Net Profit Mantra

Why to Have One Step Checkout Extension on Your Web Store?

christev — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:18:42 +0000

The main conveniences of online shopping are the ease of use, wide options, purchase anytime from anyplace as the web stores are available round the clock, 24-7 online support for any related queries, ability to compare products like its features, durability, design, price etc. The shoppers who rely on traditional stores have started enjoying the luxury of online stores that achieve customer expectation at stipulated period.

Magento – the right Choice for Online Store

Magento Ecommerce is the most widely used software platform apt for setting up an ecommerce store. The numerous magento extensions fulfill the online store owners’ requirements to meet customer expectation. If you are experiencing a tough time with the increasing cart abandonment rate in your magento store in spite of more enhancement, then your default magento checkout page needs improvisation.

Shopping cart is the most crucial page for any ecommerce store. We see many consumers leaving the shopping cart before completing the purchase. What really provokes the customers to abandon the shopping cart when they are already half way through the checkout process? The issue needs to be reasoned and analyzed for sure as it cost the stores revenue.

Consumers expect easiness while placing the order for purchase. When the checkout page is complex, involving multiple steps, 7/10 customers get annoyed and are motivated to leave the cart. Shoppers may not show the patience during checkout process that they had while browsing for products. Hence steps incurring repeated details which frustrate the customers should be eliminated. An improved checkout page for the ecommerce shopping cart can only decrease the abandonment rates and generate sales.

A checkout page with single step will diminish the cart abandon rate and increase conversion for your web shop. By providing the customers a simple checkout page that allows them to process the checkout as registered user or guest login, the first time users are eventually attracted. Other advantages such as ability to add any number of products to the cart while in the checkout stage, auto update of product details such as its cost, taxes, total etc for the relevant shipping/payment method, apply coupon codes and subscribe for newsletter while in checkout page enhances the efficiency of the checkout page.

A quick and easy checkout page can be easily be set up with ready to use extensions. The one step checkout extension is easy to install will appear in your magento admin page as shown below. Here I have added one step checkout extension from Apptha in my magento store.

Once configured all the options you get such as enabling One Step Checkout, Keep Guest login ON/OFF, set default country, Change title and description enable/disable discount coupon, enabling/disabling auto update of shipping/payment methods etc, the checkout page will be displayed as shown in the below diagram.

The Magento based checkout extension should support all default magento options such as gift options, payment methods etc. Only an efficient extension can do its job – complete successful order. If you are serious about the conversion rates and revenue, get serious about your cart abandonment. Install a readymade extension and see immediate increase in sales.

Week in Review – Guest Post and Social Media Tips

Shanker Bakshi — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:56:31 +0000

I am back with the Weekly Review of best posts in blogsphere. These are my favorites posts and Week in Review is my way to share these awesome posts that I read in previous week.

The Two Biggest Guest Blogging Mistakes You Can Make ; Simply illustrate about two basic mistake people do while requesting for guest post writing on a particular blog.
Invest in Social Media now: Get the benefits later ; Good read, engagement in social networking sites always pays back, provided you should get started with it early. Author Mani Karthik explains how you should use Social Media to create Brands and promote your products.
Bye Bye Facebook ; Well yes, you can ask why I am putting this particular post in my Week In Review best post category, as it is just a post about author’s experience so far with facebook and why he decided to give up facebooking. The answer is, because it is a great read for newbies to learn how they can create posts about their personal interaction and experience with internet. Please note how magnificently he detailed out the reasons for saying goodbyes to facebook.
Six Practical Tips for Better Blog Content: Guest Post on my mentor John Chow’s blog about six basic tips that a newbie blogger should keep in mind to create better blog content.

Hope you like reading above posts as I do. That’s for this week, see you with more quick post reviews next week.

WordPress Sales Page Theme Convertible

Shanker Bakshi — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:19:00 +0000

As an affiliate marketer this is something you must have in your arsenal, in fact I was looking for something like this for quite sometime now. Indeed, guys over elegant theme has created a great looking WordPress Sales Page theme Convertible.

You can design awesome quick sales page with this WordPress Sales Page theme and start promoting affiliate products in no time.

Landing pages are useful for marketers who have a single product to sell and need to create a page to pitch it to their visitors. Our landing page theme comes with tons of easy-to-use elements such as buttons, pricing tables, image sliders, tabs and more.

