If you want to have the most successful Internet business possible you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. What I mean by this is you don’t want to rely solely on organic traffic; you don’t want to rely solely on paid traffic and so on.
You definitely want to develop your website to eventually achieve top organic search rankings but you don’t want to rely on it. The reason for this is because you are at the mercy of the search engines algorithm. While it is definitely possible to achieve top organic search results and maintain it, you are limiting your website it several ways. Top organic search results is definitely not something that will happen over night or even over a few months. While you build your website and let it age you need another form of traffic to generate sales. The best way to achieve this is to use pay per click advertising with the keywords you want your website to come up for organically. You will obviously have to find a method that works the best to make this method profitable. The good thing about this is once you find a method to turn a profit it’s endless from there. When your website slides into the first page organic position you will have a conversion rate that you may have never achieved if you only went the organic route. You will also not receive the customers who are only clicking on the sponsored search results. This means that your competitors are capturing customers that you never even had a chance to.
So keep an eye on your search engine rankings and keep up with the changing ranking strategies. Always keep organic search rankings as icing on the cake and go out and get traffic with pay per click.
Many times some of the smallest changes can increase your conversion rates dramatically. So, let’s start by thinking simple, like what is your traffic doing when they come to your website? What do they do when they first land on your website until their order is complete or isn’t complete? It’s these very simple, but crucial steps that may lead to a dramatic increase in your conversion rate.
The first thing you need to do, if you aren’t already, is track your visitors every move. You need to know how many visitors are creating an account, how long they are staying on what pages, how many are adding products to the shopping cart, how many are getting a shipping estimate, how many are entering their payment information and how many are actually placing an order.
By analyzing how many visitors are doing each on of these things you will be able to get an idea of where the biggest percentage of your visitors are dropping off. It’s a good idea to start here first because it will normally have the biggest impact on an increased conversion rate. So for instance let’s say that your biggest drop off point is when your customers get a shipping estimate. This is normally a sign that your shipping is more than your average customer would like to pay. While you may not be able to get a better shipping rate right away you can do things that give your customers a better price. For instance, it may be worth it to give your customers a discount on shipping and pay more than they are. The reason for this is the fact that it should increase your volume if this is the reason your customers are dropping off. After doing this you may receive enough volume in orders to equal out your profit or even increase it. You may even be able to get a better shipping rate due to the volume of orders you will now be doing. You also need to look at the fact that a good portion of those customers will become repeat customers. This will obviously out weigh the initial loss you had on shipping.
All in all, no matter what part of your website has the biggest drop off rate, you always want to start there first. It will most likely have the biggest impact on your conversion rate due the fact that the majority of your visitors are dropping off there. So before you spend hundreds to thousands of dollars in advertising make sure you’re getting a phenomenal conversion rate.
A lot of people overlook just how important it is for a website to have good usability. A website can look amazing but if your visitors can’t easily shop and purchase you are loosing thousands of dollars. If a customer can’t easily find what they want to purchase it they will most likely leave your website and go to one of your competitors. It’s a very simple concept, the easier you make it for your visitors, the easier they will make it on you.
In order to effectively test the usability of your website you need to get together a group of people who have little to no knowledge about what you sell. Give them a list of products or product types to find, and then watch them to see just how easy it is for them to navigate around your website and find the products or product types. This will give you an idea of what your customers are doing and things you might need to change to give your website a better usability. It’s a good idea to change one thing at a time if possible and then see what your conversion rate is. This way you will know if that change is helping or if it’s hurting your business.
There are certain things that you need to look out for when you’re watching your testers. If your testers hit the back button in their browser this means that they didn’t find what they were looking for. This means that particular link or description they just read was misleading and needs to be looked over.
Reading something over again is also a sign of a problem. This means that what they were looking at was confusing and should be looked over. The navigation of your site should be simple but just enough information to tell them where that link will take them.
When your testers hesitate this is also normally also a problem. If a website has good usability the user shouldn’t have to think too hard. There movement should be smooth and fairly quick unless they’re reading a product description.
