus your efforts elsewhere.

Always make sure your ads are maximally relevant. If you have a lot of various keywords that focus on different aspects of your service, it’s a good idea to create specific focused landing pages for each of them as well. If one focuses on how cheap the service is, sending them to a landing page talking about a bunch of the upsells they can’t afford isn’t a good way to go about it.

Don’t be afraid to make more variations in both ads and landing pages. The whole point is to be as relevant as possible to the audience who sees the ad, so there’s as little disjointedness between the ad and the landing page as possible. One of the number one mistakes I see businesses, even big businesses, making is that they use a generic one-size-fits-all landing page for every ad.

Instead of five ads with a quality score of 7 leading to one generic landing page, make five ads each with a quality score of 9 pointing at individualized landing pages.

Make use of remarketing whenever possible. One of your best target audiences is “people who are already interested but didn’t convert initially.” Remarketing lists allow you to capture these people and market to them with separate ads later.

The fact is, a huge portion of your initial clicks are going to come from people who are interested, but who are not in the right situation to subscribe immediately. They might not have their financial information on hand, or they might not want to plug it in via a phone. They might want to discuss a purchase with a boss or with a family member first. Whatever the reason, those people are just as likely to forget about it than to remember and come back. That’s why you need to remarket.

Make use of advanced features whenever possible. There are a lot of useful little features you can get with Google, both in organic search results and paid search extensions. Here are some of them you may consider:

• Google search extensions, which are those sub-links for search results that can give users specific sub-pages to go to directly.
• Ad Extensions, which are specific formats and improvements to ads through Google that can give you additional links or call to action methods.

Those are just what Google offers. Other ad networks have their own quirks and advanced features that can be very useful once you get to learn how they work.

The post How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign for Subscription Websites appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

When you set a daily budget, it’s entirely possible for Google to charge you more than that cap. In fact, they can charge you up to double! What the heck is going on?

Intended Behavior

Google prioritizes your advertising goals, not strict adherence to your budget. If you say you want 100 conversions and Google can get you those 100 conversions, but they might need to spend more on certain days, they’ll do so.

What this means is that, for example, let’s say you have a daily budget of $50. Google can spend $100 one day and $0 the next. This averages out to $50 per day, and thus stays within your goals. The cost spike for one day is balanced out by the zero spend the next day.

This is fully intended behavior. Google relies on averages for a lot of systems within Google Ads, in fact, and this budget system is no different. When you set a daily spending limit, you’re not setting a hard limit, you’re setting an average limit.

Calculating Averages

Google needs some way to finalize the average in order to know how much to charge you. Otherwise, they could rack up as many charges as they want under the assumption that, later on, they can charge you virtually nothing to balance the scales. In order to force an average in a reasonable time frame, Google makes an ongoing monthly calculation.

What Google does is multiplies your daily budget cap by the “average number of days in a month” which, if you’ve ever had the curiosity to look, is 30.4. So if you set your cap to $50 per day, your monthly budget cap will be $1,520.

Now you have a one-month period with a monthly cap of $1,520. Google will do everything in their power to maintain that average. However, they have one more limit in place: they will never charge you more than twice your daily cap. When you set your daily budget cap to $50, Google is free to charge you up to a maximum of $100 per day.

This gives Google a lot of flexibility. On a day where your audience is over-performing, perhaps because of industry relevant news or some new content you published, Google is free to double your daily spend in order to get you more conversions at a peak moment. Conversely, on slow days, Google may charge you little or nothing – generally not showing your ads at all – to balance the scales.

The end result is that Google shoots to spend at most $1,520 throughout the month. The next month, the same thing happens, adjusted for any changes in budget you choose to make.

Overall, this simply allows Google to adjust to the whims of the market more easily. They can take advantage of spikes and lulls in the market better, without needing you to manually adjust your bidding after noticing the spikes yourself. In general, this plan improves advertising success rates.

This isn’t actually anything new. According to the Wayback Machine (web archive), prior to this change, Google could charge up to 20% more than your daily budget, while still aiming to never exceed the monthly budget calculation.

By changing 20% more to 100% more, Google gives themselves even more flexibility. Ideally, so long as you’re running your ads over the course of months at a time, and you’re not adjusting your budget repeatedly, this will give you better performing ads than you would otherwise see.

It’s important to note that Google may accidentally overstep their bounds. If, for example, their end-of-month average reaches $1,600 out of your $1,520, you will not be charged for the overage. You will be charged the $1,520, and the additional $80 in overages is basically free value.

The Loss of Control

There’s still one major downside to this change, which is the loss of yet more fine-tuned control you have over your campaigns. Many people who run Google ads do so with carefully tuned ideas of what they can and cannot do. Often, these operate on a weekly or daily basis, rather than a monthly basis. Small businesses can change quickly, and markets need constant monitoring.

If Google is potentially doubling your daily ad spend, you don’t have the luxury of being able to predict performance on a daily basis. If you can’t actually support a doubled daily budget, either because of some spending limit on your credit card or from a sheer monetary standpoint, this has the potential to cause a lot of issues. It’s even worse if you’re operating on daily deposits via prepaid card; if Google wants to overspend, they can’t, and they’ll ping you with notifications about no funds available.

