Entrepreneur Vitamins

It’s All About The Headline. Small Changes That Boost Your Conversion Rates

Alan — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 11:42:37 +0000

If you do any paid advertising or email marketing, great headlines are essential. Even if you don’t, the search engine listings for your sites and each of their pages are basically advertisements.

Learning how to write effective headlines will help you create page titles and descriptions for your sites/pages that attract visitors from search engines. A higher clickthrough rate from search results means better rankings and thus, more free traffic.

So to help you out, here are a couple of articles which provide insight on crafting great headlines from MrGreen.com and Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. They’re short and concise and the animated GIF of sizzling bacon on MrGreen’s article is reason enough to take a look!

Headline Case Study Results – Tasty Conversion Data
Are You Making These 3 Common Conversion Testing Mistakes With Your Sales Copy?

Want More Traffic, More Income And Happy Customers? Speed Up You Site!

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 21:18:42 +0000

While it may seem that the speed of your website doesn’t matter much when you’ve on a fast internet connection, around 40% of the US still doesn’t have a broadband connection and mobile data rates can be quite bad, especially if you live in big cities.

You’re probably already aware that the load time of a web site became a ranking factor for Google some time ago (albeit a minor factor) . However, that’s not the only way a faster site can see better search engine rankings, gain more traffic and increase it’s income.

Research has shown that the faster a web site loads, the more likely users are to stay on the site longer and interact with it more. This is important to search engine rankings as Google takes into account the number of people who click on a search result, then return to Google to try a different search result. This bounce rate can affect your rankings and if your site is slow, people are more likely to use the back button and try a different site. So a faster site can help to reduce this bounce rate and over time, increase your rankings.

Search engine ranking isn’t the only reason to improve the speed of a site though. A faster site is more likely to leave visitors with a better overall impression. This can improve trust which can lead to more sales if you’re selling a product or service or more repeat visitors for content sites which generate revenue from selling ad space.

There are many ways to decrease the load time of a web site. Some make sense only in certain cases such as sites with high volumes of traffic or large amounts of video or other high bandwidth content which can make use of Content Delivery/Distribution Networks. Some sites can see big performance increases by loading content on demand using AJAX, however, this can require extensive work to redesign the site.

What I’ll focus on here are the fastest, simplest things you or your webmaster can do to improve the speed of your website with the least amount of effort.

Turning On Compression On Your Web Server

This is a quick and easy one. Your web server can automatically compress the HTML, CSS and JavaScript from your site, reducing it by 60-80%. It just takes a minute or two to set up. Here are a couple of quick guides on how to do this, one for Apache and the other for IIS (Microsoft’s web server):

Minimizing And Compressing JavaScript And CSS Files

Compressing and minifying script and style sheet files is extremely easy and can result in a significant decrease to load times. There are many free tools online that will do this for you. Minifying is the process of combining multiple files into as few as possible and optimizing the way the code is written so that it’s as small as possible. Compressing is the same as when you compress any other file, basically condensing repetitive data.

Do you use WordPress? You’re in luck, you can skip this section and just use one of the following plug-ins to do all the work for you:

If you’re not using WordPress, it’s still pretty easy. All you need to do is copy and paste the your JavaScript and CSS files into the tool and it will produce a compressed and/or minimized version.

Before you minify and compress your script files, combine them into as few files as possible. A web browser has to check each file that a web page references to see if it already has the most current copy or not, this increases load times. Fewer files means fewer times the browser has to make a request to your web server.

Because minifying to the smallest size possible results in files that are difficult if not impossible to read and work on later, you’ll want to keep copies of your original files and use them in your development site. Keep the minified versions for use in your public site.

Note: In order to use compressed files, you’ll need to make some tiny changes .htaccess file (assuming you’re using PHP on Apache). You can read this short article on what you need to do: Gzip output, minify CSS and JavaScript. If you don’t want to compress your files, you can still get a decent reduction in file size by just minifying.

Once you’ve merged your files, if possible, use the tools below to compress and/or minify them. I’ve tried many of the tools available and found the YUI Compressor to produce the smallest files which still maintain a wide range of web browser compatibility.

