Julismow

Conversion Rate Optimisation

2016-06-28T23:30:00.000-07:00

The ultimate word in marketing is "conversion" and it’s undoubtedly the most important aspect of running a website. It encompasses everything that makes a website great. The things that make a website great among others are: quality of product, quality of content, search engine optimization, design and user experience. Websites that convert well, will definitely have all of these areas covered and will have certainly done a better job at this than their competitors.

What is conversion rate optimisation?
The word conversion can be completely misunderstood as most people think of this as simply being a ‘call to action’ or just simply improving click through rates.

Conversion rate optimisation is the method of creating an "experience" for the visitor of a website or landing page with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers. This is achieved by looking into a number of of elements of the website, from design to content.

When beginning the process of conversion rate optimisation there are six factors to take into consideration:

Value Proposition: By this we mean the sum of all the costs and benefits of taking action. What is the overall perceived benefit in your visitors mind? These perceived costs and benefits are what we call "value proposition".

Relevance: Does your content on your website/page match your visitor’s expectations? Do their needs match your "value proposition"?

Clarity: Is your "call to action", main message and "value proposition" clear enough?

Anxiety: Are there certain elements on your website/page that create uncertainty to your visitor or that are completely missing?

Distraction: Where does your eye first land on your website? Does it assist you on getting your message through? What does your website/page display that is off topic? Does it have a conflicting message?

Urgency: Why should your visitors follow your conversion funnel? What incentives, offers and presentation will make them take the desired action?

How to perform conversion rate optimization?
In order to optimise your conversion rates as mentioned above, there are a few basic areas to have a look at and improve:

Design: This includes user experience design (UX Design), Call to Action, Graphics/Display, Quality of Product.

Content: Quality of Content, Presentation of Content

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): accurate titles, relevant keywords, correct meta-data, images and videos. All these must be clear, descriptive and with correct names and keywords.

Testing: A key contributor to success is constantly measuring and testing what works and what not. This is an ongoing process of experimentation.

Summary:
The above facts are by no means comprehensive and what works for one website might not work for another. This is due to the fact that every website has its own message, objectives and character.

Performed successfully, conversion rate optimisation can have a long-term effect on your website and its success. Conversion rate optimisation is a continual process within an ever-changing environment. The more knowledgeable you are in regards to your website the higher the chances of succeeding. Interesting Read.

Six questions to that will improve campaign results

2016-06-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: Get some honest feedback, and learn why failure doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.

1. Are you offering the proper incentive?

What are you really giving away? Is it something you’d find useful? Does it help solve the customer’s problem even without your product? Make sure you are giving away something that has value enough to make the customer feel indebted to you.

2. Are you asking too much?

The longer the sign-up form, the LESS likely likely potential customers are to complete it. If you really think about it, you probably don't need to know someone’s full name, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name at this point, do you? Collect information that’s vital and that you’ll actually use so it’s worth everyone's time.

3. Are you attracting the right people?

Check out your web traffic stats and see where people are coming from. Check out demographic information about the people that are signing up. Are those the customers you want or expect to sign up? Perhaps you need to go back a step and adjust your marketing and traffic sources. If all your traffic comes from a cat community but you sell dog products,the people you’ve attracted probably aren’t converting.

4. Get someone else’s opinion.

You have way too much context on your product to know if your page will be effective. Start asking people around you (who don’t work with you) if they understand what you’re offering and why they should complete your call-to-action. There is also a great service called http://fivesecondtest.com that will show your page to strangers and let you ask them questions about what they took away.

5. Make sure you fit in.

It’s OK to be different, but does the design and copy stray too far from what your customers might already be expecting before they get to your page? If so, you might be scaring them away. Again, think about the dog grooming example: You wouldn’t want to include pictures of cats on this landing page targeted to dog owners, even if your general service also catered to cats.

6. Eliminate dead-ends.

Once someone signs-ups, that shouldn’t be the end. They can help you spread the word! Have you told them how they can help you by directly thanking them and ASKING for them to tell their friends?

Remember: New customers are dramatically MORE likely to convert on offers if they hear about you through their friends. So make it easy for your customers to tell their friends about you . . . both through the landing page and in your follow-up emails.

And finally…failure. Don’t get discouraged if your idea doesn’t take off immediately. A good majority of new businesses will never take off as dreamed. Sometimes it’s better to just fail quickly and move on. There are plenty of opportunities if you keep trying.

Seven Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier

2016-06-14T01:34:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: You’ll receive specific resources to measure your business and optimize your sales funnel.

We'll cover a wide range of metrics and techniques in this mail, but none of it will mean anything unless you define your end goals and how your landing pages will help you achieve those goals. Here are some goal statements that might apply to your landing pages:

Get 40% more people who click on my advertisements to purchase my product this month.
Generate 8,000 more qualified leads per month for my sales team.
Test my startup idea by signing up 1,000 people with a conversion rate that's higher than 30% in less than 3 months.

You should have completed your goals in lesson 1. Now it’s time to measure your progress.

Measure Traffic

This is where traditional web analytics come into play. You want to learn how many people are coming to your page and where they are coming from.

Visitors

How many unique people are coming to your landing page? Until more than 100 people a day visit your landing page, your other metrics won't mean much.

Sources

How did these people get to your landing pages? I like to break up visitors into the following source groups:

Paid Advertisements - These visitors came to your landing page from ads you purchased, including banner ads and paid keywords.
Owned - Came from my own website, blog, etc.
Social - Came via general Twitter or Facebook posts.
Friend Referral - Someone told them about your landing page by giving them a specific link. These visitors tend to have the highest conversion rate.
Email (Specific) Campaign - A campaign sent to known leads you've already acquired.
Niche Communities - Internet communities where your customers hang out online, ask questions, blog, etc.
Organic Search - They found the pages through natural search engine traffic by typing related keywords into Google or Bing.
Events - They heard about your landing page through an event, such as a tradeshow booth.

Measuring Actions
Beyond tracking visitors and sources, you want to know how effective your landing page is once someone gets there.

Bounce Rate: The % of visitors who leave without taking any actions on your page. A high bounce rate tells you that you have the wrong traffic (you are bringing in people who aren't your customers) or aren't speaking to a problem your customers have.
Time on Page: A high bounce rate that also has a lengthy time on page tells you the content speaks to them... but you haven't given them a clear enough call-to-action.
Engagement Rate: What percentage of people did something to become more active visitors? Did they like you on Facebook, take a secondary call-to-action, click on any other links?
Conversion Rate: What percentage of unique people visiting your landing page end up completing your primary call-to-action?
Viral Growth (Referral) Rate: This measures the "Second Conversion". For every person who converts... how many of their friends do they also get to convert. For instance, if one person tells 6 friends, and 3 of those friends come back to sign up, you have a viral growth rate of 3.0. To make the most of your traffic, you need to grow this number.

Using Numbers to Optimize Landing Pages

Start by driving traffic to your landing pages. Great landing pages can't help you if no one sees them, and you can't do any other effective measurements without traffic. Goal 100 unique people per day.
Measure the actions against all the traffic and focus on growing the conversion rate and reducing the bounce rate for all of your traffic.
Start segmenting your traffic by source to understand which sources convert the best. Double whatever you are doing there. Look for the worst source and stop driving that traffic or drive them to a different landing page that better speaks to them.
Try A/B testing to see if you can increase the conversion rate more against your baseline.
Once you have greater than 15% of the visitors converting on your landing page, focus on getting those people to help you share so that you can increase the viral growth rate.
Repeat and implement on each landing page.

Tools That Make This Easy

Google Analytics - Will help you measure all the basic web analytics and break traffic up by sources. Advanced users can setup their goals directly here. Most of you will also have this hooked up on your primary website as well.
Google Adwords Conversion Tracking - Enable this so that Google knows if your ads are converting on your landing page. This helps Google automatically optimize your results.
Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer - Enable A/B testing to drive improvements to engagement and conversion rates.
Kissmetrics - Track who your customers are and what they did.
KickoffLabs - Make it easy to measure success, enable viral growth, and integrate with these other services. Oh, and also do free landing page reviews :)

Your turn: Start measuring your results today.