No Alternative

Perhaps the biggest issue I have with this change, and the one many other marketers share, is that there’s no alternative. You can’t, say, set a monthly budget cap so you know where you stand. If you want to know how much you’re going to spend on a monthly basis, you need to take your daily budget cap and multiply it by 30.4.

It’s that .4 that trips up a lot of people. Often, you tend to just multiply by the number of days in the month. On a 30-day month, you’ll end up with $1,500 instead of $1,520. Sure, when you’re operating in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, $20 doesn’t seem that big a deal, but it can still be an unnecessary overage you didn’t plan for. If you’re running a very tight ship, this can cause problems with your bookkeeping.

Adjusting for Hard Caps

If you’re in a position where you cannot possible over-spend on a daily basis, you may want to consider setting a lower daily bid cap to prevent Google from over-spending and ruining your budget.

For example, if you can spend up to $50 per day, and that’s a hard limit to what your finances will allow on a daily basis, you should set your daily bid cap to $25. This means that Google can spend anywhere between $0 and $50 on any given day. Sure, your monthly limit will be half of what it would be otherwise, but you won’t over-spend on a given day.

Of course, there’s not necessarily a reason to do this. Remember that you’re only charged according to your payment thresholds, or on a monthly basis, depending on how you have things set up. If your payment threshold is high enough, and your bid caps are low enough, you will only be charged once a month. When you’re charged once a month, the average will always play out properly, and you won’t end up spending more than you want to.

On the other hand, if you have a low payment threshold – which most small and newcomer marketers do – you can find unexpected early charges due to Google’s over-spending. If they give you a spike in the early parts of the month with doubled budget caps, it’s entirely possible to encounter unexpected charges when you have tight finances. This can potentially cause an overdrawn account, unexpected balances on credit cards, and other problems.

Overdelivery Credits

So what happens if your ads run too much and Google ends up spending more than your monthly cap? If, say, you end up spending $1,600 out of your $1,520 cap for the month?

Thankfully, Google credits your account on the invoice. You will get an invoice that bills you for $1,600 worth of services rendered, but credits you $80 for overdelivery. This is called the Overdelivery Credit.

Overdelivery, put simply, is when Google uses more of your ad budget than your total monthly budget would allow, and doesn’t have time in the month to under-display ads to make up for it.

When overdelivery happens, any overages beyond your monthly average will be credited on your bill. It doesn’t roll over or carry over to the next month. You don’t start the next month in the hole. Google essentially says “good job on your ads, they performed better than we expected, here’s some free money.”

Checking Overdelivery

If you want to see if you’ve gotten overdelivery credits, you can check the information in your Google Ads account. Sign in to Google Ads and find the Reports tab. There will be a series of predefined reports you can view. Choose Basic, and then choose Billed Cost.

This alone won’t show you your overdelivery credits. What you need to do is compare the Billed Cost to the Served Cost for any ad, ad set, or ad campaign you want to measure. You can download the full data CSV and compare everything in bulk, or you can do individual calculations. Simply take the Served Cost and subtract the Billed Cost. If the number is anything greater than $0, the number is the amount of overdelivery credit you have received in that billing period.

Changing Mid-Month

This adds a slightly dangerous new element to adjusting your budgets throughout the month. Google takes this budget per month, rather than on a rolling 30-day basis. This is both good and bad.

If you decide to adjust your daily budget cap during the middle of the month, Google will do what it has always done: reset the monthly spend. They charge you for what has already been spent and then start from scratch for the remainder of the month. Google interprets a new monthly budget and applies it to the rest of the month.

The problem here is if you have front-loaded the over-charging. Let’s say in a 30-day period you set your budget to $50 on day 1, $100 on day 10, and $150 on day 20.

From day 1 to day 10, Google calculates your monthly budget as $1,520, and is free to charge up to $100 per day, based on your daily limit of $50. If they decide to do so, for the first 10 days of the month, you can be charged up to $100 a day, for $1,000 in ad spend.

You decide on day 10 to increase your ad spend to $100. Google does not factor in the previous spend at all. They calculate your new 30.4-day average to be $3,040, and are again free to double your ad spend. If your ads are continuing to over-perform, from day 11 to day 20 you can be charged $200 a day, for $2,000 total ad spend. This means you will have, by day 20, spend $3,000 out of your now-potential budget cap of $3,040.

On day 20 you change your budget again, to $150 per day. Google will again wipe the slate clean and calculate a new monthly average, which ends up being $4,560. For the last 10 days of the month, Google can charge you up to $300 per day. Again, your ads are dramatically over-performing, and they charge you $300 per day, for a total of $3,000 for the remainder of the month.

This results in an end-of-month total of $6,000 in ad spend, out of your total monthly calculated maximum average of $4,560. Except, at no point during the entire process did Google exceed what they calculated to be your monthly limit. As far as their paperwork is concerned, this is a perfectly valid charge, because they break it down in a way that is “beneficial” to both you and them. Yes, you get the value of the ad spent, but you are also charged more than you might have planned to afford.

This is, of course, an extreme circumstance. Very, very rarely will Google max out your budget for an entire month like that. Most of the time, there are lulls and surges, and you won’t come close to this scenario. Even so, there’s the rare chance it could happen.

As such, my recommendation is pretty simple. Set a lower daily budget than you might otherwise want, keeping in mind the potentially doubled maximum per day. More importantly, try to avoid changing your budget mid-month, unless you know you can afford additional overages beyond what a new monthly maximum might be.

