Building a Loyal Subscriber List Wednesday, Jun 10 2009

If you’re not in control of your digital identity, the odds are pretty good that someone else is, or will be if you have any brand recognition at all.
Consider the recent example of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, whose digital doppelganger created false identities spanning a range of social media sites and even claimed he had been diagnosed with skin cancer. ESPN advised in its NFL Rumor Central, “Not real, folks. In fact, if you see an athlete with a Twitter, you should assume — at least at first — that it’s fake. Assume it’s a Twitter twerp.”

What happens to celebrities happens to brands too. Identity hijacking is prevalent in social media largely because it’s easy to set up accounts and find an audience. The potential for the reach is enough of a lure. When I recently asked Facebook’s Chris Pan who Facebook’s audience is, he said something to the effect of, “Pretty soon it’ll be everyone.” He’s not that far off.

Major brands have increasing recourses in taking charge of their social identities online. If you’re in this elite group, you have a shot at pleading your case to sympathetic ears at various digital properties. MySpace has always restricted brand pages to paying marketers, Facebook is now aggressively cracking down on branded Pages not owned by someone affiliated with the brand, and Twitter will often turn over parked accounts to the rightful tweeter upon request.

Still, this strategy doesn’t solve two issues. One is that a reactive approach could occur after squatters have already damaged a marketer or brand. The other is that for the vast majority of businesses and brands, there’s no clear rightful owner. For instance, when I think of Sal’s Pizza, it’s the Sal’s Pizza on Mamaroneck Avenue in Mamaroneck, N.Y., with the best Sicilian slices I’ve ever eaten. But there are Sal’s Pizzas in Dallas, Boston, New Holland, Pa., and Little Neck, N.Y.; the last one even owns  myspace.com/salspizza. On Twitter,  @salspizza belongs to a restaurateur in Limerick, Ireland. I know the real Sal’s isn’t in Ireland – come on! – but it would be hard for Mamaroneck’s Sal to make a case, no matter how many of my old high school buddies sign a petition.

So, what’s a marketer to do? Here are ten steps to follow:

1. Run an audit of where your brands are. Note the usernames you use. If you have one flagship brand that’s also your company name, then it’s easy. If you have a stable of brands, this could be a long list.
2. Prioritize the usernames. In the Sal’s example, the business may be Sal’s Ristorante but it’s known as Sal’s Pizza, so salspizza (which is also easier to spell and type) would be the preferred name.
3. Use a site such as usernamecheck.com or knowem.com to enter see if your usernames are taken across scores of sites. Also check for other brand terms. Prioritize usernames that are both memorable and widely available — that’s the sweet spot.
4. For any sites that you know are priorities, register your key usernames. If you’re not sure which sites to prioritize, start with the ones you’ve heard of.
5. Eliminate any sites that are only for consumers and are off-limits for marketers or brands. For this and the next steps, call on the most social-media-savvy person you know, ideally someone you work with closely in your company, at an agency, or elsewhere.
6. Now you need to review all the other sites and prioritize further. If you’re at a total loss, use Compete or Quantcast’s free tools to see how much traffic the sites get, and pick a threshold. 7) For any of these sites, if you don’t plan on using them right away, fill in the minimal information required, post a link back to your homepage or the hub of your social marketing program, and adjust the privacy settings (where possible) so that’s they’re visible to the smallest audience. You don’t want to set false expectations for engaging consumers, and you don’t want to publicize a brand presence that falls short of your standards.
7. Check where competitors are. One easy way to do so is look for their most obvious usernames and visit those accounts to see if they’re really competitors or squatters. If you can’t find much, run some basic searches. Consider whether it’s worth joining competitors on those sites if you haven’t signed up already.
8. Share the list of registered usernames and passwords with a few trusted colleagues so you’re not the only one with the information.
9. Don’t be a jerk. You’ll find opportunities to undermine competitors throughout this process. Be one of the good guys. Try believing in karma.

Ideally, marketers will have clear-cut strategies for where they want to be and how they’ll develop their digital and social brand identities. But there are two problems with this approach. First, for many marketers, that’s just not the case. Second, if marketers think too hard about their strategy, they may never get around to covering some of the basic steps. If you don’t have a Twitter strategy, for instance, go ahead and register the most relevant usernames you can, make the profiles private, and then return to them when you know what you’re doing.

