July 27th, 2009 by admin
One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of online marketing is that it’s not complicated. Or more to the point,, there are a lot of “experts” who try to make it complicated. Aside from whatever motivation they might have to do that online profits happen as the result of one simple equation –
Traffic + Conversion = Sales
– performed over & over again
There are MANY ways to get traffic (visitors) to your site and cause them to take some action or “convert,” which will either result in more leads or (less frequently) result directly in more sales to your business.
So here’s the other simple rule — you only need to master 1 or 2 traffic methods and 1 or 2 conversion methods, and you will make money. When you drive you only need to know two pedals, and you don’t need to know EVERYTHING about internet marketing in order to add revenue to your business.
With that in mind, there are a few basic traffic techniques I’ve implemented in some of my sites and client sites that have universally and consistently WORKED. Here are a few of those methods — but remember, you only need to pick one or two:
Increasing Visitor Count
1) Twitter — highly effective for targeting your niche and developing the conversation with your customers and prospects. In fact, it is second to none. However, most businesses don’t know how to use Twitter effectively. They spam with “sales tweets” — “Look at the cool new thing I’m selling.” The 80/20 rule is highly effective — 80% of your tweets should be about something interesting, funny or otherwise engaging… a question of the day like “What’s for lunch?”… anything to get people talking, laughing, thinking… Also, keep it consistent and be generous with re-tweets. A few tweets a day go a long way toward establishing a rabid list of followers. The wrong thing to do is to Tweet like a madman for a day or two and then disappear for a month. Or worse, don’t reply when someone direct messages you or @messages you. That’s like ignoring someone at a dinner party when they ask you to pass the gravy. You WON’T get any dessert.
2) Video marketing — one of the fastest ways to rank your site and get lots of inbound traffic. Keep your videos consistent — don’t show up one day in a baseball cap and dark lighting, talking about the rain, and another day bouncing in a jungle gym screaming about business leads. Consistent message, consistent tone, consistent look & feel. Also, be sure to put a call to action in your video’s description, as well as the full URL of your website’s landing page, and use appropriate keywords.
3) Article marketing is an evergreen method for outstanding traffic generation, with one HUGE caveat — mix it up! Putting the same article on 400 article directories will get you nowhere fast. You will get a bump in traffic from all the inbound links until Google figures out they’re all the same article and basically count it as one link. There are content spinners out there that alter the content of your articles automatically, but you have to be very careful here as well. Most content spinners change a word or two to replace it with a synonym, or they mash up the article randomly so the output is basically junk that cannot be read. It has to pass human review. So if you’re looking for a quality content spinner, ideally you want to be able to change the entire sentence many times throughout the article, and then have it spin those into hundreds of different articles. That’s the professional way to do it. At the bottom of your article, have a call to action in the information field; a blurb about you (the author) and a link to a free guide the reader can pick up at your website.
Visitors Taking Action
1) Keep it simple. The landing page has to do ONE thing — get people to ACT. For this reason, it’s been called a SINGLE ACTION PAGE. Pear it down to the bare essence of what you need the visitor to do. Consider placing a video on the page with a very simple message, “Hey thanks for stopping by for my free whizbang. Just type in your first name and e-mail address and I will rush it right over to you. In just a moment after you send your information, you’ll get an e-mail with a confirmation link. Click that link and I will instantly send your free whizbang.”
2) Direct, direct, direct. Notice the video script in #1 above — see how we instructed the user on exactly what they need to do? And then we told them what to expect next, and what they would then need to do. And we closed with a reminder of the benefit — the free whizbang.
If you have trademarked the term “whizbang,” then I apologize in advance. 
3) Test, test, test. ALWAYS have two versions of your landing page operating at one time. You can optimize your landing page using freely available Google tools in the Web Optimizer toolbox. You really can’t go on “gut” here — the data will be you every single time. Even on PPC ads, we have literally seen the addition of a question mark in the ad increase conversion by 16.8% So test, test, test.
Conclusion
These methods work on any business in any industry. Here is some social proof –
Local landscape designer increased her traffic by 7,342% (yes seven thousand percent)
- Local artist went from three visitors a day to an average of 41 visitors a day
- International digital publisher had zero e-commerce and started converting 16% of all traffic to revenue within 72 hours of implementing one traffic strategy and one conversion strategy
- Changing a landing page to a simple design on an e-book site turned conversion from an anemic two sales per week to eight sales a day — on the same traffic.