The post Why Does Google Ads Exceed My Set Daily Budget? appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

Determine Your Market

The first thing you need to do is pin down your target market.  Part of this work should already be done; after all, you don’t start creating a product without knowing who it’s for.  Take the time to refine your target market in any way you can.  Is it targeted towards men?  That’s good to know.  It’s better to know that the most interested men will be between the ages of 20 and 30, and that they’ll tend to be handymen without long-term relationships.  Of course, some of this information won’t be available until you can actually see who is buying.  You’ll need to make educated guesses and then refine them as you learn more.

Define Sales Goals

Your sales goals should be specific, and they need to be goals you can measure.  Don’t say something like “sell enough to turn a decent profit.”  Say something like “Sell 100 units to users within the first month.”  You will need to examine the type of product, your market, your competition, your price point and your production in order to set these goals.  The point of pinning them down is to have something to shoot for, not to have a finite measure of the success or failure of your product.  You can always adjust your sales goals to meet reality, as long as doing so doesn’t mean your business fails completely.

Note Important Sales Activities

Sales activities should be a list of anything important you need to remember for your marketing and sales, but which aren’t necessarily part of the everyday marketing.  You can add “Facebook marketing” to the list if you want, but you should be doing that anyway.  Instead, use this space to list trade shows, a specialized website or time-limited ad campaign and the like.  Things you might not otherwise remember.  If you don’t already have a marketing engine in place, dedicate a section to the social media and traditional marketing you should be doing regardless of product launch status.

Note High Profile Sales Targets

For some products and in some industries, there are high profile targets you can approach for sales.  At the most basic level, setting your sales targets will mean noting whether you’re selling to end users or selling to other businesses.  If you’re selling to businesses, for example, consider creating a selection of businesses that would be absolutely killer to contract.  Players who, if you succeed, will set your product well on the way to absolute success.  It’s important to make sure you aren’t relying on these long shots, however.

Set Deadlines and Time Goals

Part of a successful sales plan is a sales timeline.  You can set all the targets and goals you want, but if you set a nebulous deadline like “eventually” you’re going to lose the pressure that drives you to succeed.  Some of your time goals will be baked into your sales goals.  Sell 100 units in a month is a deadline as well as a goal.  Bake your goals into your sales plan and you’ll have the drive necessary to achieve them.

Advertise and Promote

All of the above is about setting up goals and plans.  It’s time to put those plans into action.  Set up advertising in any way that’s relevant, digitally and offline.  Email campaigns, website advertisements, guest posts, press releases, blog posts, social media marketing, PPC ads, landing pages, brochures, billboards, TV commercials – the list goes on and on.  Set everything into motion and get the word out, whether you drip-feed a viral campaign or you start with a bang and a product demonstration at a trade show.

Take Preorders

Preorders, when you’re dealing with a physical product particularly, will help you gauge interest in what you have to sell.  It will help get some money flowing and some confidence building.  It will also help you make sure you have the resources available to meet demand.  If you’re working with software or apps, it’s a way to gauge interest, though you don’t need to worry about production, only server infrastructure and capabilities.

Deliver the Goods

Once your product goes live, it’s time to deliver on your preorders.  You absolutely need to make sure this phase goes smoothly.  A quick delivery time, a flawless customer service presence and a willingness to fix any mistakes will go a long way towards building a reputation.  Avoid shipping unfinished or broken products, avoid ignoring customer service requests and do everything in your power to make the launch smooth.

Take Feedback and Refine the Product

Once your initial wave of product has gone out, send messages to your early adopters and ask for their feedback.  This will be some of the most valuable feedback you’ll receive in your career as an entrepreneur.  Figure out what your users are looking for, what you’re satisfying and what you could be doing better.  Don’t strictly focus on the negatives; know what you’re doing right so you can put the wrong into perspective.  Take this feedback and incorporate it into developing a patch or a version two, depending on your style of product.

Expand to Wider Markets

After the initial hype has died down and your product has launched successfully, you need to carry on and expand your marketing.  Identify people or businesses who may like your product and expand into those markets.  Your initial wave should have brought in a few surprises; make use of those surprises to tap additional markets.  If you’re lucky, you may find that your initial targeting was off the mark and your new targets are much more lucrative.  In most cases, you’re going to be finding diminishing returns, though your returns will still be good enough to support you for years as you grow.

Redefine Sales Goals

Remember those sales goals?  Did you meet them?  Did you exceed them?  Did you fall short of the mark?  It’s time to look at those goals and adjust them for the current lay of the land.  If you fell short, consider why.  Were you reaching for something unattainable, or was there a flaw in your marketing that could have served to reach them when corrected?  If you exceeded your goals, did you do it on the power of a lucky hit, or was there more demand than you expected?  Adjust the goals and keep moving forward.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your New Product appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

When it comes to running an eCommerce website through a platform like Shopify, automation is a huge boon. Every element of your business that you automate is time you save.

Automation does take an initial investment. In some cases, it’s a very simple investment, involving little more than installing a plugin. In other cases, it might involve some tedious coding or custom development, which you might even have to pay someone to do for you. This can make it seem like a poor investment.

Think about it this way. If you have a task that takes you half an hour every single day, that’s two and a half hours spent on that task in a given workweek. If it takes you 100 hours to develop a custom solution to automate that task, that means in 40 weeks – less than a full year – the automation will save you money. Often, it will be an even better return! It very rarely would take 100 hours to produce automation that covers something that only takes you 30 minutes at a time.