People will still impersonate celebrities and brands. It’s a price to pay for popularity, or notoriety if that’s the case. But if you’re in these arenas for real, it takes a lot of the fun off others trying to claim they’re you.

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Article Marketing: How To Capture A Reader’s Attention With Your Article Summary Wednesday, Jun 10 2009

When you’re doing article submissions, you’ll notice a field on the submission page that asks for an article summary (aka, short description).

As an author, you may not realize all the places where your article summary is used, but the article summary is a prime opportunity for luring readers to your article.

How is the article summary used?

The short description of your article will appear on the summary page of an article directory and also in Google and the other search engines in search results pages.

There are a few different types of summary pages on an article directory–there’s a summary page for a particular category, for each individual author (usually a list of your articles with their summaries), and if your article appears on the main page of an article directory a reader will see your article title and your article summary.

Is the article summary important?

Yes!

Think of your short description as a billboard along the interstate miles away from your business. You can’t see the billboard from your business, but depending on what you write on the billboard, you can effectively lure someone from the interstate to your business.

Google is the interstate and your article summary is the content on your billboard. Don’t you want to take advantage of all that traffic and direct readers to your article?

A potential reader is doing a Google search and is scanning a list trying to decide what page to click through to, and your short description can be the deciding factor as to whether they click through to your article.

What makes a good short description?

Whether you know it or not, you probably already know the answer to this. Go to your favorite article directory and look at the list of titles and article summaries.

Some are better than others, right? Some of the short descriptions make you want to read more, while others make you say, “No thank you–next!”

When you’re doing your next article submission, here are a few tips for capturing a reader’s attention with your article summary:

1) Your short description should tell what your article is about. Give specific info–what is your article topic and what info will you be providing in your article?

2) Try to lead the reader into your article from your article summary. Here’s an example:

“With some creativity you can transform your articles into multiple pieces of marketing content which can save you time, extend your marketing reach, and create more doorways for potential customers to find you. If you’re in the mood to stretch your marketing content mileage, try one of these 3 creative uses for your articles.”

This summary tells the reader what the article is about, how the information can benefit them, and what awaits them when they click through to read the entire article.

3) Write in complete sentences.

Sometimes you will see an article summary that just says something like: “Article about windshield wipers”

That’s it–end of story. Not a very compelling enticement for a reader to click through and learn more, is it?

No matter what the topic of your article, you can phrase your article summary in such a way that readers interested in that topic will say, “Hmmm, I want to know more!”

4) A short cut may be to use your intro or closing paragraph or some other part of your article as your short description. You don’t necessarily have to write your short description from scratch. Lots of times I will look over my finished article and pick out phrases and sentences that I think represent the article and would be good at luring a reader in.

Bonus tips:

• Mind your word count–Usually a publisher will require a short description to be 450 words or less, including spaces.
• Do not mention your own business or website address in the article summary, as many publishers do not appreciate that. The article summary is not your resource box–the article summary is a description of your article, while your resource box is the place where you can talk about yourself, your business, and your website.

Writing an article summary is not hard, but you do need to put some thought into how your summary will appear to your readers.

Think of your article summary as being a little advertisement for your article. Put yourself in the shoes of a person who is looking at a long list of results in Google–what sort of summary would make you want to click through and read the entire article?

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Blogging Your Way to the Top Tuesday, Jun 9 2009

It is no real secret that a well written topical blog can significantly help out your website – so why aren’t you doing it?

The most common reasons I hear for not starting a blog involve a lack of time to write posts, and limited ideas to write about, but taking that extra time to get some useful content out there can do wonders for your search rankings among other things.

An established blog that is updated regularly gets spidered by Google often, and increases the chances of new search rankings considerably. I have seen multiple situations where regularly updated blogs wind up ranking #1 in Google for relevant phrases literally within a couple hours of posting. It usually takes a well established website and blog to make this happen, but there is big potential if you do things the right way.

While blogs work best if updated multiple times per week, even those with a new post every week or two have advantages. Blogs don’t have to be a major undertaking, spending only an hour or so a week on posting can have you seeing results in no time.

There are many advantages to adding a blog to your website. Here are a few.