YUI Compressor

Minimizing Image File Sizes

For many web sites, images will be the largest contributor to load times. Making sure your images are as small as possible and also in the correct format for the number of colors they use and how they are used can greatly speed up your web site. Without getting too deep into the topic and explaining when to use which format and how to pick the best color depth, I’ll point you to a free online tool that will not only compress your images very well but decide if it’s best to save them as a GIF or PNG file and automatically change them where needed.

If any file’s have changed from PNG to GIF or vice versa, you’ll need to update any references to these files in your site’s code. If this is too big of a pain, I’ve got another tool which won’t change any file formats. I’ve also listed what is probably the best image compressor tool you can find but it’s not free, it’ll cost you $35 and up depending on the license you need. It’s an excellent tool though and results in smaller file sizes than any free tool I’ve found.

Advanced Minimizing Image File Sizes – CSS Sprites

Optimizing the compression of your images will probably get you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded to load your web site. There is, however, another way to optimize your images even more and reduce the number of images that need to be downloaded; a CSS feature called CSS Sprites.

I don’t recommend using CSS Sprites unless you have the time or resources to do a bit of HTML modification on your site. There are free tools which can do a lot of the work for you but you’ll still have to make changes to the HTML of your site. Depending on how your site is designed, how much of your HTML is generated on the web server and how many images your site uses, this can be a little work or a lot.

CSS Sprites basically allow you to place multiple images into a single image file, then use CSS to tell the web browser how to extract each of those individual images again. This helps your site’s performance in two way: First, combining multiple images into a single image will almost always result in a smaller image file, usually significantly smaller. Second, a visitor’s web browser only has to download a single image instead of many. If your site has many images, this can speed things up quite a bit as the browser doesn’t have to download each individual one or check that it has the latest version.

Implementing CSS Sprites manually can be a pain and for existing sites, it can require a lot of work to redesign the HTML and CSS. Luckily, there are some free, online tools that can do the work for you. Depending on how your site is designed, you may still need to manually modify some code.

There are also some older browsers and mobile browsers which don’t handle CSS Sprites propery or at all so that’s something to keep in mind if you’re going to use them.

If you want to give CSS Sprites a try, probably the best online tool to take care of the grunt work for you is SpriteMe. SpriteMe will take the web page you’re on, gather up all the images it can use and combine them into one or two sprite images. It will also do the dirty work of building all the CSS for you which you then incorporate back into your site and replace the image tags for the images used in the CSS sprite(s) with DIV tags that have the proper CSS class name.

Finding Other Performance Issues The Easy Way

There are a couple of good add-on’s for FireFox and Chrome that will check for a wide range of performance issues and suggest how to fix them. Personally I like to use FireFox for this. Start by downloading FireBug from FireFox. Then, grab either the Yahoo YSlow or Page Speed add ons. Page Speed is also available for Chrome.

Increase Your AdSense Income 300% With These Tips

Alan — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:20:37 +0000

If you’re like most AdSense users, you probably haven’t spent much or any time testing and optimizing the type of ads, their styles and their placements. But making the most money from AdSense requires putting the right ads in the right places.

While there are lots of good tips out there on optimizing your AdSense ads, you still need to be testing these suggestions to determine which ones actually work for your site.

Onextrapixel.com just pulished a great collection of tips that they believe have the potental to triple your current AdSense earnings. All of the suggestions they have are easy to implement and if you haven’t tried them all, you should certainly give them a test run on your site.

Several of their “twists” I was already familiar with and have tried or currently use on one or more of my sites as I use AdSense quite extensivly. However, they had one I hadn’t tried yet, using an image and text unit side-by-side. I’ll be giving this a try on some of my sites this week to see how it does. It’s not for every layout as it does take up a prime chunk of real estate on a page but it looks like it would be quite effective.

Get the details on this and several other excellent AdSense tips and squeeze every last click through from your site. Read it now.

Source: SmartPassiveIncome.com

24 Amazing Email Newsletter Designs

Alan — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:52:21 +0000

Following up on two recent posts on how to boost your email list subscription rates, I thought it would be nice to see some examples of well designed email newsletters. Fancy, graphics heavy email newsletters aren’t always the best option. Sometimes simple text is best. However, at the rate people gloss over emails (even ones they asked to receive), an eye catching design can grab their attention long enough to see what’s inside.

Onextrapixel.com has put together a list of some excellent email newsletter designs to inspire you.