Step 1: Identify All Tasks and Processes

The first thing you need to do in order to automate a business is list down every task you can think of that needs to be done.

Some of these tasks are daily data entry, upkeep on social media, sending emails, and other tasks. Here are a number of examples you might look for.

• Sending cart abandonment emails. In 2015, it was estimated that abandoned carts globally accounted for a potential five trillion dollars in accumulated sales. Nearly 70% of all carts are abandoned. Yet you can recover these potential orders by sending emails to remind people that they left items in their cart. It’s generally a good idea to send one email reminding them of items in their cart, and if they don’t respond, another asking if there was a technical problem preventing them from making a purchase. This helps capture interest twice, as well as offering the chance for people to let you know about tech problems, compatibility issues, bugs, or issues with payment processing.
• Offering customer service. Now, it’s generally not a good idea to fully automate customer service. People have unique problems that it takes human comprehension to fix. However, there are many systems you can use to automate information gathering and providing simple solutions to common problems. Think of it like an interactive FAQ. One recent example is the Sprout Social Twitter Bot Builder, which uses Twitter messaging to ask the user questions about their issue. As they respond, the bot offers solutions. All the while, a human agent can monitor and step in at any point to prevent the frustration of dealing with a bot you can’t control.
• Inventory management. When you have a fixed stock of items, or when you want to change pricing, it can be a good idea to set up an automated database of product information. Make sure that your inventory for a product decreases when the product is purchased, so you don’t have to worry about promising more than you can deliver. There are a wide variety of possible options to automate inventory management.
• Productivity. IFTTT and Zapier are both great for free-form, flexible automation processes. For example, you can create alerts for when a product is purchased to send an onboarding email, or manipulate your calendar when a meeting is scheduled through a meeting app, and so forth. You can do anything from manipulating your Twitter profile to getting push notifications for the weather.

Remember, right now you’re not looking for solutions; that comes later. At the moment, all you’re doing is putting together as large a list as possible of processes that could be automated to save you time, even if it only saves you a few minutes per day. Every minute you save with automation is a minute you can spend doing something you can’t automate, to grow your business or set up another.

Step 2: Determine Ease of Automation

The second step on your list is to categorize your list based on how easy or difficult it is to automate the process. I like to consider four categories.

Category one is the easy to automate elements. These are things like data entry, which might only take a simple script in pretty much any programming language. It might include sending onboarding emails when a user joins a mailing list, or cart abandonment emails. Generally, category one processes have solutions already available for free or for a small fee, which you can install or configure quickly and easily.

Category two are the tasks that take a bit more effort to automate. It might include something like accounting, which requires setting up formulas or data sources in your accounting software, training an accountant, or just reviewing your data to make sure you’re not misrepresenting your business. It might also include elements that don’t have many solutions already available, or processes that have not-quite-perfect solutions you would have to customize. If you need A, B, and C done, but the program you find only does A and B, it goes into this category.

Category three are the tasks that are difficult to automate. Anything custom about your brand will generally fall into this category. These are business processes that you either have no idea how to automate or that require custom solutions. Things like the Twitter bot builder I mentioned above would fall into this category; it’s a hybrid solution that requires you set up a bot from scratch, and requires an expensive plan to gain access.

Category four are the processes that are impossible to automate. Going to meetings with potential partners, calling wholesalers for new dropshipping products, and other such processes cannot be done automatically.

It’s worth noting here that you CAN outsource some of the category four processes. You can always hire someone to do your cold calling for you, to save more of your own time. This is, however, not automation, and it’s expensive. It’s outside the purview of this post, as well.

Step 3: Look for Existing Solutions

The third step is to start with your category one processes and look for existing solutions, and work your way through the whole list. You might discover that some processes are actually harder or easier to automate than you thought, and may need to re-categorize them. If you find a category one process that is actually category three, don’t spend a ton of time on it, skip it and move on. You can come back to it when you’ve picked the low hanging fruit first.

Shopify is a great platform for creating an eCommerce store specifically because it works very well with plugins. They have a huge pile of apps, some of which are free and some are paid, all of which can automate parts of your business. Here are some of the best options, though you can always browse the store for more.

• Back In Stock – This app costs $20 per month or more depending on the plan. What it does is allows users to sign up for an alert if a product they want to buy is out of stock, and automatically sends an email to that list of users when the product comes back in stock. Depending on the scale of your business and the availability of your products, it can be amazingly useful.
• Oberlo – This app is free for some uses. It’s essentially a massive assistant for a dropshipping business. You can import dropshipping products en masse, you can handle order confirmation and fulfillment, you can automatically update inventory and pricing, you can customize product descriptions, you can track shipping, and a lot more. Pricing depends on the number of orders you process per month.
• SmartrMail – Pricing is $19 per month plus a scaling fee per customer. You know how when you buy something on Amazon, or when you look at certain products, you will start getting emails with similar products on offer and deals on products in that category? This is what SmartrMail does for you. It creates customized product recommendation emails based on user browsing and sends them out automatically.
• Social Autopilot – This free app is essentially some basic social media integration. When you publish a new blog post or list a new product, it triggers a post on the social media platforms of your choice. This should not be your ONLY social media presence, but it can easily be part of it.
• Simple Shop Automation – This is a free-form app with various events and triggers, sort of like an in-Shopify example of IFTTT or Zapier recipes. There are a lot of different options you can configure based on your needs. For example, you can tag customer accounts with flags based on amount purchased over a lifetime. You can hide products when they go out of stock and notify your staff to order more. You can dynamically change product pricing based on availability. You can even set up notifications daily or weekly with sales reports, inventory reports, and other information.