Increased Rankings

By boosting your topical content, you increase the value and relevance of your site. The more new stuff you add, the more of an authority you make your site, and this helps to improve your overall search rankings. It can also help you obtain rankings for “long tailed search phrases”.

Long tailed search phrases are those that are less commonly searched, and usually exceed 3 or 4 words in length – they are also very targeted to your product or service. Blogs are great for getting rankings on long tailed search phrases. If you see a long tailed search phrase you want to rank for, use the phrase as the post title (if it makes sense to do so) and write a good, content rich post about it and your ranking potential for this phrase will rise.

By writing blog posts with your target phrases in mind, you can often help improve your overall rankings by increasing the relevance of the site to that search phrase. Consider also linking to other relevant pages within your site from the post.

Increased Traffic

Blogs are great for increasing traffic. Aside from the added traffic you may see from search ranking improvements, if your blog is interesting and topical, you will get some repeat visitors to your site as readers check back for new posts. If people really like your blog, they will spread the word, resulting in even more visitors. Just think, have you ever emailed or instant messaged a friend with a link to an article you have read? Don’t you want your link to be the one passed around?

Credibility

By blogging regularly about your industry you will help to establish yourself as an expert. Many of your potential customers will see your blog and notice that you know what you’re talking about and be more likely to utilize your services. By sharing your knowledge it can help to instill trust onto your visitors which can actually result in increased conversions. There are a lot of faceless, anonymous websites out there – an active blog can help people relate to you and trust you.

Links

A good, well written blog can result in free one way links to your site. Sometimes it is as simple as a fan adding your link to their blog roll, and other times it may be RSS working its magic. Try to squeeze in a link or two into your posts and direct them to other internal pages on your website. If anyone then republishes or syndicates your posts on their sites, you will also end up with a relevant back link. (If you would like some other ideas on link building be sure to check out Ways to Increase Link Density & Building Links with Directory Submissions)

A blog is not a magic bullet used to skyrocket your inbound link counts, but it can certainly help.

What Platform To Use

I am a firm believer in the power of WordPress and the seemingly unlimited plug-ins available to help you. That said, just about any blog platform will work. It is probably best to stick with the main stream providers as they tend to have more options available and better support forums in case you get stuck with customization issues. In the end however, any search friendly blog platform will ultimately do the trick.

Blog Post Ideas

If after reading this you are sitting there thinking, “What should I write about?” here are some ideas to help you get going:

• New product launches
• Press releases
• Industry relevant news
• How to’s related to your product or service
• Answers to reader comments
• Posts revolving around relevant long tailed phrases
• In depth product descriptions or tutorials
• Company history or interesting stories
• Reviews of related products, services or online tools

Blogs are relevant for pretty much all industries, and they don’t have to take a lot of your time. A little creativity can help you come up with ideas for posts, just try to think outside the proverbial box.

If you’ve been putting off the blogging idea for some time, consider getting started now. There is much to gain and very little to lose.

(Scott Van Achte)

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5 Money-On-Demand Secrets To Creating Great Adsense Sites Saturday, Jun 6 2009

The rage to milk money from Adsense continues into 2009. While there are many different ways to do this, it’s no secret Google is keeping a watchful eye on spam sites which automatically generate pages consistently on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Adsense ‘experts’ would introduce a ‘fresh’ new way of generating pages which Google “has not caught on yet”, be it article, directory or backlink generators.

While these software are very good at what they do, you can’t solely depend on them for long-term success. It’s a natural tendency that automatically generated content just doesn’t look like quality pages with highly informative, up-to-date content, but it’s my personal observation.

Most run-of-the-mill, ads-on-topfold Adsense sites lack substantial sections and deeper structures to be interesting enough to make visitors think they should come back to check them out more often. While generating as many pages as possible is crucial to get them indexed and thereby build substantial presence in search results, these types of pages should only complement principal content that reflects what your site stands for and the selling point it serves to maximize its overall value. There used to be a question that goes, “Is building Adsense sites a business?” My answer is: Adsense is secondary.

Of course, like you I do want Adsense to be my primary source of income. The secret is in emphasizing content and value, not Adsense ads. You may have felt resigned to say, “Does that mean more work?” Not really. Here’s another secret inspired by a quote from Albert Einstein: You can’t solve your Adsense income challenge at the same level of thinking.

