5 STEPS TO A MORE EFFECTIVE WEB SITE

Are you frustrated by the lack of business your Web site generates? By making some simple changes you can improve the effectiveness of your site. These changes will lead to increased online visibility, more quality traffic and more inbound leads that build your business.

Make it easier for people to find you.

I’m still surprised by how little businesses invest in their search engine optimization (SEO). They’ll spend thousands upon thousands on a Web site but not a dime on SEO. That’s like building a state-of-the-art retail store in the middle of nowhere and not providing directions.

Perform a keyword analysis and make sure the words your prospects use to search appear throughout your Web site, especially in your title tags, headers, body copy and internal links.

Stop talking about yourself.

Read the copy on your home page: is it about you or about your audience? Remember: nobody cares about you or your business. They care about their problems, their issues, their pain points. You need to address those issues first before you start talking about how long you’ve been in business, your hours, or even your products or services.

Get people actively involved.

Remember those mailings from the Columbia Record Club? Eleven LPs for one penny? (Anyone under 30 can Google it: music used to come on vinyl. Really.) They would mail you a penny to take from one page and paste it on the return form. Why? Because the market research showed that by doing so they got significantly better response rates.

Get visitors involved by downloading articles, using calculators, entering contests, taking surveys, or clicking links. Passive visitors don’t buy; involved visitors become customers.

Lead visitors down the sales funnel.

This isn’t 1997 and your Web site isn’t a brochure. It’s 2010 and your Web site is your best salesperson. It doesn’t eat, sleep or ask for time off. If you’re not treating it like your number one sales tool, you’re leaving money on the table.

Focus on what your site visitor wants to accomplish and make it as frictionless as possible to achieve that goal. Lead them down that path with clear calls-to-action at the bottom of each page that tell them what the next step is.

If you want the phone to ring, make sure your phone number is at the top of every page. If you want more members for your organization put that application form front and center. If you want inbound leads make sure your calls-to-action lead to a contact form.

Measure and improve.

Take a look at your analytics”"your traffic reports”"weekly, if not more often. What search terms are people using to find your site? What Web sites or blogs are sending you the most visitors? What caused that recent spike in traffic?

By determining the answers to these and other questions you can continually improve what you’re doing on your Web site and in your Internet marketing. Maybe you’ll see it’s time to step up your activity on Twitter, or cut back on podcasting, or create more videos for YouTube and other video sharing sites.

If you’re not regularly checking your analytics you don’t know what’s working and what’s not. It’s like shooting at a target with a blindfold on.

In Conclusion

If your Web site isn’t generating inbound leads the way you had hoped, take these first steps towards making it a more effective sales tool. It may take a few months after you make your changes before you start to see an uptick, so be patient, but keep monitoring the situation and making incremental changes along the way.

Also consider porting your site over to WordPress or another content management system (CMS) so that you can make these changes yourself, saving you money and giving you more control over your Web site–and ultimately–the success of your business.

If you need help on any or all of these steps, please contact Vision Web today.

Sincerely,

Ken Murray
Founder/CEO, Vision Web

Quick Traffic Tips To Get Your First 1000 Visitors For Free

Quick Traffic Tips To Get Your First 1000 Visitors

This is a follow-up from my last post: Quick Affiliate Marketing Tips That Don’t Cost A Penny.

In my last post we discussed how you can pick a niche product on Clickbank and generate some quick affiliate commissions.

The response to that post was great, so I thought I’d share a little more with you guys

This time I want to show you some tips to generate your first 1000 visitors … for free!

The Importance Of “Digging”

One of the tips I gave when searching for keywords was to “dig down” into a niche to find easier keywords to rank for.

Even though they may have a lower search volume, they also have much less competition, which makes them ideal for getting some quick traffic.

If you’re still relatively new to this, the key to your success is going after smaller, less competitive niche markets, rather than trying to compete for terms like “internet marketing” or “make money”.

It’s SOOOO much easier to get traffic with 10 low volume, low competition keywords than it is to focus on one high volume, high competition one.

So if you’re looking to make some quick affiliate commissions, you MUST stick to niche markets.

Using Multimedia For Instant Targeted Traffic

In the last post, I suggested creating a Squidoo lens (page) to create your affiliate product review.

This method is useful because (a) it’s free and (b) Squidoo pages rank very high by themselves.

Now we need to drive traffic to that Squidoo lens.