This WordPress Sales Page theme has everything which you need to create a Sales Page ( Landing Page) without ever having to touch a line of code. Here are some unique features this WordPress Sales Page Theme has;

Drag and Drop Page Builder
Drag and Drop Modules Onto Your Canvas
Rearrange Modules On The Page
Re-size Modules With The Drag Of Your Mouse
Create Advanced Column Layouts and Nested Modules
All Modules Are Also Shortcodes!
Add Widgets and Sidebars Anywhere On Your Page

Following Video will explain it further how easy it is to create a Sales Page with this WordPress Theme.

Convertible -Sales Page Theme

Grab This Theme Now ( Create Awesome Sales Pages with WordPress and start making money right away)

Net Profit Mantra Now Powered by HostGator VPS Hosting

Shanker Bakshi — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:13:41 +0000

Before I start saying anything, I want to thanks Ajith Edassery, a friend of mine and an excellent blogger and affiliate marketer, who suggested me and convinced me to gear up Net Profit Mantra with VPS hosting. He also helped me analyse how we can speed up page loading time. One important thing which I learned during last couple of weeks is that site loading speed makes hell lot of difference in traffic and Google indexing and PR. Just couple of weeks back, I switched my shared hosting on HostGator to VPS ( Virtual Private Server), and I can see clearly the difference in comments and traffic coming to this blog. Hopefully this trend will follow and I’m sure in next few months I will take this blog to its place where it was a few years back.

What is VPS Hosting and Why it Matters?

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting is a system where physical servers partitioned into several virtual machines to provides the power and functionality of a high-end dedicated server.

A Virtual Private Server will give you dedicated CPU and RAM and will not share them with anyone else.
It functions like a separate physical computer dedicated to the individual customer’s needs.

So it’s clear why one should prefer a VPS hosting service over the shared hosting. A shared hosting is where the many websites reside on one web server and each site is placed on its own partition on the server. A VPS hosting is always recommended if you need your site to load fast with a separate dedicated server backing it up without sharing CPU and RAM with other customers.

Usually a high end virtual hosting service comes with following features;

UNLIMITED Domains
UNLIMITED Sub Domains
UNLIMITED Email Accounts
UNLIMITED MySQL Databases
Off Site Backups
UNLIMITED FTP Accounts
FREE Site Builder Software
PRIVATE Name Servers
FULL Root Access
FULLY Managed cPanel or Plesk

All the above features clearly define why should pick a VPS hosting especially if you are a professional blogger serious about turning your blogging and affiliate marketing business in to a big venture. (I wish I could have it from the beginning) but as they says better late than never.

Why you need a faster loading Site?

It’s not a secret anymore, every single web developer and internet entrepreneur knows that speeding matters a lot to you and to Big Daddy Google. Last year in April 2010, Google officially announced it that they prefer, love and pamper fast loading websites over dull and slow loading pages. Here are excerpts from Official Google blog which will explain the whole point in more convincing way;

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

So to “please” Google, it’s compulsory that your site should be loading “lightening” fast.

How to check Site loading speed?

There are several tools available for testing site page loading time. Following are some of best tools that you can use to check and analyse your site page loading speed.

Moreover, you can also see your site loading performance in Google’s Webmaster tools central. My personal favorite among them is tools.pingdom.com. This will help you understand in detail about page size components and performance under various factors plus detailed page analysis. Here is my Net Profit Mantra performance on Pingdom;

How to improve or optimize page load speed?

Opting for a VPS hosting doesn’t always mean your site will start loading fast the next moment, you also need to optimize it. Actually there are few other things that you also need to make good. My last theme was not optimize from the point of view of page loading speed. So the first thing which I did after shifting the site to VPS hosting is to change the design with a theme which has minimal graphics and images. The idea was to reduce the gigantic 1.6 mb page size. Removing thumbnail images from home page speed up page loading but it also takes away the attractiveness of a website. Let me explain further what are the important aspects that you should work on to gear up the page loading time;

There are three things that you must note from the image above;

Request : The number of HTTP requests made to load the page, these requests are the HTTP calls for images, javascript, and stylesheets. In my case number of requests comes to 54 which is fair enough. better if one could reduce the number between 30 to 40.

Page Size: The other important factor is page size. You must keep it under 1 mb. Best to keep it around and under 500 kB. In mine case it is 413.1 kB which is fair enough for a good speed page load.

Load Time: If you can manage the couple of things mentioned above it will automatically reduce the page load time. A page load time of 1 to 2.5 second can be consider (for me at least). It means still there are few things which I need fix in the current theme.

How to reduce Page Size?