Truth is: I have build a good number of Adsense sites, but my main Internet Marketing site which I treat as my core business earns more than some of them despite my intention not to make it Adsense-focused, all the more so when it has absolutely nothing to do with high-paying keywords and the tremendous amount of time that goes into keyword research…which leads to the next secret: create a site with a subject or niche you know you can continually express and expand on instead of getting stuck with a ‘lucrative’ keyword you may run out of ideas on in the long term.

This is as good as saying Adsense is not just a keyword value game; it is still the classic “How do I get and retain traffic” game, and traffic is not some scoreline, but real people with genuine interest.

eHow.com is an incredible example. It’s a free site that shows people how to do a lot of different things. The best way to explain the site is just for you to go have a quick look now. They have hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of content on all sorts of subjects and the way they get traffic to their site is through the search engines.

Every page on the site has an Adsense box on it and that’s how it makes money. They also have a Alexa traffic ranking of around 2000 which is great.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to write or purchase that much content by yourself. eHow.com succeeds in getting its visitors involved in content contribution. There’s also a wikiHow to get contributors involved in constant update of a common topic or article.

For a start, here are suggestions on the type of sections you can integrate into a site:

1. Lead capture page with freebies or incentives
2. Article directory
3. A ‘Contact Us’ page
4. An ‘About Us’ page
5. Forum: The challenge lies in the time and effort needed to build up momentum to encourage forum participants to write in
6. An archive section of some kind, for selected articles for example
7. Blog/podcast pages
8. Reciprocal link directory
9. Sitemap

It doesn’t take much to think of these standard sections. Even a products section makes your site look good besides providing another source of income, and then you replicate these sections site after site, niche after niche.

4th secret: Only sites with a general theme can afford to be massive-looking. Examples: Entrepreneur.com and Dogomania.com. Then you break the theme down into specifics like gathering them under an umbrella: dog training, dog hygiene, dog naming, dog psychology, doggy habits etc. Accurate targeting of Adsense ads depends on specific subjects as reflected on page. One thing to note is it is better that specific sections are inter-linked in some ways. If you run a site on everything about cancer, because “colon cancer” and “breast cancer” are not intrinsically related, visitors interested in one section may not want to take a first glance at another.

5th secret about content: write from a ‘consumer’ perspective instead of the ‘opportunist’ or “how to make money” perspective. What is it your visitors are looking to buy? Ads normally target and appeal directly to consumers. It’s pointless to put up content about how to make money with car accessories when there are hardly ads on “how to make money”. Stick to introducing car accessories and let the ads do the selling. If an accessory or equipment catch visitors’ attention and they click on the ads, you got Adsense dollars.

That’s about all the ideas I have at this moment. You should be confident now and maybe have some more new ideas I haven’t thought of. For sure, Adsense is a major income source you should seriously explore and make it big if you haven’t done so. This is one of those money machines that will make you money-on-demand pretty much for the life of Google.

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Change Management and Employee Communication Strategies Saturday, Jun 6 2009

If your employee communication strategy to communicate change focuses on stakeholder communication plans, an intranet site, CEO forums and Staff Information Bulletins via email stop right there.  Your efforts are focused on information, not communication and the likelihood of engaging employees in change is remote.

My interest in employee communication is to distinguish between the tools communicators use that inform and those strategies that engage employees and therefore impact business outcomes. The concern is that there seems to be confusion in the market place where roles are advertised for “Change Managers” when the organization is really looking for an internal communication professional not a change practitioner.

So what’s the difference?

Well clearly both information and engagement tools are important.  An internal communication professional focuses on tools to impart information and in some cases create dialogue including:

• the corporate intranet
• staff information bulletins
• emails
• providing information for managers to brief their teams face to face
• organizing staff forums for the CEO
• briefing kits for supervisors and team leaders

Whilst all of this activity is important and provides the support that employees need to find out what is happening.  But, and it is an important distinction, so what if you tell people what is happening, will it change their attitude and therefore change their behaviour? In my experience which is across many sectors, industries, professional roles and all types of change programs I have to say no.  And this is the problem, when a CEO and senior executive team think “change” will happen because they have hired someone to communicate the changes taking place and then when there is no impact on the business or the outcomes they were looking for they are disappointed.