How to Start a Movement With Your Landing Pages

2016-06-12T01:09:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: You’ll learn advanced techniques to keep growing your business and for optimizing your conversion rate.

Landing pages are great tools for lead generation and conversion rate optimization because they can be customized for any marketing campaign you run. You can appeal directly to specific groups in your market segment, which is ideal because some people learn best through reading, while others may prefer audio or video.

Some people like to sit down in one sitting and take it all in, while others like to learn in bits and pieces. We’ve included action items in this 30 day course because we know that many people learn best through doing.

So how do you appeal to these different market segments? I recommend starting off with some of these tactics:

Incorporate videos

After we added a video to our own landing pages, we saw that people watching the video were 65% more likely to convert. Success! But we’d gone almost a year without a video about our service because we weren’t sure it would help.

Drip email campaigns are a series of prepared emails that are sent to the customer or prospect over time. For example, the course you’re taking right now is a form of drip email. Landing pages are great for capturing leads via a drip email campaign because you’re offering value, and you’re building trust with the customer by demonstrating your expertise. Services like www.getdrip.com or www.mailchimp.com can you get set up.

Long form sales page

While sign-up pages for drip email campaigns are usually short in nature, landing pages can also be in the form of a long for sales page when used for direct sales. At first glance, long form sales pages are considered “ugly”, but if you drive the right traffic to the page, they can be a gold mine.

Giveaways/Contests

Giveaways and contests are great because they encourage visitors/customers to get involved and can generate a lot of word of mouth marketing. You can do a giveaway and give bonus entries to people who get their friends to sign up or give you their email address.

Share your goals

Share your goals with your visitors and customers! People love to know they’re working with an actual person on the other side and sharing your goal is a great way to do it. More often than not, people like to know that they’re helping out with something and making a change. If you set a goal and reach it, your customers will love that they took part and helped with a great accomplishment.

Create a movement

Be a part of something greater than yourself. While people might want to help your company reach specific goals, they are often even more willing to support a greater cause. For example, if your product created from environmentally friendly sources, tell your customers they’re supporting a sustainable product and helping the earth!

Your turn: Next week you’ll receive specific resources to measure your progress, optimize and grow.

How to increase visitors by viral marketing techniques

2016-06-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: You’ll learn how to boost the results of any campaign with viral marketing techniques.

Viral, or word of mouth marketing, can reduce the cost of any campaign by getting existing leads to refer new ones. These additional leads are free and easy to get. Did you know that 35% of the 3 million leads we've helped businesses collect have been from direct referrals?

Rule #1 - People Share Cool Shit

Have something on the site that people want to share or that makes it worth sharing. If it's "cool" people will share it.

Rule #2 - Make Sharing Easy

Make it easy to share said "cool shit". This means leveraging standard social network sharing mechanisms and popular sites like Youtube, Slideshare, etc depending on what type of media or content you are trying to make go viral. If you publish the content behind a paywall or some obscure service that's not easy to share... it will be that much harder.

Rule #3 - Make it Worth Sharing

You can always grease the wheel by making it worth someones while to share. A lot of our customers, for example, leverage a mechanism that rewards people for sharing. The reward could be a discount for anyone that shares with three friends or simply a contest "the most shares wins X".

Rule #4 - Seed the Traffic

If you are starting with no reputation without an existing audience you are going to need to seed traffic. You can do this by:

Having someone else, with an audience, promote your site/content/etc.
Buying traffic with Google or Facebook Ads
Selling it hard on your own. A little sweat equity never hurt trying to make something popular.

Rule #5 - Not everything cool goes viral

For everything that "goes viral" there are thousands of other similar things that simply don't make it. That means it make take you several tries to see what sticks for your area.

Rule #6 - Build it into your product

If possible... build a sharing/viral experience in that improves the user experience. Look at what AirBnB does by forcing you to review places you stay. Then they strongly encourage you to share that experience (if it was positive) on social networks.

Rule #7 - Find out why people aren’t sharing your message.

Reach out to your first 1,000 customers personally and find out if they’ve told anyone who might be interested. If not, find out what it would take to get them to do so. Just be direct.

This might sound rather tedious, but you’ll learn very decisively what you need to do (or do better) to earn this kind of recommendation organically. The fact is, most of what you do to get your name out there will fail whereas we both know personal recommendations work. So tedious it might be, but it’s also a very effective way to uncover things about your market you probably don’t yet realize.

Rule #8 - Create a “mission” your customers can get involved in.

We all yearn to be part of something meaningful, worthwhile and bigger than ourselves. So let’s say your goal is to get 10,000 customers by next month. Tell your customers: if they like you and the way you’ve positioned your cause, they’re very likely to help you achieve your goal – or at least go a long way to doing so. A little transparency can go a long way.

Rule #9 - Run a referral contest.

A variation of the previous tip is to hold a tell-a-friend contest, where the customer who generates the most referrals (paid or trial, that’s up to you) within a designated time period wins a prize. Make the prize relevant to your customers’ interests as well as worth the effort.

Rule #10 - It might be OK to be just a little viral.

Going truly viral means that for every one person that joins up you get more than one additional person for free. That leads to the awesome hockey-stick style growth of traffic, users, etc. But most businesses don't work that way.

But that doesn't mean you should stop trying to follow the rules. If, for example, every person that signs up brings .3 more people... that's a 30% boost you didn't have before. For example, we see an average of a 35% "Viral Boost". That's 35 more leads for every 100 you had to bring in the hard way. That helps lower you average cost per lead assuming you, like everyone else, have a customer acquisition cost.

Your turn: Read our article on how to supercharge your conversion rate with referrals, then awesome worksheet on leveraging for viral growth and implement these techniques yourself!

How to get inside your customer’s head

2016-06-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: You’ll learn how to get inside your customer’s head. Pamper them for the first 30 days and they’ll never leave you.

With how automated and systemized everything is on the internet, it’s becoming increasingly important to treat your customers well and provide great support. This includes everyone, unless your business has a deliberate and intentionally well calculated decision not to. Here are some tips for establishing a great relationship with your customers.

1. Send a personal thank you note

At the very least, reach out to anyone you notice sharing the love and genuinely thank them! If you have their mailing address (because they’re a customer), hand write a personal note from you, the Founder, and pop it in the mail. Do you think that would have a positive impact?

2. Pay attention

Let them know you’re there and offer your help. For example, if your product is a 10 lesson online course, and you see they reached lesson 4 and got stuck - reach out to them!

3. Ask for their feedback.

Many times you can establish a great relationship just by asking for feedback. It shows your customer that you care, and you can learn something to improve your product.

4. Get rid of all no-reply email addresses.

If possible, get rid of all no-reply@somewhere.com email addresses and make it easier for customers to contact you. You should WANT to make it easy for customers to reach out.

5. And lastly, don’t stop selling!

Be sure to keep extolling the benefits of your product or service to your existing customers. Remind them every week what tremendous value they’re getting and all the ways their life is now easier as a result… “And, uh, by the way, shouldn’t you be telling all your friends about this unparalleled awesomeness? Yes, you’re right; you should! Here’s how…”

So the basic thrust is to focus on treating your customers like royalty, making sure they receive truly remarkable service and reaching out to them personally. Make it easy for people to share the message. Remind people regularly without being obnoxious. And then start working on how to scale that and amplify your communication using the voice of your happy customers.

Your turn: Connect with your customers and nurture your leads!

The most essential skill of driving traffic

2016-06-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: you’re going to learn the brutal truth about driving traffic to your website.

“Build it and they’ll come”. That may have been true ages ago, but certainly not anymore.

So what’s the holy grail in lead generation? Sure you can buy ads, or do some fancy SEO (search engine optimization). But there are many other ways to drive traffic that will probably work better for you. But no one talks about it because it’s hard. It’s not sexy. And it takes time. So let’s get down to the dirty work.

1. Post in niche community sites and join online discussions related to your business.

Answering questions on Quora, industry blog comments, and other online marketing forums helps you build a reputation around your business as an expert while driving traffic to your site. Don’t be spammy...just add a link in your signature or specifically to a resource on your site that helps answer the questions.