Step #1 – Articles

This is the cornerstone of most of my marketing strategies. I gave you a list of places to submit to in the previous post, but we are going to do a LOT more with them this time.

If you want to submit to more than 10 different places I would suggest rewriting the articles to make them unique.

This can be done either by creating new ones from scratch (which is a lot of work) or using a free service like www.JetSpinner.com to create hundreds of unique versions easily and quickly.

You can then post unique versions to different directories and other “web 2.0″ content sites.

(For a large list of web 2.0 sites, visit: http://www.go2web20.net/)

Step #2 – Videos

Video sites like YouTube and Google Video get enormous amounts of traffic (and also rank highly in the search engines).

You can easily create a video by turning your article into a powerpoint presentation and then recording your screen as you talk through the article.

If you don’t have MS Office to create a powerpoint, try a free alternative at OpenOffice.org and if you don’t have Camtasia, grab a free alternative at CamStudio.org

Take your video and submit it to multiple video directories (for free) using the service at TubeMogul.com

Don’t forget to put your keywords in the title and also put the URL of your Squidoo page in the description box.

Step #3 – Submit Your Slide Show

You can take your powerpoint presentation you created and submit it to SlideShare.net

Be sure to include a link to your Squidoo page in the presentation and a call to action at the end to get people to visit.

Step #4 – Audio and Podcasts

You can take the audio from your video recording and upload it to different podcast sites like PodcastDirectory.org, PodcastingNews.com, PodcastAlley.com

Step #5 – Bookmark Your Submissions

As well as bookmarking your articles and Squidoo pages as discussed last time, you should also use SocialMarker.com to bookmark some of your videos, podcasts and powerpoint presentations

Step #6 – RSS Aggregators

Your Squidoo lens also comes with an RSS feed – the format is:

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/your_lens_name_here

For example, if your lens is:

http://www.squidoo.com/olivegardenrecipes

Your RSS Feed is:

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/olivegardenrecipes

You can submit your RSS Feed to places like:

Feedagg.com
Feedage.com
FeedsFarm.com
Feeds4All.com
Feed-Directory.com

Submitting your feed can get you more backlinks and help your pages rank higher in the search engines, as well as getting indexed faster.

The important thing to remember is that all of this content should be based around your chosen keywords for your niche affiliate product.

All of the above steps can be done with little work, and all from one “base” article.

If you research your niche keywords correctly, and use them in all of your content pieces, then very soon you will start to see traffic and sales at your site.

Quick Affiliate Marketing Tips That Won’t Cost You a Penny

Quick Affiliate Marketing Tips

I get a lot of questions from readers, and the most common one is from people who want to make money online as quickly as possible …. preferably yesterday!

The truth is, if you want to build a business online, that is going to take time.

BUT …

It *is* also possible to find some ways to create some quick cash through affiliate marketing.

With this post I’m going to give you a plan that ANYONE should be able to follow, time and time again, to generate some affiliate commissions, without spending a single penny.

Step #1 – Choose Your Product To Promote

The easiest way to do this is to go to Clickbank.com and sign up for a free account.

Look in the “Marketplace” for different products. It’s divided into 9 categories and 94 sub-categories.

Go through and pick out a product that you want to promote.

(HINT: I usually find the further you dig down into the categories, the less competition there is to promote it online!)

Example: It’s now coming close to the holiday season so people are going to be cooking/baking a lot. I found a “Cooking And Recipes” category in the “Home And Family” section of the marketplace. There are several products here to promote.

I look at the $/sale and %/sale amounts to decide which one to choose. (The higher the values, the better)

I find one product on “restaurant recipes” that is #1 in that category, with a reasonable $/sale amount of $20.

Step #2 – Find Some Good Keywords To Target

We’re going to create some content to submit online as a way to drive free traffic to our affiliate link. But to do so, we want to focus on keyword search phrases that will be easy to rank for in the search engines.

To do this, I use a free keyword tool which you can get at the link below:

http://www.trafficuncut.com/keywordtool.exe

1) I input the main keyword “recipes” and hit “Gather Keyword”. This gives me a list of related keywords and the number of daily searches for that term.

2) Clicking the “Gather Data” button returns the number of competing pages in Google, Yahoo and MSN for each of the keywords.