There are many different ways to test the usability of your website. This is one way that we have found to be one of the most effective and it should do the same for your website. Remember if you don’t give your customer what they want your competitor will. So make sure your website has the best usability possible.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are now supporting a Canonical URL tag to help manage duplicate content issues. Duplicate content can occur when a product is listed under multiple categories, each with its own URL. Another instance could be when a search engine crawls a printer friendly version of a page.
There are several issues that exist with duplicate content. When multiple copies of a page exist search engines want to choose one version to show and filter out the rest. This could end up with the search engine showing your printer friendly page and almost completely defeating the purpose of your organic results. Your PageRank may also suffer in this case due to the fact that it’s being spread across pages you don’t want ranked well.
Before Canonical URL tags the best way to let search engines know which pages to crawl was to add rel=”nofollow” to the links you didn’t wanted crawled. Now you can use rel=”canonical” to let search engines know which page is the original version. This may not work correctly every time because search engines aren’t perfect, but it will surely help you achieve better results.
There are many advantages to using pay per click marketing even when you’re ranked high in search engines organically. One of the biggest advantages it can have is pushing your competitor’s ads down. This will allow you to receive more clicks and obviously give them less. A lot of consumers will never click the ads toward the bottom and they will never have a chance to even find out about some of your competitors.
Pay per click ads can also be changed as often as you would like. This allows you show consumers when you’re having a sale or when you’re running a special promotion. It also allows you to give consumers an ad that will receive a better click through rate. This is something you can not do with organic search pages without hurting your SEO. In other words it can become a much better selling technique.
Another thing to take into perspective is the fact that some will only click on the paid ads that are above the organic search results. So while you may be ranked number one organically for the searched keyword or term you’re targeting, you may not receive clicks that you would receive if you used pay per click.
Imagine watching a video online or watching a TV show where you can buy what you see. Video e-commerce is in its beta stage but the potential of it is amazing. Say you’re watching tiger woods play golf and you like the hat he’s wearing. You will be able to purchase that hat while still watching tiger play golf. You can “click” on his hat and it will bring up a list of companies that sell that hat, their price, shipping, etc. and then you can make a purchase. This is truly going to change the world of commerce in a positive way.
Knowing how your email marketing reputation stands is a very crucial component to make sure all of your subscribers are receiving your newsletter. There are several elements that are assessed to decide your email marketing reputation score.
One of those elements is your email volume. You want to make sure you keep your email volume at an acceptable rate. Sending emails out several times a week could be pushing the limits. You also need to try and keep the amount of emails you send as consistent as possible. If you have a sudden increase in the amount of emails you send in a short period of time this can be seen as spam.
Your email delivery rate is also very important. If a lot of your emails sent out aren’t being delivered this may be seen as an out of date list or a rented list. This can definitely be seen as spam so it’s important that you keep your email list as updated as possible.
Spam reports are probably one of the biggest factors in your email marketing reputation. If you have a lot of people report you as spam to their email providers or their ISP’s this is more of hard evidence than anything. However, they will cut you some slack and take into perspective the size of your list and the fact that you’ll always have people who report emails as spam whether they are or not.
Some good websites to check your email marketing reputation are Sendmail.com, SenderBase.org and SenderScore.org. These should help you get a better idea of where you email reputation stands.
There are many strategies that you can to use to build a successful E-Commerce website, but the key is target a specific niche and focus on one thing at a time. If you try to do too many things too fast you will become the master of none.
If you really want to get the full potential out of your website before you start anything you want to make sure you have a decent grasp on how search engine optimization works. This is something that your website won’t benefit from right away but over time. It’s important to understand how it works before you build your website otherwise you’re better off starting a completely new website. You don’t want to spend too much time in this area because if you do you’ll never get started. SEO is something that doesn’t happen overnight but more like a year or two down the road depending on how crowded your niche market is. The reason it takes so long is because a website needs to be indexed in search engines, it needs to age, a good amount of content (you must add some kind of website content everyday), relevant back links. Once you have a system going to keep your website updated daily it’s time to look for other forms of traffic.