Check out my answer to "What's the best source of traffic for landing pages?" on Quora... by posting a solid answer I'm driving back qualified traffic back to our site!

2. Blog with a call to action.

Unless you’re blogging for the fun of it, every piece of content you write should have a call to action.

3. Do a guest post and cross promote.

Step up the blogging a notch and see if you can do a guest post for someone. Allow them to do a blog for your website too.

4. Leverage existing customers.

Your existing customers/subscribers are your best source of new customers. Give them some incentive to share your link with their friends or simply make them so happy they feel compelled to do so.

5. Buy traffic with adwords or search engines.

Buying traffic can be profitable, but proceed with caution.

6. Reach out directly.

Know of some people or companies that can use your service. Reach out to them directly - you never know!

Your turn: Check out our guide to marketing online without a big budget.

Learn how Apple designs amazing landing pages

2016-06-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: You’ll learn what makes a landing page beautiful and use those very same techniques for your own landing page.

Ever wonder what a multi-billion dollar company does with their marketing budget? What do their landing pages look like?

Well here’s a secret: emotions sell.

Go to a luxury car maker’s page and what do you see? A dangerously fast car.

What about Apple’s page on their new iPhone? You’ll see an incredibly beautiful smartphone.

I’ve “borrowed” some tactics from these cash rich marketing departments for you. Here’s what to focus on:

1. A clear call to action.

Step 10 feet back and see if you can spot it. The main goal of your page is to convert, so remove unnecessary distractions. You might have a great blog, an awesome Facebook page, and a lot more information somewhere...but if I start clicking around I might never come back.

2. Lead with differentiation.

Tell me why you’re special. How does your product or service different from the next competitor?

When the iPhone 5s was introduced, it came with a fingerprint sensor and gold colored option. Do you offer phone support when no one else does? Brag about it. Either way, find something to differentiate your service or product.

3. Consider the visual hierarchy.

Stand 5 feet back from your screen. Of the information you’re trying to convey, some things are critical, others important, and others helpful. Look over the messages you want on the page and determine the most critical, what provides additional support and what might be great to include if there were space.

4. Choose a great background and perfect stock image.

The best images amplify your call to action. They don’t make the text harder to read or distract the visitor. Images of people can evoke emotions or even use body language to point toward your call-to-action.

5. Fonts and colors.

Sometimes it seems like the world has been created in Arial. Don’t limit yourself.

6. Learn from the best.

You have a favorite company, product or landing page already. Check out the landing page best practices Apple used to generate record iPhone 5 sales.

Your turn: See where your design stands. Don’t wait - the next lesson on lead generation is going to be action packed, so you want your landing page to be ready.

How to optimize video content more seo friendly

2016-06-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in our previous article, there are many forms of content. In this article we are going to examine video content and how we can optimize such content in order to improve our search engine rankings and achieve higher visitations and higher conversion rates.

Video is a powerful tool. It improves the visitors experience by offering additional ways of viewing your content and receiving answers to their queries in more than just the classic textual way.

Videos:

YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. Statistics also show that while people will spend a minimal amount of time on a website, they are willing to spend more time watching a video of interest.

The following are some useful tips on how to optimize your videos as to achieve higher rankings on the results of Google and YouTube and build visibility for your target audience.

Video Quality: Ensure your videos are relevant and informative for your target audience. Videos should be clear, understandable, memorable and short.

Video Title: Create a title relevant to your target audience and the subject area the video is about. Adding a few keywords to the title will also help with achieving higher ranking in the search engines. The keywords should be included in the video title, description, tags and file name.

Transcript: In order for your videos to rank well in the search engines, it is a necessity to provide the search engines with something to rank and index. This is achieved with the transcript. Including keywords or phrases in the transcript is desirable. More information on transcripts can be found here.

Captions: Captions can be used as a transcript alternative. You can find the full process of adding captions and subtitles here. You can also edit the captions afterwards for further optimizing your video.

Video Length: The average amount of time a person spends viewing a video is around the 1.30 minute mark. So make sure your video is direct and to the point, with all the information you want to present included. People do not want to sit through a lengthy video and most will not. Part of creating a positive user experience is the length of the video.

Host & Embed: As mentioned, YouTube is the second largest search engine. Opening an account is free and easy to use. Once that is completed, you can then proceed to embed your videos on your website. This process enables you to rank higher in search engines, especially when the content of the page is relevant and the pictures the same.

Video Sitemap: Submit a video sitemap to Google to make sure that the search engine can find your video content and index it accordingly. This is the easiest way for search engines to find your video content, index it as quick as possible and rank it. Use important keywords in the anchor text that links to your videos featured on your sitemap.

Summary:

If you are not exploring and utilizing video content, it is time you start doing exactly that. You are ignoring one significant reason you should: it will increase the chance of more visitors landing on your website which are coming from organic search results. That will also increase your conversion rates accordingly.

Copy good copy for your landing pages

2016-06-04T02:20:00.000-07:00

In this lesson: You’ll learn how to refine the copy on your website and make it short, simple and compelling.

It's finally time to put pen to paper... or fingers to keys if you prefer. You'll notice that we're intentionally avoiding a conversation about your landing page design right now. That's because what you say is much more important what it looks like. Unfortunately too many people get caught up on the look of their landing pages and don't spend enough time writing copy that really converts. You aren't going to make that mistake. You are better than that. You've already done a bunch of research so you're ready to go.

Go step by step here and use the worksheet to create your first headlines and sales pitches using the research you’ve completed before. After you’ve completed this worksheet you’ll have great copy you could plug into just about any standard landing page design.

The Headline

When a visitor first comes to your site, the first thing they see is your headline. Your headline’s job is to stop them in their tracks. Does your headline grab their attention? It can make the difference between them leaving or signing up. When writing a headline, here are some tips:

Make them curious: Entice them with what you can offer and deliver.
Match their expectations: The majority of your visitors probably land on your page for one reason - match that reason in your headline.
Communicate clearly: The visitor should know exactly what’s going on without having to think too hard.

The Body

If your headline captured your visitor’s attention, the body of the page is what comes next. Here you can go into more detail about why your product is so valuable. Here are 5 characteristics of what you should communicate. You need to subtle tell them or convince them why you are:

Unique - Why is your product/service different from the competitor?
Desirable - What is it about your solution that makes them want it?
Succinct - Keep it short and simple..
Memorable - Tell the visitor something that they’ll remember after they leave.
Specific - Be specific and definite.

The Call-to-Action

Make sure you have a clear call to action. Visitors should be able to know immediately what your call to action is. It might be for them to enter their email to join your mailing list, or to buy your service or product.

Remember to Include Social Proof

Testimonials are great “proofs” to demonstrate to your visitor just how great your product or service is. The best testimonials will address an objection or multiple objections. For example, the testimonial can stress: durability, price, quality, speed, customer support, popularity, and more. If you don’t have any testimonials yet, you can “cheat” by using industry quotes to steer your visitor in the right direction.

Your turn: Work on your header, body, and call to action. We have a helpful article that will teach you how to write better landing page copy.

We’ve also created this guide for you to cover all bases - do the exercises now. Don’t skip this - you’re going to need this when we go over advanced tactics.

How to research landing pages like a pro

2016-06-02T01:52:00.000-07:00

You’ll craft the perfect plan for your landing page. You’ll understand who your target market is, and how to stand out from the crowd.

Time is your most valuable resources - every second that goes by disappears forever.

You can save hours of wasted time by going over these 6 essential basics.

1. Define a SMART goal for your landing page.

Good landing pages start with a goal. It’s why you’re building the page. A SMART goal is Specific. Measurable. Action oriented. Relevant to your business. Timebound.

An example of a SMART goal would be: “Convince 20% of the people who come to our home page to sign up for a trial.” You want to have one primary goal for each landing page you are building or refining. These goals should also align with your business strategy.

Is it to generate new leads? If so, how many new leads per month are you aiming for?
Is it for direct sales? What is your conversion rate right now and where do you want it to be?
Are you having a contest? How many people gave you their email address?

2. Describe your target customer with 5 traits.

Even if your business services several different customer verticals... what customer specifically are these pages designed to persuade? What do you know about them? How old are they? How much money do they generally have to spend? Etc.

