Posts filed under 'Blog'
A lot of people tell me that one of the most frustrating things for them in terms of Internet Marketing is that they put a lot of work into it and yet are still struggling to get visitors to their sites. In previous posts I have talked about the use of Tag and Ping which as described in Tagging Secrets is probably one of the most effective methods I have come across for driving traffic to our sites.
Here I am going to ask you to think about the basics! If you want to increase traffic and customer purchases on your website, you need to really analyze the site. If you have an existing site, then look at that. If you have a plan for a site, look at your plan.
As you look at your site or your planned site you really need to be objective about it as you ask yourself these questions:
1.
Is my site attractive and ‘sticky’? Does it make people want to stay and look around?
If your site is a built from a standard template, it probably does nothing to attract your customers. It may have all the necessary components, but does it look professional?
If your prospective customer looks at this site, does she or he think the person selling the product or service is a dependable business, or does the site look like it may fold any day?
If you don’t think you can afford a professional designer, think again! Many local web designers freelance and the prices you get for design may be better than you might imagine.
If your needs are simple and you are a small business person, it won’t cost you that much to hire a professional if you don’t think you have the skills yourself.
2.
Does your website offer ‘value’ and true content?
With the advent of search engine optimization and keyword overload, some sites pull customers in by using many keywords that the customer may use in a search, thereby ranking them higher with search engines.
When the customer gets to their site, they may find content that is not useful to them. In fact, there is so much of this going on now that online customers are getting pretty disgusted.
Make your content USEFUL. We’ll talk more about how to do that later on in this book!
Think about your target audience and what they may be coming to your site to see, learn or buy. THEN DELIVER THAT! Don’t bother your customer with four pages of sales pitch in a large red font in bold and italics. It is annoying, and at the very least will put your customer in a bad mood. At the very worst, your prospective customer will leave and never come back.
We don’t want that do we! You want repeat visitors who will buy what you are offering - don’t you?
June 24th, 2006
The fundamental mistake made by many niche marketers is they create products based on what they think people want to buy. The correct way of deciding what niche product to create, is to find out what people are actually buying at the moment.
Here are five ways of discovering ideas for niche products which you can sell to make money:
1) Use Forums
With the rapid expansion of the internet, forums (or discussion groups or bulletin boards as they are also called) have proliferated. There are forums hosted all over the internet based on practically every theme imaginable.
Forums are websites where like minded people gather to discuss all sorts of issues pertaining to the theme of the forum. Some of the well moderated forums are extremely active and a good place to conduct research.
When it comes to finding ideas for niche products, you need to use the search engines to locate a number of forums on the theme you are interested in. For example, if you’re interested in needlepoint, you could enter needlepoint+bulletin board into the search engine.
Visit each forum and find out what questions people are asking. In addition, find out how many times similar questions are asked. The more frequently a question is asked across a number of forums, the more likely you have found a topic for your next niche product or website.
2) Visit Your Local Book Store
If you are completely stumped for ideas, a visit to your local book or magazine store is in order. People who are keen on a hobby almost always subscribe to related magazines, and if they buy magazines there’s a good chance they will buy niche products.
Your task is to discover what magazines are being sold and how quickly they move. It is best to visit a number of stores and compare the common magazines sold in all of them. Try to find out from the sales assistants how many copies they sell of the popular magazines you have identified.
A magazine sold in great number by each store, month after month, is a sure sign of a profitable niche.
3) Investigate eBay
eBay is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single market place on the planet. Millions of people buy a gigantic range of products month after month.
Go to eBay.com and scroll down the left hand menu, click on “All Categories” and scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens in your browser until you get to the section titled “Other Ways to Browse”. Included in that section are four sub-sections, each being ways to conduct your research:
i) eBay Keywords (popular terms being searched for)
ii) Common Searches
iii) eBay Pulse (a daily snapshot of current trends)
iv) Popular Products
From these four you will be able to spot a multitude of popular ideas for your next niche product.
4) Survey Your Website Visitors
If you have an existing website which receives a fair bit of traffic, you can survey that traffic using a popup. In order to entice people into taking the survey you will have to offer some kind of reward. You could even offer extra rewards for people who refer others to your survey.
Normally any web survey you conduct would have to be of a similar theme to your website, but it is possible to conduct a survey to find out your visitor’s interests and whether they would be prepared to spend any money on their interest.
They key is to ask simple questions in a manner that won’t lead your respondents to any particular answer. When designing your survey, keep in mind you will have to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it. This means keeping your questions “on topic”.
The simplest surveys to analyze are those constructed with multiple choice questions. The disadvantage of this is you don’t know for sure that the answers are absolute or close (i.e. “second best”).
5) Survey Your eMail List
If you have your own email list, you could survey them to find out what problems they are currently facing, or what interests they have. People on your email list will tend to answer more truthfully because there is a degree of trust between you and them.
This degree of trust not withstanding, you will still have to offer an incentive for your subscribers to take the survey. Design your survey the same as you would for a popup on your website.