3) My goal is to pick out keywords that have high search volume (minimum of 20 daily searches) and low competition (less than 20,000 competing pages is good as a rough guide)

I find one keyword “Olive Garden Recipe” that looks good with 2,000+ daily searches and only 16,000 competing pages

TIP: If you find a good keyword, try making that your new MAIN keyword and performing the search again …

This gives many more related phrases with even less competition e.g.:

Olive Garden Soup Recipe
Olive Garden Salad Recipe
Olive Garden Bruschetta Recipe

Step #3 – Create The Content

Now you need to create an article or review based around your chosen keyword(s)

Your article should have the keyword in the title, in the first and last sentences, and at least once in every paragraph.

If you sign up to the affiliate program for the chosen product, they will usually have sample articles you can use for ideas.

If you’re really stuck for ideas, you can even go to sites like EzineArticles.com, type in your keyword and see what other people have already written about.

Once you have created your article, use it to create a “lens” (i.e. webpage) at Squidoo.com

At the end of your article on the Squidoo page, place your affiliate link to the product you are promoting.

Step #4 – Submit The Content Everywhere!

Take your article and also submit it to sites like:

EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
Buzzle.com
iSnare.com
HubPages.com
Weebly.com
USFreeAds.com
WetPaint.com
Blogger.com
Wordpress.com

At the end of each article, make sure to place a link back to your original Squidoo article/review page.

This is so that when people read your article they will click through to your Squidoo page and then through to your affiliate link.

Step #5 – Bookmark Your Content

Social Bookmarking is a great way to get your content indexed by the search engines quickly and can help it rank higher – therefore giving you more chance of people seeing it.

The site I recommend using is:

SocialMarker.com

Use this site to bookmark your Squidoo page and one or two of the other pages where you submitted your content.

The combination of submitting content, plus bookmarking it can bring you a lot of free traffic – particularly if you picked the low competition keywords.

Once you start getting traffic to your affiliate link, the sales should follow soon!

Step #6 – Rinse And Repeat!

Once you’ve finished with your first keyword, take a new one and create some new content based around that and repeat the process over again!

You can do this for as many products, in as many markets as you like.

So What Are You Waiting For?

This is possibly one of the quickest, easiest and definitely cheapest ways of making money online.

It does take some investment in time and energy to create the articles and submit them, but there is NO such thing as “free money” online.

Anything you do will require an investment of either time or money.

The good thing about this is that once you start seeing results and generating income, you can re-invest your profits (getting content created and submitted for you etc…) so that you spend less of your own time doing it.

So there you have it – a step-by-step plan for quick affiliate marketing.

All you need to do now is take action!

Build Your Sales Argument in a Simple, Straight Line

Once you have captured a reader’s attention with your headline, don’t assume that you will keep that attention after the first line, second line or third line. Most readers won’t read your entire web page. Most will bail well before the end. How come? Because something you write will make them feel that you are not taking them directly towards finding what they want.

Here are 3 ways to ensure that you keep moving forward in a straight line…

Follow these three guidelines and you will significantly increase the number of people who read all the copy on your page and, of course, you will increase the number of people who take action at the end of that page.

1. Be clear about your page’s objective.

Before you start writing, determine the objective of the page. What is its purpose?

And if you’re thinking, “Well, there are a few things I want to achieve with this page,” be very careful. Because by writing to a few different objectives, you are giving your readers a few different reasons to bail on you. You’ll achieve far higher conversion rates by sticking to a single topic or message per page. In fact, that’s why landing pages were invented. Marketers understood that their general web pages were not converting very well. So they started creating stand-alone pages, or landing pages, which were created with a single objective in mind. The need for landing pages tells us we are not very good at creating and writing regular site pages that are focused on a single, clear objective.

2. Let your readers see the final outcome, from the beginning.

In other words, let your readers see where they are going. For instance, if you want to sell me a vacation in Greenland, let me see the road ahead. A typical way of doing this would be to write a headline that says something like, “5 reasons why Greenland has become the #1 travel destination for adventure lovers.”

When you write a headline like that, the reader knows where you’re taking them, and they know you are trying to sell them a vacation. They even know there are exactly five steps between the beginning and end.

But if the headline were to say, “Greenland grabs hearts of outdoor adventurers,” then I don’t really know where you’re taking me. Is this a general description of the country? Is this about travel, or about conservation? Are you trying to inform me? Or sell a vacation package?

When you make the purpose and objective of the page clear from the beginning, the reader doesn’t have to be distracted by these questions.

3. Write in a straight line, without detours.

When writing editorial there are some excellent reasons for taking the scenic route. You can add character and depth to a story with a paragraph that begins with the words, “Which reminds me…” Or, “By the way…” These scenic diversions make editorial content all the more interesting.