Identify at least 3 traits shared by and two related products used by your target customers.

For example: Where do they shop? How old are they? What magazines / forums do they read? What is their average salary?

3. Identify 20 keywords that your landing pages should target.

Get inside the head of your customer. If you wanted to buy a product online, what keywords would you type into Google? Do you know what the most popular searches for your product is?

You probably have a few keywords you know should be included in your headlines and copy. But what about other words, words that are missing from your list, words your competitor’s target, or phrases that you should be using.

Our own product sells landing pages. But there are certain words after "Landing Pages" that we had questions about.

Do people look for "Landing page analytics" or "Landing page metrics"?
Should we say "Landing Page Themes" or "Landing Page Templates"?

Data can answer all these questions. The Google keyword tool will help you determine search volume and help settle debates like the ones above.

https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool

Ad spy software will help you identify keywords your competitors are targeting

http://www.keywordspy.com/ or http://www.spyfu.com/

Add 20 keywords or keyword phrases that should be in your copy.

4. Identify related and competing services.

Who is your biggest competitor? Does what they do work? Why? Can you improve upon it?

Assume that your product doesn’t solve every problem your customer faces. Assume that they are also looking for alternatives to your solution. You should see how you stack up and what customers expect.

Search for related services and competition based on your knowledge of the customer.
If they are running an advertisement… click it so you see their PPC landing page.
Capture the name and link of the page.
Capture the headline of those landing pages
Identify one thing you liked and didn’t like about each landing page.

If you just want to improve your home page you could bookmark your competitions home page. But if you want to beat them at targeted landing pages the same Ad Spy tools from the last task can be used to help you find their targeted landing pages as well. Finally, you could just perform keyword searches based on your research to find competing pages. The point is that you want to differentiate but also not stray too far from formulas that may be working. Use a competitor’s head start as an advantage when you improve upon their pages. This works especially well if you are competing against a well-established (larger) player. You can assume that they've already done a lot of this research to know what works. Rip, pivot, and jam on their content. :) Competing Landing Pages These pages would be competing for your business. You want to do better than them right?

5. Describe the problem you’re solving like a customer would.

How much background information does a typical customer have? Never assume they know what you know. Put yourself in their shoes for just a minute and write out what the problem is in their words. Write 5 sentences that a customer might use to describe their problem. For example: A new business that's about to launch might describe their problems the following ways...

We need to locate our first 100 customers.
We need a "coming soon page" to start marketing.
We need to start building an email list

A Landing page, for example, could be a solution for all those need/problem statements. If you are selling landing pages you may need to think about how your copy addresses each of these customer problem statements.

6. Capture the 5 best headlines you’ve seen.

Sometimes the inspiration you need is right around you. Write them down and don't be afraid to "borrow" them.

Your turn: Read the article on building the perfect page by finding your audience first. Once you do this you’ll be ready for your next lesson.

Creating a Website Without a Budget

2016-06-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

Being a newbie affiliate or a season veteran, there are two good reasons for creating a website without a budget. Firstly, your budget is zero or you simply do not want to spend money. Secondly, you have the budget but want to experiment and see if you like the work before you spend any money.

Many people believe that it is necessary to spend in order to succeed but usually that simply isn’t true. You need to learn, discover, experiment, become creative and of course make some mistakes along the way.

Most significantly, you want to find out if you like the affiliate world and if you see a future in this hard working and competitive environment. If you don’t like the affiliate world you can just walk away without any losses and plenty of experience gained, instead of having to walk away after invested money in addition to the time consumed.

Once you have decided to undertake the task of creating a website there is a certain checklist to run through:

Domain & Topic
Business & Marketing Plan
Logo & Design
Content Management System (CMS)
Content

Domain & Topic: Your domain and topic go hand in hand and should explain what your website does. Whether you are starting a travel affiliate website or a topic outside of the travel industry, this needs to be addressed carefully as this will dictate your content. Of course getting a domain isn’t exactly free but the costs are not high.

GoDaddy – (offers 1 click WordPress installation)

Business & Marketing Plan: Most affiliates, especially new ones, do not have any plan in place and it is advisable to at least outline how you plan to market your website. What research have you done on the topic and market, how would your website stand out to the competition, what is your target market/audience, how much money can you generate from your website.

Logo & Design: Logo can be done for free using free tools that can be found online. A website design can also be done for free but it will depend on your content management system (CMS). The most popular free CMS are blogspot.com and Wordpress.com.

Content Management System (CMS): As mentioned above, the most popular free CMS are blogspot.com and Wordpress.com.

Blogspot.com: If you can write an email, attach images and add a link, then you can start blogging with blogspot.com.
Wordpress.com: It should not be confused with wordpress.org which is an open source software. There are many free themes to select from as well as low cost customised themes to make the process of creating your website even easier. With loads of plugins and add-ons also available for free, wordpress.com is the preferred choice for a vast number of affiliates.

Content: It is imperative to have content if you want to sell something or at least to ensure that you get traffic coming to your website. It’s a simple and straight forward equation: no content = no traffic. The great thing about content is that you can write it and it will only cost you your time. Before you begin the process of writing content, make sure to include your content ideas as part of your business and marketing plan. It is necessary to get your website organized so visitors can easily navigate it.

Summary:

We have outlined above a few resources for launching a new website while keeping the costs as low as possible or even completely free. Although there are hundreds of free solutions out there, these are the most user-friendly and easy to use. As a new affiliate or a seasoned veteran that is embarking on a new project, this is the correct time to get your hands dirty and try out new things.

And for any further queries or thoughts, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are always here to assist you in any way possible.

How to rewriting content

2016-05-30T19:41:00.000-07:00

As we touched upon in the previous article "Content is King", it is no secret that content is the foundation of any successful website.

A common mistake that a vast majority of affiliates do, is to focus on new content and worry about how and when will the search engines visit their website and update their rankings with the new content. This is a daily struggle for affiliates and even more so for affiliates that have been in the business for a long period of time and have ran out of ideas and content to write about.

The solution is simple. Re-writing or updating your existing content!

While re-writing content does seem daunting, it is a simple straight forward process where an affiliate can gain plenty from it. You can either update an existing article or re-write an existing article and create a whole new page for your website.

How to re-write or update my content?

These are a few easy points an affiliate can take when proceeding to re-writing or updating an article:

Read the article again and again until you thoroughly understand it. Copy its ideas and not its words.
Re-write paragraph by paragraph and not sentence by sentence. This will prevent you from accidentally writing the same thing twice and be penalized by the search engines.
Don’t be afraid to make changes. Add new information where possible, a paragraph or two. It will provide new relevant information to your audience and also increase the length of the content which is also good for long-tail keywords in the search engines.
Restructure the article. Perhaps turn it into a question the audience is looking for and then proceed to answer the question. Change the title of the article.
Add visual elements. Adding a video or images is always a great way to change your content while at the same time increasing your chances for conversions.
Change the order of the paragraphs and the information displayed. Add bullet points and also change the opening words of its sentence.
Remove the date of the article if displayed. By removing the date, the visitor will think the information is relevant to them and click through.
Never forget the keywords!

Summary :

Once done with re-writing or updating your article you can then check online that it is unique. There are many free tools out there created specifically for that purpose.

If the above sounds like hard work and you do not think it is worth the effort, I would like to invite you to perform the following exercise.

Spend some time over the next few days looking at older articles that are still getting a good amount of hits. Put yourself in the visitor’s place and ponder: could I re-write or update this article and increase my conversions? The answer is yes you can. What are you waiting for?

How to maximize the keywords for seo

2016-05-29T19:24:00.000-07:00

A keyword is generally a word or phrase that is highly important to a certain topic. When a visitor is searching online, he will use a keyword to verbalise and identify a certain topic they are looking information for.

Companies and affiliates alike use keywords to create content around relevant topics of importance which then helps them rank on search engines and make their content available and visible to the wider public.

Why to use Keywords?