There are a lot more, of course, but these are just some of my favorites. We’ve reached a point where there are honestly very few processes that aren’t automated in some way already, as long as you aren’t using some kind of custom back-end system.

Step 4: Develop Custom Automation Solutions

Once you have implemented any solutions you can find, it’s time to start developing your own. In some cases, this means learning some programming language – if you don’t already know a couple – and writing scripts or apps to automate your own processes. You can also pay someone via Upwork or Fiverr to code something, though you should know at least enough programming to be able to analyze their code to make sure it’s not installing a backdoor, processing data through a third party platform you can’t control, or otherwise opening you up to hacking or theft.

I’ve mentioned them a couple of times already, but Zapier and IFTTT are both engines for creating custom automation processes using existing APIs for various services. If you’re trying to automate something in a Google app, a social media platform, or one of their supported services, you can use one of these sites to create your automation.

Step 5: Pursue Further Developments

With all the time you have saved, you can expand your businesses or create new ones. If you created a functional and profitable dropshipping business that focuses on apparel, you can take the framework of that business and adapt it to a new business centered around a different type of product. You can slowly build up a network of sites, each of which operating in their own niche, each of which automated almost entirely. You will still need to do some things yourself, but a lot of it you can handle with the time you’ve saved. Alternatively, you can use the profits you’re making with a smoother, faster business and invest them in hiring people to manage other elements for you.

If you play your cards right, you could run a successful business empire with virtually no effort on your part. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish with entrepreneurship when you have the power of automation at your site.

The post How to Fully Automate a Shopify eCommerce Website appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

Google encourages you to consider your user experience when implementing ads. They offer you questions to ask yourself. What is the user trying to do on your site? What actions do they take while viewing certain portions of your page? Where is their attention?

These are factors you need to consider before placing your ads. You can’t put your ads too far out of the way, or they’ll never be clicked. You can’t put them right up front, or your users will be distracted and ignore them out of disgust. You can’t clutter your page with ads, or you hurt your user experience.

What sort of positions can you use to place your ads, to maximize their impressions and their clicks, without violating Google’s guidelines?

Before We Begin

The first thing you’ll want to take a look at is this article, published on MonetizePros. It’s a very good beginner’s guide to ad placement, and includes a few graphics and terms I’ll be referring to later.

One concept you’ll want to remember when considering ad placement is the pattern people use when they read. English is a language that reads from left to right. It also displays from top to bottom. Some languages in other parts of the world buck this trend, but we’re primarily talking about English websites, so English is the determining factor.

So people read left to right and top to bottom. In practice, this means an F-shaped pattern, focusing on subheadings, skimming, and more detailed reading in certain sections.

As you might expect, the upper left corner gets the most attention in this scenario. Therefore, placing content on the right side of the page is going to get less attention and less clicks than the same content on the left side. Content above the fold, likewise, gets more attention than content below the fold.

You also have to take into account the gutter of a page. Most standard web design these days has significant space on either side left open for widescreen monitors, while allowing smaller devices to scale down without issue. There’s also almost always top bar navigation, which is generally ignored unless it’s needed. Placing an ad above the navigation means it will be virtually invisible.

Now let’s take a look at five good positions you can use for ads.

1. Ads Within the Content

This is becoming increasingly common. You can see an example – from ReelSEO – in the article I linked above. A paragraph or two into your content, you put a horizontal banner or text ad. It gets attention, because it breaks up the user’s ability to read from one paragraph to the next. It’s not intrusive, because it’s not exceptionally tall, and it doesn’t push much more than a few lines below the fold.

The important part of this position is that it’s above the fold, but close to it. The idea is to make it an “artificial footer” if your page didn’t stretch below the fold. The user, if they want to continue reading the post after the first few paragraphs, can scroll down and see it. If they don’t, they still reach the end of the introduction and see the ad.

Always make sure this ad is slim, vertically. Banner ads and other wide-but-short ad formats are ideal here.

2. Under Navigation, Above Content

This is a more traditional banner ad position, resting below your navigation, where it won’t be ignored as easily as an ad above navigation. Again, this type of ad should be wide but short. The primary reason for this is because Google can and will penalize your site if the ads push the content entirely below the fold. If you’re displaying more advertising than content on a given page loaded on a normal monitor – not one of those 4K beasts, that is – you’re at risk.

One benefit to this ad position is the accidental click. When a user moves to click your navigation, there’s a chance they’ll click your ads instead. Even if they don’t, when they move to focus their attention on your navigation, the close proximity of your ad will attract their attention.

Be very careful about taking too much advantage of accidental clicks, however. Don’t make a hover-over drop-down navigation menu flaky enough that a user can accidentally click an ad because the nav bar disappeared. I’ll go over that a bit more in a minute, when we discuss Google’s placement guidelines.