Think of it this way. Smokers buy a packet of cigarettes, the health warnings are featured on the packet and yet we see intelligent, literate people continue to smoke, packet after packet. The only time they truly become engaged in changing their attitude toward smoking and therefore behaviour is when they are in the doctors office and are personally facing a health risk. And then Aha! they finally get it.

So how do we use this analogy when we are tying to communicate change? Let’s look at this example. An organization wants to communicate the financial results to employees and the usual approach is to post the employee annual report on the intranet. But this time they need to do something different, they want employees to understand why the company needs to improve and what shareholders base their decisions on. So they decided to run free lunchtime information sessions for their employees on how to invest in the share market and held them for one hour each week for four weeks. The topics progressed from understanding the share market, categories of companies listed etc till the final week they examined annual reports. So in this final session they were reviewing annual reports and came to the last one for the session and after reading through the data the question was asked of employees, so who would invest in this company, few put their hands up. And you guessed it, the company was their company and with a collective Aha! the employees finally got the message.

As in this instance, a large transformation program including HR, training and operational initiatives was developed to build on this.

So here is the important message for any change program.  Information is important, employees need to know what is happening, when, why, who, what and by whom.  However, equally as important when it comes to organizational change, employees need to be involved in the process to be truly engaged.  This is where change professionals need to focus on the Aha! moments and engage their employees in the process of change.

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Three Tips for Effective Article Marketing Saturday, Jun 6 2009

One of the best ways to get free advertising and links back to your site is to write good articles and publish them on blogs and websites around the Internet with a link back to your site. Doing this in a systematic way is usually called “article marketing.” I have done it for years and believe me it works! However, my enthusiasm for article marketing is started to wane due to an avalanche of poorly written articles which do not provide end users with useful information. In the same way that reciprocal linking was destroyed by misguided users trying to “game” the search engines, article marketing stands in a precarious position today. I publish three article directories and I can assure you that most of the articles submitted should be consigned to the recycle bin because they go against the basic idea of providing good useful information in an easy-to-read fashion. In case you are writing articles, or about to have some articles written for you, here are three important tips for doing it properly.

1. Provide Information and Not a Sales Pitch

It is futile to write directly about your product and explain how great it is. If this is what you want to do, it is better to write a press release and explain the newsworthy features of your work. An article for publication on another website should be related to your area of expertise, but should not be bragging about you or your product. For example, if you operate a garden supply business, then write “how-to” articles helping people to solve some of the gardening and landscaping problems that they might be facing. You don’t have to say how great your garden supply business is. If you write well and provide useful tips, then the readers will be impressed and they will want to click through on your link and find out more about you and your business People who visit your website after reading a good article are high quality visitors, because they have been “pre-sold” on you. They already regard you as an “expert” and will be more inclined to buy your products or subscribe to your newsletters than someone who clicks through on just any old link. 2. Write the article properly or get the article written by someone who can write!

If you were to submit an article to your English teacher in high school or college, would you want to hand in something with obvious grammatical mistakes even in the title itself? Of course you wouldn’t but that doesn’t stop people from hiring unqualified ghostwriters to write tons of sub-standard articles for them at $5 per article. Try writing an intelligent 500 word article. Can you do it in ten minutes or even twenty minutes? Probably not. Take the time to write your article well and if you are hiring someone then you should opt for a native English speaker who will give it a reasonable amount of time. You may have to pay more for it, but you will gain in the end. How will you gain? Well written and informative articles get reprinted at a much greater frequency than the junk or filler articles. You will gain with more links and most importantly you will get more credibility as an expert in your field.

3. Format Your Articles Properly

One of the keys to effectiveness is the readability of your article. Do you like looking at a long block of printed words without any paragraph breaks? Take the time to divide your articles into short paragraphs punctuated by sub-heads. It will give your readers a chance to assimilate your message more easily. The reason why I am particular on this point is that many people use automated article submission systems which push all the paragraphs together. Editors have no time to make these corrections for you and may delete the articles. Alternatively, your article may be published, but in a way that turns off the reader, rather than inspiring her to read the whole article. Submit your articles in a proper format and make sure that your submission system sends a well formatted version to the publishers. If you follow these three tips then you will be “adding value” to the Internet rather than clogging it with useless filler. You will be doing a service to the public, and in the end it will work to your benefit too.