But when you are writing to sell, you would do better to take the direct route. When people come to the web to make a purchase, they are task oriented, impatient and anxious to find what they want and get the task completed quickly.
This means readers want their sales information given to them straight. No meandering. No side trips. Get to the meat of the message quickly, and tell them why your product and service will deliver exactly what they want and are looking for.

Conclusion…

The reason behind the need to build your sales argument in a straight line can be found in that last section. Compared to print or other offline media, users of the web are impatient and generally have a specific goal in mind before they even arrive at your page. If they want to buy something, then they want to find what they want quickly. No side shows. No diversions. Keep your sales pages direct, straight and uncomplicated.

Can You Really Make Money In Less Than 24 Hours Starting From Scratch?

If you’ve tried making money online before, you probably know that it’s often difficult to get started.

Most people think you need a lot of experience in building fancy websites and generating tons of traffic to make any real sales.

The other day I stumbled across a site that actually shows you (step-by-step) how to get a complete money making website up and running in less than 2 hours … guaranteed.

It also shows you the secrets to getting the top spots on Google in as little as 24 hours!

Here’s some of what you’ll discover when you
watch these videos:

- The no cost methods to automatically getting 100 or more visitors per day within 24 hours of building your site

- How to find a HOT niche in less than a minute.

- Where to instantly get free content.

- How to constantly have your site updated automatically.

- The fastest methods for making the most money with your site.

Here’s what just some people had to say about the videos after watching them:

“A “must see” for anybody who wants to start making money on the Net fast.”

“Some of the best beginner techniques and tips I’ve ever seen.”

“…it is wonderful to see exactly how to do these things when you are someone like me who does not have a background in building websites.”

Over 4,500 people have already watched these videos and saw a site being built from scratch (it’s surprisingly easy when you watch these) and actually make money in less than 24 hours.

The whole process is covered from start to finish in step-by-step videos that are easy enough for anyone to follow.

If you’re interested in making some money online you can check them out here:

http://makemoneyin24hours.net

All the best,

Ken

P.S. I’m not sure how long the videos will be available for, so you should visit asap

http://makemoneyin24hours.net

Turning Visitors Into Leads & Sales

So people are visiting your website, but no one is calling you on the phone and no one is buying anything. Guess what? That’s the case for more than 90% of website owners.

What are you doing wrong? You are probably giving them too much information, not enough information and not actually asking them to do anything. Expert marketers have been testing for years and we know what sells, and what generates leads and builds email lists.

If you are selling a product, you should be landing visitors on a page with a long sales letter. The kind that goes on and on with the sales pitch and sticks a bunch of testimonials and “bonus” offers in there too. I know, you’re probably saying, “I hate pages like that,” but they are proven to make more sales than any other type of website.

If you run a service business, or for some other reason can not sell your product directly on line, you need to generate leads. To accomplish this, you want your visitor to land on a “squeeze page” where they have only two options – Give you their name, email and maybe telephone number, or leave. You should not have any navigation on the page, no where else for them to go. You can send them to your home page after they give you their info if you want. It may seem like you are losing some prospects, but you really aren’t; they were never going to call you anyway, and neither were most of those who did give you a way to contact them. Those who leave contact info EXPECT to hear from you, so you won’t face a lot of objections and your close rate should be very high.

Another benefit of the squeeze page is building a list of people you can send newsletters and special offers to. One of the best known Internet Marketers in the world told me that you should expect to make $1/month for each and every name on your list. I was shocked until I went home and did the math. You see, I had never really done any “list building” up to that point. I had about 600 names on my newsletter list and usually didn’t sell anything in it. But I had sold a few Affiliate products over the years and sure enough it averaged out to $0.78 per name without really trying. I am about to send out an offer to my list (and I am starting to work at growing it – he has over 200,000) that will net me over $13 per sale – but it is a recurring monthly commission, so I should do much, much better. If I sell to 6% of my list, I will make $0.80 that first month, but I will continue to collect the same amount as long as they maintain their subscription. This is not very difficult once you have a list, but you need to build that list. The quickest way to build a list is to give away a free download of some sort and run Google AdWords (learn more about Google AdWords here)ads to drive traffic to the squeeze page where you are giving it away.

So, how are you going to build these “squeeze pages?” I strongly recommend using MarketingMakeoverGenerator.Com, which I use personally to save time. they offer a $1 trial – can you guess why it costs a $1 and is not free?

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