3. Left of the Title

As I mentioned before, many sites have fixed-width designs, in a way. That is, they will shrink down to fit smaller devices, but they won’t expand beyond a certain level. There’s a good design reason for this; it’s easier to read a typical page width than it is to read an extra-wide page on a widescreen monitor. It also makes short paragraphs look bulkier. If your page was as wide as a widescreen monitor typically is, even sizable paragraphs can look short and thin.

This means there’s generally a good amount of whitespace to the left of your content. Many sites use this gutter to place social sharing buttons or a scrolling call to action, that follow the user as they scroll. You can use the same techniques to place a vertical banner that follows the user as they scroll.

This placement tends to be more ideal for your own products than for Google ads. That is, you’ll get more attention and less scorn from advertising your consulting or your ebook than you will running Google ads. That said, it’s still a good ad position.

4. Native Ads Beneath the Content

How often do you scroll down a page and see a block of thumbnails with titles and short descriptions, trying to get you to click on other articles to read now that you’ve finished this one? This site uses it, Forbes uses it, Cracked.com uses it; it’s incredibly widespread.

Here’s a secret; half the time, those related post links are actually sponsored ads. The immediate end of the content is a great place to put an ad, ideally an ad that relates to the content the user just read, so they’re more willing to click to learn more. The more it looks like part of your site design, the better, within limits. Again, this is something I’ll talk about more in the upcoming guidelines section.

Unfortunately, Google ads don’t perform quite as well here as some other ad networks. Outbrain and Taboola, two of the big content marketing networks, specialize in native ads. They’re the companies you most want to use for this position.

5. Using the Gutter Whitespace

IMDB is a big proponent of this style of ad, though I’ve seen it on many sites around the web. The idea is that all the whitespace above and to the sides of your content can be “skinned” to advertise something. For IMDB, that something is often an upcoming blockbuster movie.

Both the left and right gutters will have mirrored ads that include logos and links, and their design will flow from one to the next. This is a great ad position, if you can pull it off.

Some sites go even deeper with skinning and choose a new color scheme for their site while they run a skinned promotion. This can be cool, but it’s not something every site can pull off.

Interestingly, Google has a readout of their “top performing” ads, and many of them are in the far right gutter. I feel as though these aren’t actually as well performing as they want you to believe. Their primary benefit is their size; they’re large, graphical ads that take up a huge portion of the screen, but they only really work in very wide site layouts. For smaller devices, many of them just don’t work.

Google’s Placement Guidelines

Google has a lot of rules about where you can and cannot place your ads. In general, anything that makes your site look spammy, and anything that gets in the way of the user experience, is going to be a negative placement.

• You need to avoid accidental clicks as much as possible. I know I said they’re good above, and they can be, but that’s only when the ads look clearly like ads. Google’s rule of thumb here is that you cannot encourage a user to click on a link that looks as if it goes to another page on your site, when it’s really an ad. This is considered fraudulent activity. What this really means is that the ads have to look like ads, more than anything else.
• You are not allowed to use elements of site design to draw extra attention to ads. For example, if you have a banner below your navigation, you can’t have a message in your navigation with an arrow pointing at the ad and the words “click this to help us!” or anything of the sort.
• Your ads must be labeled only with “Advertisements” or “Sponsored Links” and nothing else. You cannot, for example, place ad links in a column labeled “resources” or “additional reading.”
• You cannot solicit ad clicks. Any time you ask your users to click an ad in order to support you, it’s technically a violation of the AdSense guidelines.
• You cannot run ads that are tall enough to push your content below the fold. An ad that pushes a couple lines down is fine; one that takes up the majority of the above-the-fold space while pushing most of your content down is not.
• You cannot offer any form of compensation in exchange for ad clicks. At all.
• Your ads are not allowed to refresh themselves and rotate without the user explicitly refreshing the page themselves.
• You cannot place ads on interstitial pages, welcome pages, exit pages, or login pages. You also cannot place ads on error pages or 404 pages. This is the primary reason why I didn’t recommend a welcome page ad above.
• You cannot use AdSense ads within emails or in a web-based email client.
• You cannot use pop-ups on your site and still run Google ads, even if the ads in the pop-ups are not Google ads.
• You cannot use ads in a frame where the primary content comes from another site.

As you can see, these guidelines are very strict about where you can run Google’s ads, and as such, they eliminate many potentially lucrative forms of advertising. If you want to run native ads, pop-under ads, welcome page ads, or email ads, you will have to use a different ad network.

Heatmaps, Hotspots and Experimentation

I have given you five different ad placements, as well as a few other ideas for ads with non-Google platforms, but I do not and cannot guarantee their value. Most websites have unique designs, you see, and that means user behavior varies from website to website. An skin ad will work great for IMDB, but it won’t work as well for a smaller no-name blog. A welcome ad works for Forbes, but it won’t work for other sites.

How can you determine which placements work best for you and your site? That’s where data harvesting and testing come in.

The first thing you want to do is figure out where users are looking and clicking while they’re on your site. The absolute best way to do this would be through a detailed eye-tracking study, but very few businesses are able to afford the costs of setting up and running such a study, primarily because it requires readers in person.

The next best thing is a heatmap application. Heatmaps generate activity reports based on user actions, primarily based on clicks, though some will actively track mouse position. You will get a graphic with colors ranging from blue to red-yellow-white depending on the density of activity in those areas.

Most of the time, what you’ll see is a variation on the F-shaped pattern I mentioned above. What you’ll want to do is look for abnormal hotspots or locations where you might be able to place an ad for more attention.