Keywords are the basis of your website content. The subject of every webpage and the essence of what it is about should connect directly back to a keyword or keyword phrase. Since keywords are topics as we previously mentioned, they should also be taken into consideration when creating offers and emails.
Keywords help visitors and potential customers understand the purpose of your webpage. When reading the content of the webpage, a visitor will often identify the keywords they searched for which will then in return keep the visitor on the certain webpage and increase the opportunity of conversion.
Keywords help search engines understand the purpose of your website. When a search engine begins the process of indexing your website pages, it will analyze the keywords on the webpage to determine the purpose of your pages which will in return help your webpages rank better on the search engines.

Different types of Keywords

Keywords are mainly separated into two distinct categories: broad keywords and long-tail keywords. Broad keywords are short words or phrases. While they apply to your website and industry, it is paramount to recognize that they might also apply to every website and company in the industry and sometimes even to those in other industries.

Long-tail keywords tend to be longer words or phrases that are more specific to your website, target market and industry. It is important to remember that long-tail keywords make up the vast majority of online searches. Actually, most searches conducted on the Internet are long-tail keywords and if you are not targeting long-tail keywords you are missing out on about 95% of your possible traffic.

How to use Keywords?

Research popular keywords and phrases for the industry/market you are considering writing about. There is a variety of keyword research tools available for free online that allow you to add in certain words and find out which keyword phrases are popular with search engines.
Write down all of the keyword and phrases you want to use in your articles and then create article categories and titles for each set of keywords and phrases.
Density of the keyword or phrase is an important area to consider for each article. Ideally a frequency of at least 1% per article is vital, which averages out to five uses of each keyword or phrase when writing the average 500 word article. Make sure they are spread across the article.
Create a draft outline for each article. These articles should have a general intro, a few paragraphs for the body and a conclusion. Be extremely cautious as the articles can end up not making much sense if you focus only on adding the keywords, so make sure to outline all the related information that is useful to the visitor.
Read the article you created a few times to ensure there are no errors that a common spelling and grammar checker may have missed. Once you give your articles a quick editing, you can then begin adding the article to your website.

Summary :

The final touch in order to optimize your keyword or phrase selection is to make sure they are inserted into the following. Including your keyword or phrase will help the search engines detect the subject of your webpage and rank your webpage in the relevant search results.

Page Title
URL
Header Tag
Sub-Header Tag
Body Content
Site Navigation Link Text
In-Content Link Text
Image Tag
Video Tag
Meta Description

How to write content that attracts visitors

2016-05-28T02:38:00.000-07:00

The phrase "Content is King" in internet marketing has been literally around forever. It has always been applicable to the world of internet marketing, but today more than ever before content is incredibly important if you want to succeed and make money online.

You can have the cutest and most structured website on the internet, and you can have the most comprehensive and detailed hotel reviews available, but that is not enough anymore. The search engines, particularly Google, are practically screaming out loud that they want to rank websites that offer the best possible content for the user. In other words, content that is unique and relevant to the subject.

Where to start from?

Knowing who your audience are, is the first key to success. By knowing who they are and what they are looking for, you can then provide them with what they want. Your audience are the traffic/visitors you want to target and attract to your website. The source of having a profitable website.

How do I attract the audience?

While it is not an exact science or art, there are many steps to be taken and things to consider in order to attract the desired audience. Below are some of the main categories to tackle.

Keywords: Ask yourself which markets and regions am I targeting. Perhaps concentrate on one or two before expanding into more markets.

Let’s say you are targeting "hotels in Osaka, Japan". You should then start asking yourself, "what would someone type in to find me", "what other variables/features (long-tail keywords) could that question include" (skiing, mountain climbing and so on, relevant to that specific region).

Perform a keyword research (plenty of free tools available online) to ensure you understand which keywords are popular and where you can fit in.

By completing your keyword strategy, you then have your road-map for the future structure of your website, its content, including your future thoughts and goals.

Quality of content :

Quality content is much more than simply having correct spelling and grammar in the article. It’s what your audience values as significant and relevant.

In other words quality content is well written and always has a purpose. The content should be unique, to the point and providing value to your audience. It should address the query the audience had while at the same time educating the audience to the point that they are ready to purchase.

Presentation of content : The presentation of content is highly undervalued and is one of the easiest things to fix with obvious and immediate benefits. A big majority of affiliates don’t give enough emphasis on improving the appearance of their content and frankly this is what divides the top affiliates from the rest. Here are some easy to implement tasks that will greatly improve the appearance of the content on your website:

Make use of Headers
Break your content down into paragraphs
Use Bold to highlight main parts of the article
Use italics and underline to complement other parts of your article
Use bullet points to highlight key points in the article
Add links to other sections of your website
Add icons, logos, pictures, buttons and banners
Add videos

The most important result you will notice by improving the appearance of your content is that your conversion rates should increase which will also result in increased sales while at the same time your bounce rate will have decreased, something Google takes into consideration while ranking.

Summary :

Here are some essential guidelines on content:

Websites that have more pages usually receive more traffic, a page can’t rank if it doesn’t exist.
More pages = more chances of ranking for more keywords and getting more traffic.
Websites with new pages, new posts and updated content rank better than websites that don’t update or don’t create more content.
Avoid pages with less than 200 words, homepage included. Google doesn’t like providing rankings to websites that have no content at all.
Avoid having duplicate content on any page. Every page should be unique and evidently if you want to rank for a keyword, that keyword should exist on the page more than once.

How a quality backlinks

2016-05-26T02:21:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization works on the premise that more people linking to your website means the more popular and valuable it must be and therefore the higher the ranking it deserves on the search results. In other words, popularity is a major indicator of the value of a website.

A common question derived from the above is: how do you measure popularity?

From a search engines perspective, the answer is pretty straight forward.

Backlinks from another website directing to your website is a definite vote of confidence and of popularity.

Attention! We are not writing about links you put on your own website, although those "internal" links are also very important and often neglected, but instead backlinks which other websites use to direct attention towards your website.

What is a Backlink?

To make it short, backlinks are the backbone of search engine optimization. They are the externals links that are directed towards your website from another website.

Search Engines prefer those websites who have high quality backlinks. To receive good organic traffic as well as high quality traffic at the same time, backlinks are the most important part of it. The more high quality backlinks you have the more good reputation you will earn in various search engines such as Google.

Search engines calculate the relevance of a website to a keyword and consider the number of quality backlinks to the website. We should not be satisfied with purely getting backlinks, it is the quality of those links that matters.

When backlinks to your website come from other websites which have content that is related to your website, these backlinks are considered more relevant to your website. If backlinks are found on websites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of backlinks, the greater the quality.

How to get Backlinks?

There are countless numbers of ways and places to build backlinks for your website, and the enormity of the task in hand can sometimes be paralyzing. But search engine optimization needs to start from somewhere. Waiting passively for others to link to your website is a certain "No No".

There are certain things to take under consideration when starting your backlink building. It is useful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which websites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink includes keywords relating to your website.

While getting quality backlinks is a hard task, fortunately there are heaps of places on the internet that are willing to link to your website making the backlink process a walk in the park. All you need to do is have the "time" to proceed with the task of getting backlinks.

Below you will find a number of websites where you can make high quality backlinks for free. You can simply get backlinks from these websites by making your profile on it and add your website url with it in your profile page.