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Why People Fail to Make Money Online: How to Achieve Internet Home Business Success Saturday, Jun 6 2009

There are a number of reasons why most people fail to make money online, and why their internet home business is doomed to failure from the outset. If you can understand these reasons why 99% that start fail to be successful, and consequently avoid them, then you can be one of those 1% that make a comfortable living working online from home.

Some of the major reasons for failure are outlined below: keep them in mind and do your best to avoid them.

1. A Failure to Plan is a Plan to Fail Although this is a massively abused cliché, it is true nonetheless

To achieve success with an online business you must have a strategic plan and must set targets over various time-frames. Get a sheet of paper and a felt tip marker, and write down in bold letters exactly what your objective is: “I Want To Earn Enough This year to Buy a New Dream House”, or “I Want To Leave The Day Job By Christmas”. Stick in a prominent place where you see it every day.

Set targets for your year, each month and each week. Have a daily list of tasks to be completed to enable you to meet these targets. Review your plan and your targets, and make changes to suit progress: IF YOU FALL BEHIND, THEN WORK LONGER HOURS. Which takes us on to Number 2:

2. It’s Your Job, Not a Pastime

Just because you have no boss to report to doesn’t mean an internet home business is not a job. Many people fail to make money online because they don’t take their business seriously enough: they take time off when they feel like it, finish earlier in the day than they did in their regular job and find it difficult to concentrate on tasks.

You must not fall into this trap, and setting daily tasks and targets to meet will help you to get through the work needed to be successful in making money online. An online business is hard work to start with, although it does get easier. However, if you enter into it thinking it easy money, then you are in for a shock and you will likely fail.

3. Get Rich Quick? No Chance

This leads nicely into the get rich quick syndrome from which many people appear to suffer. Those starting an internet home business looking for quick success and to become very rich in a matter of weeks – or even days – are in for a huge fall. Such people make up a good proportion of the 99% that fail to make money online, and if this is you then change your mindset immediately.

If you knew a foolproof way to get very rich by spending only a couple of hundred dollars would you tell everybody else about it? Of course not! You have no idea how many of these ’schemes’ involve you paying money to somebody who will tell you their system: to charge people money for a get rich quick scheme that is charging people money for a get rich quick scheme. Nobody has any online program other than telling people to do as they do – collect their money and then tell them to do as you are doing.

Keep completely clear of these because eventually there will an awful lot of losers.

4. Lack of Focus

Information Overload! How many different ways of making money online have you seen advertised? There are literally hundreds. I won’t go into any of them right now, but will just say that a very large proportion of failures is due to a lack focus on any one of them.

Many people spend an awful lot of money paying for loads of eBooks, ways to make money on the internet, ways to avoid failing to make money online, software, mentoring and everything else on offer out there. Rather than settling on one and targeting that they start on many different programs, and when they fins that they are not making anything they leave it and try something else, and so on, and so on.

Target just one and focus on that. Spend all your time and effort on it and you might be very surprised. Because the thing is that most of these programs and ideas actually do work! It’s just that people don’t give them enough time.

If you heard that jigsaw puzzles were fun to do would you buy up twenty of them and then start them all, and finally give them up because they are no good? Of course not: you would complete them one at a time and think that jigsaw puzzles were great, and eventually you would be able to work on twenty at a time. The same is true of online income streams.

5. Where Do I Start?

Lot’s of people just don’t know where to start. They are bewildered by the choices available; by the number of different ways in which the can make money online. There are so many that they don’t know what form their internet home business should take.

Sure, they know that they WANT their own business, and they know that they might even NEED a home business, but the problem is WHAT home business and HOW they find out what is available without getting burnt.

That’s when you should be looking for a site that offers regular information, teaching and product reviews, so that you can be helped by like-minded people that have been exactly where you are now and understands your problems and knows how you feel when that credit card bill comes through the door, but you haven’t the money to pay.

Internet business membership sites are ideal to help in this way, and not only do you normally have permanent information on the website that you can refer to whenever you feel the need, but also special members-only products. They are not gifts, because you pay for them with your monthly membership fee, but nice to get nevertheless.

If you want to make money online, and want to start up a successful internet home business of your own, then a good live online membership site can help you more than any individual eBook or program that is starting to get obsolete the day that you purchased it. Internet home business success is based upon sound knowledge and access to expert help when you most need it.