The best way to reduce page size is the reduce the size of images by optimizing. If your theme uses timthumb.php for auto thumbnail then you can reduce the size of thumbnail images by reducing the image quality in timthumb.php file. By default the the quality is placed at 75%. We can do this by keeping the quality around 30 to 40 (“q=3o”) It will help you reduce the image size ultimately resulting in a reduced page size.

Tools for optimizing image for website

There are couple of tools available that help you reduce the size of images without much affecting its quality.

Here are some of them;

With image optimizer, as shown above, you can reduce image size significantly without loosing its quality. I have decided not to upload any image without optimizing it for web.

The idea is to keep the page size low so that the page could load faster. Removing unnecessary images and graphic on home page will do the trick. If your site theme has a big header, try and optimize it with tools mentioned above and see the difference in site loading speed.

So to attain a good site loading speed

- A VPS hosting service, preferably from HostGator. You can trust that they actually create a partition on their physical server and do not share your CPU and RAM with other customer.

- A well optimize WordPress theme, preferably Elegant Themes, as they work a lot of loading time of their theme.

Share your site page loading experiences in comment below, plus share if I missed something important related to page loading speed optimization.

Affiliate Marketers, Do You Have These iPhone Apps?

blakesanders — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:13:45 +0000

While technology may change from year to year, online affiliate marketing has always been about forging relationships. The tools may improve, but the fundamental ideas remain the same.

In the smartphone era, the toolsets that marketers use have improved greatly. Nowadays, you can manage campaigns using cell phones and mobile applications. Here’s eight handy iPhone apps no marketer should be without.

Hootsuite

Since its debut three years ago, Hootsuite has garnered a lot of positive press from the likes of Mashable, Lifehacker, and other top blogs. If you’re not using it already to manage your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles, you should give it a shot. You’ll be able to manage all your social media profiles in one location with the Hootsuite iPhone app.

Paypal

Let’s face it, making payments over the web has always been a bit of a hassle. Things have gotten better in recent years, and Paypal is responsible for a lot of the improvement. You can send money, make purchases, and donate to worthy causes with the official Paypal iOS application. Marketers who make heavy use of Paypal should download this gem immediately.

Analytics App for Google Analytics

Keeping an eye on traffic sources and conversion rates is a must for any serious marketer. Analytics App for Google Analytics from iTunes allows you to look at how your websites are doing regardless of where you are. It gives you the ability to see bounce and click-through rates, time spent on your pages, and many other important statistics.

SEO Search Ranking

We all know that how well you rank in the organic Search Engine Results Pages has a huge bearing on how profitable your websites will be. Cell phones can handle SEO tasks as well as any tablet or PC with SEO Search Ranking. It’s a nifty app that shows the current ranking for any website in the organic search engine results for any keyword phrase.

Twittelator

Many marketers are finally beginning to realize just how effective Twitter can be at marketing, provided you’ve got the right tools. Managing campaigns with Twittelator Pro is simple and straight-forward. You can manage your accounts, post tweets including audio clips, video clips, and pictures, and look up information on specific hash tags and keywords.

Odesker

One of the first things that all successful marketers learn to do is delegate. If you can outsource a task for less money than it would cost to do it yourself, there’s no reason not to. Odesk is one of the premier freelance outsourcing websites around, and their convenient Odesk iPhone app helps you to find freelancers quickly and easily.

MomoNote

With so much information floating around these days, our lives are hectic enough as it is. Remembering everything that’s important to you is easier with a helpful note-taking app. MomoNote is easily one of the most powerful iPhone note-taking apps around. With advanced search, sync, and sharing options, MomoNote will make your life more efficient and streamlined in all areas.

My Feed -Google Feed Reader

The best marketers keep up to date on the latest news in their field by following what fellow marketers are saying. The best way to do that is with a dedicated RSS client. Reeder should be on everybody’s iPhone, but marketers in particular will find its full-featured interface particularly well-suited to keeping up on the latest marketing buzz.

Affiliate Profit

At a touch of a button find out how much profit made with your affiliate marketing efforts .The application currently supports multiple Affiliate accounts

ClickBank
Commission Junction
Clickbooth
Copeac

Closing Thoughts

While some may criticize Apple’s application ecosystem as being too “locked down”, the upside is that it ensures that you only get the best apps possible. All iOS applications are thoroughly tested and ready for prime time when they hit the market. One thing that you can count on is that iPhone apps for Internet marketers will only get better in the coming years.

Blake Sanders is a tech writer at phone comparison site Cell Phone Expert. Blake specializes in providing industry news and information on cell phones and wireless internet providers.