Google Profiles
Google Places
LinkedIn
Digg
Foursquare
Reddit
Squidoo
Stumbleupon
Ezine Articles
Hubpages
Dotpoch

Another good way of gaining backlinks is: Blog, Forum commenting (make sure it is relevant to your website)

Top 50 High PR websites to create "profile" Backlinks for free :

http://www.xing.com About Me PR 8
http://my.telegraph.co.uk About Me PR 8
http://www.blogger.com About Me PR 8
http://www.politico.com/ About Me PR 8
http://issuu.com/ About Me PR 8
http://www.ehow.com About Me PR 7
http://www.zillow.com About Me PR 7
http://www.2checkout.com About Me PR 7
http://30boxes.com About Me PR 7
http://community.elgg.org About Me PR 7
http://www.comedycentral.com/ About Me PR 7
http://www.jamieoliver.com/ About Me PR 7
http://activerain.com About Me PR 6
http://answerbag.com About Me PR 6
http://www.viddler.com/ About Me PR 6
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.stickam.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.quarterlife.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.dontstayin.com/ About Me PR 6
http://virb.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.myfolio.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.threadless.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.gusto.com/ About me PR 6
http://schoolofeverything.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.crowdspring.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.yuku.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.startupnation.com About Me PR 6
http://democracyforamerica.com/ About Me PR 6
http://newstrust.net/ About Me PR 6
http://www.divinecaroline.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.thepoint.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.soundclick.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.redbubble.com/ About Me PR 6
http://www.dezinedepot.com About Me PR 6
http://www.protectthehuman.com/ About Me PR 6
http://retroland.com/ About Me PR 5
http://www.vidilife.com/ About Me PR 5
http://socialight.com/ About Me PR 5
http://vi.sualize.us/ About Me PR 5
http://nobosh.com/ About Me PR 5
http://www.listal.com/ About Me PR 5
http://www.linkinn.com/ About Me PR 5
http://www.revish.com/ About Me PR 5
http://community.guinnessworldrecords.com/ About Me PR 5
http://nerdfighters.ning.com/ About Me PR 5
http://rezzable.com/ About Me PR 5
http://www.shoutlife.com/ About Me PR 4
http://www.widgiland.com/ About Me PR 4
http://ikarma.com/ About Me PR 4
http://www.bloggersunite.org/ About Me PR 4

Summary :

All of the above does take a bit of time and work, but if you do it the search engines will have a richer collection of websites pointing back to yours in a consistent, powerful way.

It is much wiser to get one high quality backlink instead of 100 low quality backlinks to your website.

How to jump-start your blog visitors

2016-05-25T02:07:00.000-07:00

After yesterday we discussed the call to action and continued with tips to improve website speed. Now we discuss How to jump-start your blog visitors. It is true that when we discuss about content, our mind straight away thinks of text content. But there are other forms of content such as video and pictures that can have a big effect on our search engine rankings and which can result in higher visitations and therefore higher conversion rates.

In our days, search engines provide us with a blend of results such as text, pdf, blogs, video and images. Video and images have stopped simply being an interesting add-on to the website structure but an integral part of every marketing effort.

Pictures :

Most websites have images displayed but not many optimize those images for the search engine results. Images are an asset which should be utilized correctly for organic search results and have the ability to generate loads of traffic.

Visitors can identify with pictures and can easily capture the visitor’s attention.

Below you will find a number of important tips for optimizing your pictures in order to improve their performance on your website as well as on the search engines.

Find the right Image :

Finding the appropriate picture is very essential when talking about optimizing performance. They can add a different dimension and feel to your page or article and can encourage visitors to convert. While the text itself is also important, it is the image that sells the page or article. Make sure the picture is relevant to the content of the page or article.

Quality of image :

It is imperative that the picture displayed is clear and easy to see. This increases the chances of the visitor clicking on the image and having a positive experience.

Image Description :

Just as keywords are vital in the content of your website, the same also applies for pictures. This means that the filename of your image should include a few descriptive keywords that are relevant to what the picture is, as well as to the surrounding content. It is important to do so, as it helps search engines identify the image, determine its relevancy and rank it accordingly.

Alt-Text :

The "Alt-Text" or "tags" as they are also called, are another way for search engines to identify your picture and determine what the image is about. It is a few words describing what the picture is about and it should include a few keywords. It is important to keep the description relevant to the image as well as to its surrounding content.

File Size :

Part of the image optimization process is ensuring that your picture is not slowing down the loading time of your website. That’s especially important for mobile websites. This can be achieved by using free tools such as "Image Optimiser". You should also make sure that the dimensions of your picture are of appropriate size.

Additional Resources on Image SEO :

Video of a presentation by Peter Linsley, Product Manager at Google offering insights into how image search is used, how it works, and how webmasters can optimize their pages for image searchers.

If you want to check many of these image SEO tips on your web pages, try this handy image SEO tool.

Tips to improve website speed

2016-05-24T01:47:00.000-07:00

In this issue we want to share with you some exciting news about tips to help increase the page speed of your website in order to generate more traffic.

Announcement: Unique Visitors in Your Statistics Report

Historically, the Statistics Report in the Partner Center has showed you clicks. This is not necessarily the most complete measure as conversions are generally considered on a visitor level i.e. how many percent of your visitors make a booking. To improve the measures available to you, we have therefore replaced the old clicks with unique visitors (UVs).

This offers a number of improvements including a more correct conversion measure and a better overview of what your visitors and traffic is really worth. It also becomes easier to cross reference with other sources such as Google Analytics.

Improving your website’s page speed

In today’s day and age a website has gone through significant innovation since they were first used. HTML is no longer just a markup language for documents with titles, summaries and tables but they serve as the underlying code for complex web pages and web applications.

Everyday also the expectations of the end users are increasing and with the increasing use of mobile internet over the years the speed of the internet and processor power has relatively decreased while the expectations stay the same.

It is important to make you sure that the speed of your website is optimal because of the following reasons:

User Experience

A website that loads faster results in a better experience for the end user (your visitor).

Conversion Rate

A less amount of visitors will leave your website (bounce rate will be less) when your website is optimized for speed. This increases the chance of a higher click-through and conversion rate.

Generating more visitors

Google includes the page speed of webpages as one of their ranking factors. A website that is optimized for speed is likely to rank higher than a website that is not optimized for speed.

There are a lot of tools available online which can help you detect the areas on your website where there is speed to gain.

Examples and links that can help you with optimizing your website’s speed are:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ (Google PageSpeed Insights Tool)

http://yslow.org/ (YSlow - Open Source Page Speed Tool based on requirements by Yahoo!)

https://gtmetrix.com/recommendations.html (Summary of recommendations by Google PageSpeed and YSlow)

Use these tools to further optimize your website and generate more traffic.

Call to Action

2016-05-23T01:35:00.000-07:00

Call to Action (CTA) is another one of the buzzwords in the online marketing industry. It is a conversion tool used in parallel with your content and which can surely make a 100% difference in the conversion rates of any website when used correctly.

What is a Call to Action (CTA)?

A call to action is a text or image, or a combination of both, which directs your visitors to click on the CTA in order to proceed further and become exposed to your products. In other words a "Call to Action" convinces your visitors to do something which will hopefully result in a monetary remuneration for the affiliate.

A clear CTA is very important, as it offers the visitor clear instructions and benefits on how to proceed. On the other hand, a non-clear CTA can easily lead to confusion and reduced traffic.

Where to place a Call to Action?

The first step to making a sale is to make the visitor actually see that you are making an offer available. You want your "Call to Action" to stand out from the surrounding content and really capture the attention of your website visitors. For that to be accomplished you need to make use of the empty space around the CTA.

It is extremely important to balance the amount of empty space you have around your "Call to Action" with the size of the CTA itself. It’s all about proportion. You want your CTA, the empty space around it and the surrounding content to all look like they go together, even with differences in size. You may have to play around with things a bit in order to get them looking just right.

There are two main factors to consider when deciding where to place your CTA:

Always have your placement of the offer, whether it is a link, banner or search box, as high on the page as possible. This increases the visibility.

Use multiple locations ("touch points"). On any given webpage, the addition of touch points in multiple strategic locations greatly increases your bookings.

You can e.g. have a search box in the column and then "book here" buttons above and below a hotel description, text links integrating with the content in a relevant article and/or supplementary banners to make the opportunity to browse and book hotels clearly available to visitors.

What is an effective Call to Action?

When you are in the process of creating your "Call to Action", it is easy to get carried away and end up creating something that people will not click on. To save you time and effort, you will find below a quick checklist of the essential components for creating a quality CTA :

Eye-Catching Design: For a visitor to click on your CTA, the visitor has to firstly recognize its existence. Appearance in this case is everything, so be sure you adjust the size and color accordingly in order to provide an even bigger contrast compared to the rest of your webpage.
Message that Makes People Act: It is a necessity to use words or phrases enticing an action as to catch people’s attention. You can select various messages and even test the effectiveness of each message every few weeks by measuring the conversion rates of each.
A clear Value Proposition: People should know exactly what will happen when they click your CTA. Make sure the "Call to Action" explains, as well as the surrounding content, the benefit of clicking and what they will get in exchange. In other words an enticement always works miracles.
A specific page/landing page: A "Call to Action" is more effective when the journey the visitor is experiencing is a continuous one. For that to be achieved, the CTA needs to be linked to a page where the specific message/enticement of the "Call to Action" is more thoroughly explained and the desired conversion has higher chances of being achieved. So make sure that all your links are directing to the proper page and enticement.