Looking for email templates? ThemeForrest.com has a nice selection.

Source: Onextrapixel.com

Double Your Email List Subscriptions With These Tacticts

Alan — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:41:00 +0000

Does your email list building need a boost? The Blog Tyrant at SmartPassiveIncome.com explains how using tactics he observed from a street salesman doubled his subscription rate.It’s a well written story with good explanations of each tactic. Try them out in your own list building and leave a comment if they worked for you… or didn’t. Read it now.

Source: SmartPassiveIncome.com

Secrets To Writing Popular Blog Posts

Alan — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:39:14 +0000

Writing a post which gains the attention of the masses and bring in a surge of traffic is a primary goal of every blogger, but what exactly makes a popular post, popular?

SmartPassiveIncome.com has compiled a list of dozens of popular posts from various internet business and marketing blogs as well as 5 blogs from various other topics. One of the first things you might notice is that around a third of the posts in the list are, well, lists. Despite many condeming them as little more than link bait, numbered list posts are still as popular as ever and personally I find them quite useful. Another commonality I noticed between these posts are the fact that most have somewhat extreme titles such as “All Customers are Liars” and “Batshit Crazy: Creative Ways to Meet Your Goals”. Using strong language in your title can draw significant attention and makes your content stand out amongst the sea of safe and dull. Just make sure it’s not too strong.

Read all the posts on the list and see what other attributes they have in common and try incorporating them into your own content.

Source: SmartPassiveIncome.com

Create An Amazing FaceBook Fan Page With These Tips, Examples and Resources

Alan — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:03:59 +0000

A FaceBook fan page can be an excellent way to attract awareness to your brand or site and can be a great communication tool with your readers/customers. “Likes” on FaceBook have also become a ranking factor in search engine algorithms and having a fan page can help you get more likes to your site content.

It takes only minutes to create a FaceBook fan page but in order to be effective, it needs to to be personalized for it’s intended audience, engaging and well promoted. Here are some good guides on creating your fan page and tips on making it effective. And for inspiration, some galleries which showcase some of the best designed fan pages on FaceBook. I’ve also thrown in links to some free templates to get you started.

Fan Page Creation Guides

Fan Page Galleries

Templates and Resources

FlashMint.com has a good collection of fan page templates for sale.

If you’d rather build your fan page the easy way, check out Epicenter. You can create your own design or use their included templates and their service lets your fan page run contests, polls, show your Twitter feed, collect emails for your mailing list and more. You get a 14 day free trial and monthly service fees start at $14.99.

Looking for a free template to tweak? Try this one from IceTemplates.com:

Are You Missing This Critical Step When List Building?

Alan — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:12:22 +0000

So you’ve got your list building in high gear. You’ve got you’re good looking opt-in form set up and a nice little ebook, tool or other incentive you’re giving away to entice readers. But there’s one thing that a lot of websites overlook, they don’t sell the incentive.

Just mentioning your incentive isn’t enough, you need to push it as if it were a product you were selling. Smartpassiveincome.com has a short but good writeup on selling your readers on your opt-in incentive. If you’re list building (and you should be), you’ll want to check this out.

Source: Smartpassiveincome.com

“Seven Deadly Sins” of Converting Customers

Alan — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:13:09 +0000

Exploiting human nature is a major part of marketing and the desire, or at least tendency, of we humans to sin is no exception. We all have weaknesses that can be exposed and exploited to entice us to make a purchase we otherwise might hesitate to.

Want to better convert visitors in to customers? Read this guide from SmashingMagazine about designing your web site and sales copy to strike a chord with the Seven Deadly Sins of human nature can help you to .

Source: SmashingMagazine

Do You Know Your Twitter Click-Through-Rate? Want to Improve It?

Alan — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:10:58 +0000

So you’ve probably got a Twitter account, or a dozen. It’s a great way to update your customers or readers, build brand awareness and recently, both Google and Bing admitted that links shared on social media sites like Twitter are taken into account for ranking. But one of the main reasons to use Twitter is for the direct traffic it can drive. You’ve got links in your tweets but are you calculating their click-through-rate?

SEOMoz has put together a brief explanation on how to track clicks from the links you tweet along with some good tips on how to improve your CTR.

Source: SEOMoz