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Improved Website Sales Conversion Is The Best Answer Saturday, Jun 6 2009

When I first started learning how to make money online, I read that “content is king.” Well, I am here to tell you that “content is not king.” It is an illusion (a mirage) that traps many online business owners in the quick sand of failure.

“Content for the sake of content” is pointless.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. Content is a good thing, so long as it will help deliver a potential customer to your sales page or the sales page of your advertisers. Any content that does not deliver a potential customer to a sales page is content that has not lived up to its true purpose, plain and simple.

A Number’s Game

No web page or website will ever deliver a 100% conversion rate, so it is imperative for a website owner to devise some method for tracking patterns and sales conversion results on their websites.

Many people use and recommend Google Analytics for tracking website sales conversions (http://www.google.com/analytics/). The best benefit of using Google Analytics is the cost… it is free.

Personally, we are unsatisfied with the results that we get from Google Analytics, and we feel there has to be a better way. A few similar products worth considering include:

• http://www.metasun.com/
• http://www.sales-n-stats.com
• http://www.onestat.co.uk/

Real Numbers For Consideration

The Internet Retailer website compiled some interesting information back in 2005 and 2006. You can buy the 2006 data on their website, and they provide a good portion of the 2005 report on their website for free. This information comes from its 2005 report of the Top 500 online retailers: http://www.homebizcowboys.com/2005-net-sales-stats

In 2005, the top 500 online retailers completed 523.9 million separate sales at an average ticket price of $118. This in itself is a number that can encourage smaller website owners to have confidence in their future, but it is not the number I am most concerned with sharing with you today.

This article is about “sales conversion”, so it is imperative that I show you what you should expect from your own sales conversion.

The Internet Retailer report shows us how the top online retailers are performing as far as sales conversion on their own websites. As you will see in this breakdown, sales conversions based on monthly visits (by visitor) varied widely, even within the same industries.

• Chain Retailers ranged from 0.45% to 23% conversion;
• Catalog and Call Center Operations ranged from 0.39% to 23.5% conversion;
• Web-Only Merchants averaged between 0.10% to 31% conversion; and
• Consumer Brand Manufacturers ranged from 0.75% to 20.2% conversion.

Web-Only Merchants stand out in two ways: they scored the lowest conversions and the highest conversion rates at 0.10% and 31%.

Closer To Home

One of our “cowboy” friends has been working on his conversion rates with our help, through his free report and online newsletter. It is always easier to give away information than it is to close a sale on someone’s first visit to your website. So, he has adjusted his approach to build his email list first, and then to use good content to drive his sales down the road. (Yes, good content does have its place in the world.)

He still uses the old methods of promoting his websites that he has used for years. But now, he is trying out different advertising models to strengthen his opt-in numbers.

Banner Advertising

We have all heard about how bad banner advertising is, but my cowboy friend had read someone’s eBook, where they said that they are making tons of money with banner advertising.

Willing to try anything once, my cowboy friend undertook his first banner advertising promotions with the AdBrite Network (http://www.adbrite.com/).

In his first run at the system, his banners only generated 0.0005% CTR’s (click-through’s) to his website. So he readjusted his banners and took another pass. With his second run, he generated 0.0054% CTR’s. Again, he redesigned his banners and took another pass at the system. This third time out, he had managed to raise his banner clicks to 0.0695%.

On his third run of 144,000 banner impressions, he generated 101 clicks to his newsletter sign-up page. By spending one-third less money than he spent on his first run, he generated 100 times more CTR’s than he did on his first pass.

These numbers only reflect how many of his banner displays generated a visitor to his website.

The industry conversion rates shown previously in this article only reflect the actions people took once they were at a website. For my cowboy friend, once people landed on his website after clicking a banner ad, he was able to convert 3% of his visitors to subscribers.

Co-Registration Marketing

Co-registration is a process by which one company will offer a subscription to its visitors, and then on its “Thank You” page, it will offer other subscriptions to similar but non-competing publications.

At the end of my friends’ banner advertising campaign, he started a co-registration campaign. He started running his campaign in small increments, so that he could tweak his system as it progressed.

In his first 5,000-exposure pass, he generated a 0.5% CTR to his subscription page and converted 4% of his visitors to subscribers.

So, he tweaked his landing page and was able to increase his conversions to subscribers to 12% on his next run.