The 3 Easiest Ways For Newbies To Start In Affiliate Marketing

2016-05-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

With the aid of the Internet, you can almost have everything right at your fingertips. With just a few clicks you get access to thousands and even millions of pieces of information and data on virtually any field of interest. As years pass by, the Internet continuous to effect radical changes in many facets of human endeavors, including commerce. Experts say that the information space, commonly known as the “world wide web,” grows by over a million pages everyday as more and more people utilize the Internet for information, education, entertainment, business and other personal reasons. It doesn’t take a business-oriented individual to realize that this phenomenon can bring about sky-high financial gains. The Internet’s fast-growing popularity in the recent years is surely an opportunity for business that any entrepreneur would not want to miss.

You might be thinking only businessmen can make much money out of the Internet, don’t you? Think again. You too can earn big bucks through the Internet even if you don’t have products to sell and high-profile and established company. How? That is through affiliate marketing. You might have come across these words over the net while surfing. Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing between a merchant and an affiliate who gets paid for referring or promoting the merchants’ products and services. It is one of the burgeoning industries nowadays because it is proven to be cost-efficient and quantifiable means of attaining great profit both for the merchant and the affiliate and other players in the affiliate program, such as the affiliate network or affiliate solution provider.

Affiliate marketing works effectively for the merchant and the affiliate. To the first, he gains opportunities to advertise his products to a larger market, which increases his chances to earn. The more affiliate websites or hard-working affiliates he gets, the more sales he can expect. By getting affiliates to market his products and services, he is saving himself time, effort and money in looking for possible markets and customers. When a client clicks on the link in the affiliate website, purchases the product, recommends it to others who look for the same item or buys it again, the merchant multiplies his chances of earning. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer benefits from each customer who clicks on the link in his website and who actually purchases the product or avails of the service provided by the merchant. In most cases, the affiliate gets commision per sale, which can be fixed percentage or fixed amount.

If you want to be an affiliate marketer and make fortunes out of the Internet, you may follow the following three most basic and easiest ways to start an effective affiliate marketing program. First is to identify a particular thing you are interested in or passionate about so you won’t be bored and forced to develop your affiliate web site later on. Focusing on a specific area you know very well will help you bring out your best without much risks and effort. You can add a personal touch to your site and give your visitors who are possible buyers an impression that you are an expert in your field. In this way, you gain their trust and eventually encourage them to buy the products you endorse. Next is to look for good paying merchants and products or services related to your interest and create now a website. In choosing the products, you must also consider its conversion rate—the number of visitors-turned-buyers. There are various affiliate networks and affiliate solution providers that can give you info on the most profitable products and best paying merchants. The key here is, be wise enough to choose the right one.

Now that you have decided where to concentrate, have chosen the products to endorse and the merchant you are supporting and have created your own web site with top level domain name and reliable hosting, you are ready to promote. This is a crucial task, since it is through this that you would be able to increase traffic to the business website, sales and of course, profit. In affiliate marketing, it is possible to earn large sums of money in a short span of time especially when you’re endorsing high-priced items. Expensive products are hard to sell; however, with the right marketing strategies and sales techniques, you can draw visitors to the merchant’s site and make them buy the products. How to promote the products, though, would need a separate discussion. Continue to educate yourself by reading books or other articles online about the best advertising techniques.

Keep in mind, there is no facile and quick path towards success. Affiliate marketing may seem very tempting due to numerous encouraging testimonies of merchants and affiliate marketers alike who have benefited from it, but it entails great deal of hard work and persistence. Likewise, you need to be creative, flexible and willing to embrace new ideas to market your partners’ products until you find the perfect strategy that works for a specific market that you are targeting. Neither signing up for an affiliate program nor copying ads and leading others towards the merchants’ site doesn’t guarantee success yet. Many affiliate marketers fail to understand this, so when they don’t make sales, they quit, look for other programs and repeat the same mistake. In the end, they conclude that affiliate marketing is just one of those scams in the Internet. Even as you sleep, you can work your way to great financial success if you employ the right strategies in affiliate marketing. Be creative, be smart and surely, you’ll achieve your goals.

How to email listing creation

2016-05-21T23:08:00.000-07:00

Email opt-in lists are very important. They provide you a legitimate way to keep in touch with your customers, not to mention a way to ensure that you don’t lose them to the competition as well.

Subscription Software

Choose the best software that will allow you to automate the registration process for would-be subscribers. Once you have this up and running, visitors of your blog can automatically opt-in to your email list even without your physical supervision. As the settings for these programs are configurable, it’s up to you to choose whether approval of subscriptions would be automated or manual.

Offer and Link

Use an attention-catching image or decorative text when inviting people to join your email list. Be sure to place it in a prominent area of your homepage. As for other pages, just choose a spot where it’s highly visible and which you could maintain for your entire website.

As for the link, just keep it simple and remember to make regular checks in order to ensure that it’s always in good working order.

Call to Action

Since building your email list is your current goal, it’s best to end every blog entry you write with an invitation to join your email list. Your call to action for now should offer strong encouragement on joining your email list.

For an effective call to action, just keep your sentence short but powerful. Use action-packed words and if possible, try creating a sense of urgency with your words.

Deadlines

Speaking of urgency, one way of making people even more aware of the need to join your email list is by offering an incentive with it. This can be special discounts, membership privileges, or free ebooks and the likes. Whatever you end up offering, just remember to place a deadline on your promotion.

With the clock ticking, your blog readers are sure to experience just how necessary it is for them to avail of your offer.

Benefits

Besides those incentives you’ve mentioned, there must also be other benefits for a customer to enjoy once they do sign up for your email list. Explain to them what you hope to accomplish with your email list and how they’ll benefit from it at the same time.

Signing up with your email list, for instance, will allow them to receive regular updates about the latest additions to your blog. They may also be able to receive newsletters containing special members-only data.

Safety and Confidentiality

Another way to encourage people to sign up for your email list from your blog is by giving them the assurance they need when it comes to safety and confidentiality. Purchase and register for what you need in order to provide your customers as secure platform for the registration process. A secure platform is one that keeps customer data safe from getting hacked.

As for confidentiality, you should also give your solemn word not to share any information they submit with other parties.

Overall Improvement

Of course, the real clincher is your blog itself. If you consistently work on providing the best content for your blog, you’re giving them the best reason to sign up for your email list. If you don’t prove to them that there’s something to look forward to in your blog, they will never think there’s any reason for them to join your email list.

How Much Money Will I earn Through Adsense?

2016-05-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

If you're looking at Google's AdSense program you're surely asking yourself how much you could make from such a program, and you probably think you can't make as much as you can from traditional advertising schemes.

Google, of course, keeps a great deal of secrecy regarding how much AdWords advertisers pay per each click directed to their site and the same applies for how much AdSense banner holders make from their websites.

While there's nothing official, rumors circulate around the Internet concerning the amount of cash a website can earn by using AdSense. And many people (illegally) disclose how much they have been making with AdSense. There are stories of people raising over one thousand dollars per month using AdSense.

There are also stories of people exceeding $100,000.00 per month but it's a bit hard to believe such stories. The truth to the matter is that if you have a small website and you just want it to support itself, and don't wish to reach your pocket for its maintenance costs you can probably do this with AdSense.

AdSense is also very good for people who host a lot of pages. Even if the said pages don't generate a lot of traffic individually, every click counts and you can earn up with a lot of money by doing this. And that just goes to prove that sometimes quantity matters nearly as much as quality.

There's no telling how much money you're going to make by using Google's AdSense but you can sort of tell for yourself, before actually starting, by taking a few things into consideration.

First, is the amount of visits you get every day. While there's no way to estimate precisely on this, you can generally make a safe assumption that if you have a lot of clicks per day you'll be making good money.

Also, this depends on what exactly your site is about. If your site is about anything popular (music, sex, whatever) you're bound to get a lot of banner clicks. These have a coefficient associated with them, called the CTR (click through ratio).