One of the most prominent heatmap applications is Crazy Egg, and I like to recommend it to most people who ask. However, in the interest of expanding your horizons – and I’m talking about how one solution doesn’t always work for everyone, it would be hypocritical if I didn’t give alternatives – here’s a list of other heatmap programs you can use.

So what about testing? The idea here is simple, and if you’ve ever done split testing for ads or headlines or landing page designs, you’re already familiar with it. Basically, what you’ll be doing is running the same ad in different positions, or in different sizes. Make sure they run for roughly equivalent amounts of time or for equivalent amounts of traffic. That way, you can see which ads perform better.

The goal is to try out ads in different places to see which gets more attention and more clicks. Once you determine that, you can test out other positions and see which is second best. Google allows you several different ads at the same time – three AdSense content units, three link unites, and two search boxes – and you’ll want to test them all. Don’t be afraid to use all of them, but test them when you do! Sometimes, adding an extra ad unit will take away from the other units enough that the return isn’t worth it. One valuable ad is better than two poor ads, in virtually every situation.

Once you’ve figured out a winning position for your ads, you’ll be able to focus on other optimizations, such as the content of those ads, the content on your site, and passive ways to encourage ad clicks that don’t violate Google’s various rules.

Speaking of Google’s rules: when you log in to Google’s AdSense dashboard, in the left navigation column will be an entry labeled “policy violations.” You can click this at any time to see if your site is in violation of any of Google’s various policies. If you see any entries in this section, drop what you’re doing and fix them as soon as possible! You don’t want to risk being penalized or even removed from AdSense over something you could have fixed easily had you only known.

The post 5 of The Highest Earning AdSense Ad Layout Positions appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

Make a Referral System

What’s the best source of advertising? Word of mouth. It’s free, and people trust their friends more than they’ll ever trust a corporate message, no matter how down to earth you may be.

A referral system incentivizes word of mouth advertising. It’s also incredibly simple to set up. All you need to do is come up with rewards for your referral tiers and advertise the fact that you have them.

Anything, really. I’ve seen successful referral systems based entirely on intangible game-style achievements. You earn badges that display on your user account, but they don’t get you anything other than the prestige of being a top-tier user.

On the other side of the spectrum, I’ve seen pure monetary payments in the form of gift cards and store credit offered. Typically these would come out to be very low payouts for advertising, so it’s worth using payments as incentives. You can also use products as incentives, if your product is compelling enough that people would want to earn it rather than buy it. Free upgrades work as well, such as Dropbox’s increased storage for referrers.

To actually run a referral program, you might want to use a company like Friendbuy or S Loyalty. These services, along with many others, give you the framework for tracking and redeeming referrals without requiring that you manage code and bookkeeping yourself.

Streamline Your Sales Funnel

A referral system is an example of a detailed, advanced growth hack. It takes a lot of work to set up, but it offers ongoing rewards for potentially years to come. On the other side of the coin you have the simple, minor growth hacks. For example, streamlining your sales funnel is a simple hack that makes it easier for users to convert.

The process here is simple. Make a map of all of the ways a user can convert. Draw a circle with “converted” in it, and draw lines radiating outward. Each line is a path. Where do users come from when they convert? From each node, draw more lines reaching out to a step further away. For example, one extended path might be Facebook ad, to Facebook page, to promoted post, to blog post, to product page, to checkout page, to conversion.

Your goal is to identify any case where there are too many steps between a user and converting. Think about it this way; every click a user needs to make, every form field they fill out, is an opportunity for failure. If you can take a five-field form and prune it down to three fields, you may get less information on an opt-in, but you get more opt-ins from the lower number of stumbling blocks.

The individual effect of each change is minor, but there will be dozens of minor hacks you can make to streamline your funnel.

Upsells

The art of the upsell is the art of getting a customer to buy more than they had the intention of buying. Think of this old joke, where the young salesman ends a day of work selling just a single set of fishing hooks, which leads to selling a new rod, which leads to selling a boat, which leads to selling a truck. That’s what you’re trying to do, albeit on a much less ridiculous scale.

Amazon is a great example of this with their simple “customers also bought” menu. The idea is to suggest to users that they buy something that compliments what they’re already buying. You see it all the time with computer manufacturers as well. Hey, you’re buying a computer, how about adding in a second hard drive? What about a mouse and keyboard? How about a monitor that goes well with your graphics card? You can also get a mouse pad, and a carrying case for your accessories. Want some cleaning supplies for your hardware? How about an anti-static wristband for if you have to repair your machine?

If you take your time, you can leverage a mailing list signup or a free trial into a series of upsells and get more out of a single customer than you would had they just purchased up front.

Proof of Trust

Social proof and trust seals are both important for small businesses, anyone who hasn’t built up enough of a reputation to ride on it alone.

Social proof shows up on your landing page and your product pages. It can occur in various forms, as well. For example, basic user testimonials is a good form of social proof. Users like to know that other users liked your product. Testimonials are easily faked, though, so go one step further and get detailed testimonials from influencers and power users. If you ever have a brand-name minor celebrity come through, solicit their opinion for a bit more social proof. You can also add full case studies of businesses willing to share their results.

Another form of social proof is the company logo. If you contract Sony, the United Nations or NASA as a customer, you sure as hell want to tell everyone about it. Add their logo to your landing page and you’re sure to get more sign-ups.