There are several other ways to bring traffic to your website but best the instant way is pay per click. Pay per click marketing will allow you to bring the most targeted instant traffic you can get next to organic search results (the natural listings). Let’s say you are selling Sony TV’s you can advertise your website for the search term Sony TV’s. This will bring you customers who are looking for Sony TV’s. You could get even more targeted and advertise specific models you are selling. The more targeted you get with pay per click the better conversion rate you’re going to receive.
These strategies are without a doubt the two that every Internet entrepreneur should start out with. You should also start with one marketing strategy, find what works with that strategy, keep it going, then move on to the next to keep your business growing.
Customer loyalty can make all the difference for a business. For instance, Zappos.com did $1 billion in sales in 2008 and 75% of it was from repeat customers. If it weren’t for those repeat customers they would have done $250 million. While this is no way a small amount of revenue it just shows how much of a difference customer loyalty can make.
There are several things you need to find out from your customers to create customer loyalty. The first is to identify what your customers expect and want from you. In order to do this you will need to create an exit survey that gives your customers some type of incentive to fill it out. A good way to go about this is to generate a list of drop down menus with different selections. Each drop down menu asking them what they prefer in that particular section of your website and what they prefer from your business. This will allow you to find out what setup the majority of your customers prefer. The reason you need drop down menus with a list is because you will have too many different answers and it won’t really help you improve your overall experience.
The next thing you want to do is to take each of the things that won majority vote with your customers and start implementing them one at a time. The reason you need to do these one at a time is to see if they are actually working. Chances are if your customers are asking for certain things to improve their experience your future customers want the same. If your conversion rate increases you know that that change to your website is working. Not only is this going to improve customer loyalty but it will improve your conversion rate.
This is just a start to improve customer loyalty but one of the most important steps you can take. Knowing what your customers want and applying it to your business will surely send you on your way to success. Always put your customers first and the business side will follow.
There are several reasons why you need to have audio books for your information products. One major reason is for your traveling business people. We find that a lot of our customers are business people who travel a lot and don’t have time to read, but still want to learn Internet marketing or how to make money online. They spend a lot of time in their car and want to be able to put a CD in or hook up their iPod and just listen. We have also come to find that a lot of people just don’t like to read and would just prefer that someone verbally teach them. The fact is there are many people who prefer audio books and there are many who prefer to read. So if you give your customers both options you end up with more sales and more happy customers.
Audio books done the right way can be expensive but will pay off if you do it right. The first thing you want to do is figure out how well you’re informational product like an eBook, is going to sell. This will be the deciding factor of when it’s time to offer an audio book as an option. Say you have 10 eBooks and 2 of them are making you $100.00 a day (10 sales) while the other 8 are making you $10.00 a week (1 sale). The 2 eBooks with the majority of your sales are the ones you need to create an audio book for first. You have to remember though; just because your other eBooks aren’t doing well doesn’t mean they won’t ever do well. The case is mostly likely that you just need to find the right marketing methods for that particular niche. Once you figure out what works, then it’s time to create an eBook for those also. The reason for this is because audio book recordings done right can be expensive. You want to make sure you’re not going to invest hundreds to thousands into something that’s going to remain tied up for a long time. While you can have an audio book created for an inexpensive price there’s a big possibility it will sacrifice the quality and message of your product. If you don’t have an audio book that’s clear, steady volume, read correctly and enthusiastic, you are might as well wait until you can do it right. It’s always better to do something right in the first place even if it means you have to wait longer. You will achieve better success in the long run and you will be able to give your customers exactly what the majority are looking for.
All in all it’s important to have an audio book for an informational product you sell, but only if it’s done right. Just because you have an audio book doesn’t mean it will improve your business. It’s an audio book that’s done right that will improve your business. It will receive positive reviews, people will tell their friends about you and your customers will come back to purchase more products from you because the first was so good.