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3 Key Points in Online Marketing to Avoid Tanking Your Results

Albert — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:03:40 +0000

With all the changes in Google AdWords and the increased competition these days, organic SEO looks more and more attractive to most of us.

The key is for your website optimization to out-perform your competition, without over spending with an online marketing consultant (or without taking up too much of your time if you’re going the do-it-yourself route).

Remember, affordable Search Engine Optimization is about increasing quality traffic, then

converting
that traffic to a sale or a sales lead.

If you miss these points I describe below, your SEO goals of increased conversions will tank, even if you have a Number 1 Google Ranking.

I often notice these missed areas when I’m Coaching a business owner about their Web site and their need to increase sales and sales leads.

So, here are 3 points for you to review that I hope will help your SEO goals of increased conversions.

What’s Above the Fold Counts Most, so Consider Monitor Resolutions

Living in the world of TV remote controls and browser back buttons, we have to capture our website visitors’ attention ASAP. Our visitors aren’t going to give us much time before making a decision to stay or to leave our website.

As much as this subject is discussed these days, it’s amazing the number of sites I review that have critical information missing from “above the fold”, in that area visible before your visitors scroll down.

This is the area to briefly summarize what people can do on your site and make your best case for your guests staying on your website and not clicking away. This may also be the area to place your contact information.

Keep in mind that what’s above the fold on your monitor will likely be different from what’s above the fold on the monitor for someone visiting your website. Browser resolution is set differently for various computers.

For instance, on my website, I know the top resolution of my visitors is 1280 by 1024 (53%) and the second most popular resolution is 1024 by 768 (37%). I get this information from my site’s analytics script, although not all analytics programs provide this critical information.

Since I make sure my site looks great for these 90% of my visitors and make sure I communicate reasons to stay on my site above the fold (my value proposition), I draw more people into my site, encouraging them to scroll down.

Remember to cross test your site with recent versions of the most popular Web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and maybe even Google’s new Chrome.

These steps raise my conversion rate and they will raise yours, too. And increasing traffic and conversions is the whole point of affordable search engine optimization, whether using an online marketing consultant or d-i-y, right?

So, don’t miss this important step.

Carefully Select Your Type Size and Font and Remember that White Space is Your Friend

I’m astounded by the improper text choices made by so many website owners today. Is there really any good reason to make people squint at your website, struggling to get the information they need?

Consider reviewing The Easy to Read Standard at Information Architects (you can Google it). I would encourage you to review the size of your text, the white space between your letters and words and between your paragraphs and headings.

Designers often believe whitespace is your enemy; if you want people to understand your message and stay on your website, whitespace is in fact your friend.

Also consider that fonts with serifs are easier to read than fonts without serifs.

If you want to successfully convey your message to as many of your site visitors as possible, then make it as easy for them as you can. When we’re talking about increasing conversions, it’s all about the numbers and appealing to the largest number of people possible.

Use Opt-in Email or Blog Postings to Maximize Your Sales

All website owners would like for people to buy from their website the first time they visit. But is that realistic?

Consider these statics from the National Sales Executive Association:

2% of sales are made on the 1st contact;
3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact;
5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact;
10% of sales are made on the 4th contact (and)
80% of sales are made on the 5th – 12th contact.

For most businesses, if you don’t offer an opt-in contact, like a regular email newsletter or blog postings, you’re missing out on most of your potential sales!

When setting up an opt-in Internet marketing campaign, you should offer incentives to subscribe. To entice people to opt-in, you can offer:

special pricing for email list members
a first look at new products
ability for customer to select subjects and emails they receive (controlling the frequency of contact by choosing which of your lists to be on)
promise not to share email or other personal info with other companies

Using opt-in contact allows you to significantly increase conversions by introducing yourself over time to your potential customers, in a soft-sell manner.

Website optimization is important; the goal is increased Internet traffic, sales and sales leads. But whether you’ve hired an online marketing consultant or you’re doing the process yourself, Affordable search engine optimization by itself doesn’t accomplish those last points of increased sales and sales leads.

You’ve got to remember to design your website to alleviate visitors natural apprehensions and make buying from you as easy as possible.