Basically, what it translates to is that if a large proportion of your site's visitors click the ads you'll be making more money. And the best way to do this is to have some popular content in your site, ensuring the links direct users towards popular items as well.

Then of course, there's the position and number of ads on your website. While you don't want to overdo it, having many links will undoubtedly generate more income for you as a webmaster. Do not however believe, that if you just add a lot of ads in an important portion of your site, visitors could always just skip them (and be assured that many do just that).

There's something between an art and a science to positioning your ads. People generally look in certain places and never look in others, and knowing this a website author and/or webmaster can do a great deal of things to increase his earnings with AdSense.

All in all, the amount of money you make with AdSense depends on many factors. But if you have a site with interesting contents and/or many pages, and if you see a constantly large amount of traffic every day, you can bet you'll be making a lot of money with AdSense.

Even if you aren't in the above categories, AdSense is still worth using because there's very little hassle in setting it up, and many times it can help financially support the site, whilst being a nice bonus to get through the post at the end of the month.

SEO for Adsense

2016-05-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

If you've been using Google's AdSense on your pages you obviously feel the need to somehow generate even more traffic for your website, which in turn would translate to more AdSense click and a higher income.

But who do you do this? Well, the major way you'll get visitors to see your website (other then using AdWords, which is encouraged as well) is to use some techniques to have search engines send more and more users towards your page, by ranking high in search results for your topics of interest.

Believe it or not this is a technique, better known as search-engine optimization or simply SEO. So here are a bunch of tips that come handy under every amateur or professional optimizer's belt.

The first thing you need to take care of is the actual source code and layout of your page. This has to be kept as simple as possible. The problem comes when AdSense and the search engines themselves begin to have troubles in extracting the most relevant keywords on your site because of a too complex layout.

Secondly, try to have each one of your pages target only one specific topic. This way it is a lot easier for them to get indexed properly and for the AdSense ads to be consistent with the content of the site itself.

Also, try not to include too many hyperlinks in your page as well. This also means you should try not to use too many AdSense ads on your page either.

If there are certain keywords you wish to target, make sure the word you wish to target is present in the title, in the first paragraphs as well as in the name of the file. While you're at it you might want to ensure the word springs up in the page's last paragraphs.

And of course, it's very important for your content to have original and compelling content. How do you do this? Well the easiest way to do it is to find something you're really passionate about. That way, providing you give it a lot of effort you're bound to have a great page quite fast.

If the content you use in your site is in the public domain (which is highly discouraged) make sure that you at least give it an original title, and add an opening and a closing paragraph of your own.

This takes a little while, but if, after waiting, you still can't find your page near the top, you should try rewriting your title and your first and last paragraphs. It doesn't take much, often just changing a few words will give you the right results.

And of, course there's the use of keyword tools that may aid you in finding some good keywords to include on your page that will drive visitors to your site more and more.

So those are about the basic techniques in search engine optimization. You can find a lot of computer tools to aid you in doing this, and of course, Google is a great place to search for this.

In the end, you'll find that SEO is a complex topic, and entire books have been written on the topic as well. You might find that you have a lot of optimization you need to do in order to get more and more visitors to your site and clicking those precious AdSense banners.

How Adsense Changed the Internet

2016-05-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

Ever since Google came up with the master idea that is AdSense, the web has transformed in a variety of ways no one would have ever suspected. Some of these are good changes others aren't.

This is a small exploration of how a brilliant marketing scheme has taken the web by storm. It deals with the changes advertisers and publishers and even website visitors have undergone ever since AdSense has become a daily part of our on-line lives.

Even before AdSense came out a lot of people were advertising through AdWords. It ensured a lot of publicity through getting your site listed at the top in Google search queries. It took away a lot of the pain and price of SEO and the large amount of time you had to wait until you were finally on top. It made launching a website, a realistic way to instant profitability instead of a long term strategy with no immediate returns.

Through the use of AdSense, the possibility appeared of having your ads appear on just about any site on the Internet that has anything that even resembles your company is all about. And so it's for that reason that AdSense has brought a new sense of advertising to the Internet. Before PPC poorly ranked web pages had to advertise offline to get any real initial exposure.

Companies no longer have to hire expensive professionals to create extremely elaborate advertising campaigns. There are no high costs of running your ads on websites which you have to personally look for.

All you do is come up with a couple of meaningful words for your business, sign up with Google AdWords and let Google take care of the rest of the equation. Although it requires day to day management automation saves significant time for advertisers.

Of course, probably the largest change in the way the Internet works due to AdSense comes from the publishers' point of view. Whereas one would previously have to jump through many hoops to get a website to even support itself now people are making fortunes off their sites. This leads to motivation for content, and resources for web surfers.

That generally means site publishers have to worry more about what content lies on their site, and the overall way their pages look rather then be concerned with the economic specifics of maintaining a site’s profitability. Although time is invested in adsense, a large capital investment is not.

It's no surprise that the blogging phenomenon exploded when AdSense came out a few years ago. Anyone could just write a page about a subject he was passionate about and making a living out of it through AdSense.

And thirdly, one can't ignore the impact AdSense has had over the casual everyday web surfer. Whereas people used to not even notice banners altogether (which psychologically is a very interesting thing to observe) the situation is completely different for text ads.

People nowadays will take a long look at a sponsored ad. Why? Well because the whole setup brings forth a feeling of confidence about the advertiser. People don't ignore a text ad as easily as they do a graphical banner.

Another thing to note is that graphical banners have become even less profitable nowadays. It is because of this that many people are walking away from affiliate type networks to AdSense.

Of course, there are bad effects as well, with people making websites solely for the purpose of running AdSense on them and just as well, with a large phenomenon of 'click fraud', people creating artificial clicks for various reasons.

But Google does try to control such behavior, and really isn't to be blamed for such individuals' actions. All in all Google AdSense is transforming the way the Internet works and it's doing so mostly in a good way.

Now those with ideas can write them down, and make money from them. Those looking for content can find it easier, and those looking to attract a customer base can do so in a targeted way. Adsense has changed the internet through supporting the economic interests of businesses, and the utility of consumers.

What You Should Know About Blog Marketing

2016-05-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

Whether you are a new blogger, or one that has been blogging for a while, you are probably wondering how to get more sales, visitors, and readers to your blog on a weekly basis. Marketing your blog the right way will give you the results that you are looking for. You are going to find that you can not just make a blog, post in it a couple of times, and then expect for the world to find you. That just will not happen how much you wish for it. However, you can market your blog effectively, and get the results that you are looking for.

To begin blog marketing you first need a blog. The next step is to ensure that your blog is updated frequently. Post content in your blog regularly for the best results. Some will post once a day and others once a week. Whichever it is, be consistent with it and know that it will pay off to continue posting as you should. This is a great way to get started with blog marketing. You wont have a blog to market if you do not post in it regularly.

While most free blogs all look the same, you can make sure that your blog design stands out. You don’t want your blog to look and feel like everyone else’s, so make it different. Having your own look is a huge plus in the blog marketing world. You will find that most blogs all look the same and you can have your own look by just using HTML and adjusting the code to suit your taste. You are going to see that this will truly make a difference with your blog as well as your readers. Try to get a theme that is going to match the market that you are promoting in your blog. Doing so will make it look even more professional. You don’t want your readers to confuse your blog with others do you? If this is something that you are concerned about, you will definitely want to make sure that you change yours to make more personable. However, if you are not worried about it or concerned about it in the least, you can leave the design as one of the free templates that you see so frequently used.

Something else that will help you with your blog marketing is exchanging links with authority blogs and websites that are in your same market is another great way to get the word out about your blog. The authority sites are going to have a higher page rank, and will also be listed high in Google’s search results. So do some searches and check those out and see if they are up to exchanging links. If they are not, you could always just add those into your blog roll. You do not need permission to do that if they are not into linking. However, in the world of blogs, most blog owners are thankful for all links, and are willing to return the favor. This is a great way to market your blog that some do not think about or use. If you use this technique to get your blog seen, you will not be sorry. You can even use this for website marketing, and you will see a lot sites do that.