Trust seals are a little different. These are certifications from security companies like Norton that require you pass a security test. They’re badges that tell a user that your conversion process is certified secure. Get one, post it on your checkout page, and watch your abandoned carts disappear.

The post A Complete List of Growth Hacks That Increase Sales appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.

That said, I can still give some general niche advice. I won’t be telling you what specific subset of a given topic in a given industry has proven to be valuable, because that’s a lot of research to do to just give away the information.

Before you go hog-wild with a niche, you should always do some research. Do some Google searches for your niche and see where you might be able to fit in. Run some keyword searches on OfferVault and see what sort of offers are available.

It’s also important to investigate the CPA network before you invest too heavily in a site or a niche. An offer may look attractive, but if it’s coming from a network that has a known history of never paying their publishers, it will do you no good to apply and invest in a site to funnel traffic to that offer. You can check out network reviews on oDigger, or run some Google searches fro them as well.

Now, on to the niches.

1. Gaming

Gaming, in this case, refers primarily to video games with a side of mobile gaming. Gaming is interesting, because it’s both very saturated and somewhat low paying, but it has a place on this list because it rewards agile brand builders. Gaming offers work great for 3-6 months, maybe up to a year, but fade quickly compared to other niches. On the other hand, discounting mobile games, thousands of video games come out every year. With mobile included, that number could creep to hundreds of thousands, if not higher. Of course, a lot of them are terrible shovelware no one plays for more than a few seconds, but no one said the games you put on offer had to be good.

2. Gambling

A lot of times, when you plug “gaming” into a search engine, you’ll end up with a lot of gambling results. This is just as true for CPA offers. Gambling has a lot of flexibility in topic, from online casinos to individual games, though it can also be quite saturated. The one notable downside to the gambling niche is the general bad reputation it gets with users and search engines.

3. College

With the rising costs of education, entire generations of students are graduating high school and looking for cheap alternatives. Trade schools, tech schools, community colleges and low cost educational options are all valid niches to pursue. Just beware of trying to compete with some of the ridiculous industry giants also using those CPA offers.

4. Mobile Apps

Mobile is growing at an astonishing pace, having taken over as the dominant means of browsing many social networks. Catering to mobile is still a niche many marketers find hard, so you can actually dig into already-saturated niches and supplant the incumbent giants by catering to mobile when they don’t.

5. Vitamins and Supplements

If there’s one thing that never changes, it’s snake oil. Ten years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, and probably ten thousand years ago, people were peddling ways to be healthier. Sure, it’s an industry dominated by a few big companies, but these big companies need to be careful about what they hawk, lest they open themselves up to lawsuits. As a smaller, more agile marketer, you can adjust your product recommendations on the fly to follow the lucrative offers.

6. Loans

Loans and other personal finance options are another timeless source of high-paying CPA offers. Much like gambling, however, you have to be aware of the seedy underbelly of loan marketing. Either embrace the dark side, or beware of the dangerous payday loan marketing.

7. Dating

Dating is a niche that has two roles; one on the legitimate side of SFW ads, and one as ads attached to pornographic sites. As frowned upon as the pornography industry is among many circles, it’s perfectly legitimate as a way to make money for thousands of marketers. Dating also has the benefit of a huge variety of niche sites to pick through. Heck, the old standby of Adult Friend Finder has CPA offers in the $120 range.

8. Insurance

Health insurance in the United States has been an ongoing controversy for the last several years, and plenty of people have been searching for alternatives they can find to the state-run marketplaces and subsidies. Other forms of insurance haven’t changed much, though.

9. Weight Loss/Fitness

Fad diets, exercise equipment, weight loss pills, fitness regimens, they’re all potentially lucrative niches. You just need a compelling way to sell whatever it is you’re selling, and you’re good to go. As a bonus, this is a great one to roll in with other affiliate marketing strategies.

10. Jewelry

You might not think of jewelry as a high-profile niche, but it’s out there. You’ve got everything from wedding rings to diamond candles as options when you dig into this particular niche.

11. Technology

Tech is an incredibly broad niche, admittedly, which means you can find something in there that hasn’t been covered yet, even if it’s a slightly older piece of tech that people just haven’t heard much about. You can also strive to be on the cutting edge, following offers for tech that’s only just been announced or just released.

12. Fitness

Fitness specifically is what got people like Doctor Oz where they are today, and it’s really not hard to replicate their success. It helps that there’s a high turnover in the industry, with rebrandings and public backlash coming in waves that wipes out the top players occasionally.

13. Forex and Binary Options

Who doesn’t want to make money fast on seemingly easy investments? There’s a huge market available for investments and trading moneymaking schemes, ranging from legitimate to beginner’s ebooks to scams. Find the right offers, strike the right tone in your site and you’re golden. You’ll probably make more money than most of the people getting into trading.

14. Business Investments

A surprising number of businesses looking for capital and investments put up offers with high values through various CPA networks. It’s a tough niche to get into, because it requires contacting a very specific type of person with a very specific type of marketing, but if you can get venture capitalists on the hook, you can make a mint.

15. Pets

Time and again, otherwise reasonable people will spend insane amounts of money on stuff for their pets, be it medicine, toys, grooming, food or gimmicks. Use this to your advantage.

The post 15 of Our Favorite CPA Advertisement Niches appeared first on Growtraffic Blog.