June 24th, 2006
Affiliate marketing has become one of the most effective ways to advertise online. It is also one of the easiest ways for anyone with a website to make a profit online. Affiliate Marketing is an agreement between a merchant and a website owner. The website owner, or the affiliate, allows the use of their site for the promotion of the merchant’s products by linking to the merchant’s website. In exchange, the merchant pays a commission to the affiliate on all sales generated by the affiliate. Every time someone clicks on the link on the affiliate website and proceeds to make a purchase, the affiliate gets a commission. The merchant will pay the affiliate only when a customer clicks on the product link and makes a purchase.
Affiliate marketing programs are described as a win-win situation for both the merchant and the affiliate because of the pay-for-performance scheme. Both the merchant and the affiliate enjoy some benefits in affiliate marketing. There are many benefits on the merchant’s side. It gives the merchant a wider market in which to advertise a product or service. Affiliate marketing will give the product or service the maximum exposure that it may not get with other traditional advertising techniques. The more affiliate sites a merchant has, the higher the traffic, which can convert to sales. Affiliate marketing is the equivalent of having an army of sales people who will do the advertising and will only get a commission if a customer purchases.
Meanwhile, since an affiliate marketing relationship is a win-win situation, the affiliate also enjoys many benefits. Foremost among these is the easy way to make a profit. The affiliate can earn by having an ad or link to the merchant’s website, which prospective customers will hopefully click and proceed to make a purchase. As soon as the customer clicks on the ad on the affiliate’s site, is redirected to the merchant’s website and goes on to buy that particular product, the affiliate earns a commission. The more referrals there are the more profit for the affiliate.
Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to earn money while at home. There are virtually no production costs. The product is already developed and proven by the merchant, and all you have to do to find, as many prospects as you can that will bring in the profit for both the merchant and the affiliate. Affiliate programs are usually free to join, so affiliates do not have to worry about start-up costs. There are thousands of products and services you can choose from. You can find affiliate programs for every product under the sun. Surely, there is a product or service out there that is relevant to your website.
In addition, there is absolutely no sales experience necessary. Most affiliate programs offer excellent support when it comes to providing marketing material. The simplicity of affiliate marketing allows you to be an affiliate marketer at the least cost and the most comfort. You can even build a successful affiliate marketing business right in the convenience of your own home. In affiliate marketing, your responsibility is simply to find prospects for the merchant; you do not have to worry about inventory, order processing, and product shipping. These, along with customer service support are the duties of the merchant.
Because of the global reach of the internet, you can easily find thousands of prospects. You can intensify your advertising campaign by exploiting more aggressive and productive strategies such as viral marketing. By attracting more prospects, you also maximize your potential to earn. Another benefit of an affiliate marketer is the minimal risk involved. If the product you are advertising is not making money then you can dump it and choose another. There are no long-term binding contracts tying you to products that are not making enough money.
All the same, the best benefit of being an affiliate marketer is the opportunity to increase your income; and you can make a profit even if affiliate marketing is only a sideline business. With your own affiliate business, you can earn easily earn extra income, although you do have to exert effort and use your imagination to maximize your earning potential. Indeed, affiliate marketing is one of the simplest and most effective business opportunities on the web today.
One of the things that massively increased my affiliate earnings was taking on board the information in Rosalind’s The Super Affiliate Handbook which you can take a look at by clicking on the link.
June 22nd, 2006
The Free Report in the post below has received some very positive feedback and thank you for that.
I am still finding an absolute mass of information in the Tagging Secrets and I think used appropriately Tag and Ping and Social Bookmarking is going to be a long term strategy for building traffic. It will be interesting to see how the Search Engines develop their own thinking on this area and whether there is much more emphasis placed on Googles Bookmarking abilities and the like. There are some tremendous benefits to this “Search Engine of the People” approach without all the emphasis on complicated algorithims as well as some downsides of course.
Interesting to see how it develops over the coming months.
June 18th, 2006
I have put together a Free Report for you on how to create a Blog and start to make Money from it. It also offers advice for the experienced Blogger looking to take their Blogging to the next level.
You can download your copy by right clicking on the link and selecting “Save Target as” to save it to your own hard drive. Blogging for Profit.
You cannot change the document or sell it BUT you can give it away to friends and your own subscribers.
June 17th, 2006
Getting links from other websites is not the only way to attract visitors to visit your blog. This time, we are going to explore alternative methods to attract high quality traffic with both free and paid methods.
The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to recycle all the content you have written on your blog. What I really mean is to turn your blog posts into little “manuals” or articles that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to article directories. These article directories are like aggregators that collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day.
When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On most article directories, you are also permitted to include a “resource box” where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. This is where you can truly leverage the traffic of the said article directories.
Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that is based on your niche. To find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter “ +forum”, without the quotes. You would want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members, and preferably always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum.
When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to append a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affilliate since they are already convinced you’re an “expert” in the field.
The strategy we’ll discuss is word of mouth. Let’s say you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift and posted it on your blog, saying that if a certain visitor can refer three of his/her friends to visit your blog the gift will be his/hers for free? If your small report or gift is lucrative enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will surely refer their friends to this blog that they frequent!
You can also utilize the “blog and ping” technique that everyone’s talking about. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals know by pinging them.
Tag and Ping is probably one of the most effective strategies allied with Social Bookmarking and you can read more about that at Tagging Secrets.
June 17th, 2006
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