The next time through, he tweaked his co-registration advertisement. He saw his CTR increase to 2%.

He checked his stats, and then tweaked his system again. With the latest tweak, he is jubilant about his results. On his fifth pass, his results were so promising that he kept the system moving forward unabated.

With his last 4926 co-registration exposures, he generated 104 clicks to his website (2.11% CTR). Although he is still running about industry average on his CTR’s from the co-registration page, he is getting a 55% visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate (58 subscribers from 104 visitors).

Good Statistics Are Integral To One’s Success

Without good conversion statistics, it is nearly impossible to know how one can improve their overall conversion results.

Good tracking stats can show you when you have improved your conversions, and they can show you when you have diminished your conversion rates. Every time you make a change to your advertising, you should keep a backup of your original copy, just in case your changes produce poorer results instead of better results. If you see your conversions go down, then go back to the copy you had used prior to your last change.

By using his conversion statistics as a measure of his success, my friend was able to increase his results from banner advertising 100-fold in just a few weeks. When he took the same process to co-registration, he was able to increase his conversion results again, getting 58 times more subscribers for the same cash investment.

Learning From Our Friends…

We are working to duplicate the success of our friend. We had always thought that our own 10% visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate was pretty good, but 55%? Wow!

Going forward, my point is simple. Before investing great sums of money into driving traffic to one’s website, the first and most important task should be to drive enough traffic to your website to get some real conversion data and to tweak and improve your conversion results. Once you know that you are converting well on the traffic you are already receiving, then and only then should you consider stepping up your investment into driving traffic to your website.

If I had called this article, “Increase Your Sales by 5,800%,” you would have assumed me to be a hype-salesman, and you would have skipped over my article altogether. But, if you ask my friend, he would tell you in his own words, “If he can do it, then anyone can do it.” And that includes you, my friend. If he can do it, then YOU can do it too.

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7 SEO Tips for your WordPress Blog Friday, Jun 5 2009

Do you have a WordPress blog? If so, one of the best ways to increase the traffic to your blog is by applying search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. In this article we will go over 7 simple things that you can to do increase your traffic from the search engines.

1. Make sure that your permalinks are set up optimally for SEO – whenever you publish a blog post it will have a permanent URL known as a “permalink”. By default the WordPress permalink setting is not optimal but you can easily edit this by clicking on the Settings->Permalinks menu in the WordPress dashboard and then use a custom setting http://yourdomain.com/category/postname. This will mean that your blog post category and title will appear in the URL rather than a number.

2. Install the All in One SEO Pack (or a another similar plugin) – the All in One SEO Pack plugin allows you to add a custom title, meta description and keyword tags for your home page and blog posts.

3. Optimize each blog post for a low competition long tail keyword phrase – before you make a blog post take some time to do a little keyword research. Visit the Google Adwords Keyword tool and use this to find a long tail keyword phrase that has a low amount of competition. Ideally this phrase will have just a few hundred monthly searches rather than a few thousand monthly searches. Use a different keyword phrase for every blog post that you make and put the keyword phrase in the blog post title and 2-3 times throughout the post.

4. Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark each blog post – whenever you post to your blog use a social bookmarking service e.g. Digg or StumbleUpon. There are also services such as OnlyWire and SocialMarker that will let you submit your site to multiple bookmarking services at the same time. Social bookmarking can get you additional traffic to your blog and give you a backlink to your blog post.

5. Optimize the home page of your blog – it is normal for the home page of your blog to get more traffic then any of the other pages. You can increase the number of visitors even more by optimizing your home page. Choose one or two keyword phrases for the home page of your website using the free Google Adwords Keyword tool. If possible try to choose prases that are not too competitive, but still have a good few thousand monthly searches. Ensure that you include these keyword phrases are mentioned in the TITLE tag, meta description and throughout the permanent content of your blog home page.

6. Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin – this won’t increase your search engine rank, but having a sitemap will help to ensure that the search engines index all the posts and pages of your blog. You can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a sitemap for your blog.

7. Build links to your blog – building links back to your website is the surest way to improve your ranking in the search engines. If you ignore this it will be very difficult to get a good level of visitors from the search engines. You can build links using article marketing, directory submission, forum posting, commenting on other blogs, press releases, link exchange and social bookmarking.

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