Properly mapping out the above the fold area of your Web pages, using appropriate size text, using adequate whitespace and offering an opt-in process to nurture your buyers will all help you accomplish the real goals you have with SEO and website optimization: increased sales and more sales leads.

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Top Ten Ways to Use Twitter for Marketing

Albert — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 17:24:48 +0000

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are “following” you. When people follow you, they see what you’ve recently contributed when they login. They see your “tweets”, which are the messages you leave.

And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you’ll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promotion. It acts sort of like an opt-in mass emailing blast to your house email list, but it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the ‘how-to’s’, tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here’s an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)
Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.
Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?
1. You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?
2. Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.
Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your opt-in house email list. Invite these people to join.
Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.
Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.
Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.
Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.
Use it as an instant messaging system to keep your and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don’t only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

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Email Marketing – 4 Keys to Advance in Email Marketing

Albert — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:01:01 +0000

Email marketing is something that can be easy or hard to implement; it depends on you. The basis of email marketing is a list; though there are many companies selling email lists, it is better for you to create your own email list. If and when you build your own list, you develop cordial relationships with these people which make email marketing easier. So the first step to effective email marketing is building your own list.

Though auto responders have their own personalization feature, it is better for you to be personal in your emails. Speak directly to the recipient of the email so that the email doesn’t look like it has come from an auto responder, but directly from you. this is the second step to effective email marketing.

Content is an important aspect of effective email marketing. Make sure you have content that people are interested in reaching and not something that will make them bored about reading. Just consider how you would accept the email if you received it, and whether you would read it if you received the email. If you would read the email if you received it, then it is more than likely that your recipients too would read it.

Offering free gifts to the subscribers is a great tool in email marketing. However make sure that whatever you offer has real value as if it has no value, then it is not considered a gift, but free junk. Remember that the gifts will judge the value of your paid items with the value of the free gifts you offer them. So ensure that you give your subscribers real value free gifts. All this is sure to help you in effective email marketing.

Why You Need To Use An Autoresponder With Internet Marketing

Albert — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:41:10 +0000

Internet marketing is mainly done by sending emails. People indulging in Internet marketing have an access to a database of emails, which they use to send their marketing collateral like articles, e-flyers and e-brochures to. This kind of email marketing is risky, as there is no saying when the recipient of the email will actually read your email and send a affirmative reply.

Actually speaking, any kind of marketing is all about networking with people. In the same vein, email marketing would mean a person should always be able to process and reply to any and replies they receive due to their Internet or email marketing. It is, of course, a physically impossible task for a person to sit at the email program 24/7 and check the replies, and hiring a group of people to handle these emails will just increase the unnecessary costs of Internet marketing.

This is where autoresponders come into the picture. Autoresponders are small email programs that automatically reply to the sender of the email. Today, autoresponders can be completely personalized, and are seen as a very good tool for email marketing.

Most autoresponders are tweaked so that your email program can send complete and concise information about the product you are marketing. Such autoresponders, also known as follow up autoresponders, can be divided into two categories:-

? Server Side Autoresponders: Server Side Autoresponders allow the user to install the autoresponder on their own server. Since the user has to manage these autoresponders, a minimal set of technical skills are required to use the autoresponder to its true potential.

? ASP model Autoresponders: These autoresponders are normally outsourced and are installed on the provider’s infrastructure. They can be configured through a web GUI or control panel. Clients are charged a monthly fee for these autoresponders. These autoresponders are simple to use and hassle free.

There are several free autoresponders available in the market. However, like every ‘free’ service on the Internet, free autoresponders have their own advertisements. These advertisements are sent with each and every auto respond that you send. These advertisements may act as an distraction from the actual message. Also, if the advertisement is not coded properly (believe us, that happens), the entire autoresponder message will go for a toss and your e-mail message will be deleted, perhaps personally.

There are many autoresponders available on the Internet. Make sure to go through a proper research and decide which type of autoresponder is the best for you. Most paid autoresponders are available for under twenty dollars.

Keep in mind that some autoresponders have a limit for the number of autoresponds that you can send. These limits can be weekly or monthly. One basic feature that you should remember is that once you use an autoresponder, if you decide to take your email list somewhere, all your subscribers will have to re-opt for your email marketing.