I hope this helps your business. The average business fails to do what it takes to drive traffic or achieve conversions to their website. While they exercise 20-30 traffic methods on average, they don’t do a single one effectively. There are many sources online to learn about effective marketing strategies, including free resources and some almost-free, like the definitive guidebook 750 Traffic Generation Methods.
Do-it-for-you solutions are also available; experience guides the appropriate strategy for the website and market. The biggest challenge business owners face is knowing which strategy to implement. Experimentation can be very costly in terms of time and lost sales… The key is to find a reputable marketing firm that offers a full range of customized services as well as downloadable products and courses to assist every website owner at every budget level.
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July 27th, 2009 by admin
Did you know that cash flow challenges are the main reason most companies go out of business?
If you are seriously interested in making your business a success, then managing your money effectively is critical to the security of your organisation.Irrespective of whether you run a small home based business, or are responsible for a nationwide business, such as a client of mine Softcat who provide Microsoft licensing solutions, the same financial rules apply and keeping a very careful reign on business expenses to maintain a healthy positive cash flow is essential to the success of any business.
When starting a new enterprise it might seem impossible to put together a budget without any financial history on which to base income and expenses. However a business plan, before you even start, with some idea of costs and revenues is essential to determining the viability of a business, even if you are just planning to setup a work at home business. It might seem like guesswork at the beginning, but a tentative budget can be established with some thought and projections of future business. From some past experience in renovating properties, I always say ‘think of a figure and double it’ and then you will be near the mark. I think this is true for other businesses, because it’s human nature to underestimate what we need to spend and over estimate what we will earn.
Like most businesses usually have, my web design Nottingham business has two main categories, income and expense.
Under the expense category there can be several sub-categories often falling into two main areas of controllable expenses and uncontrollable. While many business owners believe they can control every expense involved in their business, this is not always the case. Some things such as services costs, the amount of rent and other supposed fixed costs can, and do change, with the owner having no control. For example the recent increase in oil prices are an example of this and have been responsible for a number of small airline and transportation companies going out of business as their fuel costs skyrocketed.
Other expenses such as payroll, transportation and advertising can be subject to a budget, but they are considered controllable expenses. If the business begins to fall off, you can control some of these expenses by laying-off employees and cutting back on advertising. However, living by a budget may help maintain profitability but could also turn against you in the long run.
Depending on the viability of your company it may be a better investment to bite the financial bullet on employee wages and still provide good customer service to the remaining customers until business picks up again. If no one takes care of the customers, it will not be long until there are no more customers to care for.
There are 2 ways to budget your business finance and these are through set dollar amounts or as a percentage of income. Many businesses will budget their controllable expenses by the dollar and non-controllable by percentage of income. Obviously a good part of the owner’s time is going to be based on bringing money into the business and how much they have to spend on controllable expenses will be in direct relation to income. With any increase in business the owner will probably need the extra help to take care of the business so a percentage of income will go to more wages, thus freeing the owner to focus on generating additional income.
There are many other expenses that fall into the payroll account such as worker’s compensation charges, Social Security tax paid by the company and paid vacation time or other perks determined by the employer. These need to be calculated into costs when recruiting new employees into the business.
While you may think a budget is hard to establish for a new business, it is essential to establish a healthy and sound financial footing on which success can be built for the coming years.
About the Author: Roger Davies, is web design team-leader for Advanta Productions. Advanta was formed in 2004 to provide highly affordable, highly skilled website development and e-commerce web design services to businesses in the Midlands areas. Roger’s team work on website development and e-commerce web design projects for successful businesses advertising and selling via their websites. All enquiries to 0845 22 55 805 or at the Advanta website.
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July 27th, 2009 by admin
In late April the Associated Press reported the discovery of a diary written by a woman, Johanna Fantova, who was a close friend of Albert Einstein. “The 62-page diary, written in German, was discovered in February in Fantova’s files at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, where she had worked as a curator,” the AP story noted. One fascinating revelation of the diary is that Einstein received a parrot as a 75th-birthday gift. According to the AP, “After deciding the bird was depressed, Einstein tried to alter its mood by telling bad jokes.”
Parrots can live for a century. In early May I may (or may not) have encountered a parrot that may (or may not) have been the bird entertained by Einstein. Speaking in German-accented English, the parrot recited a monologue.
That’s someting else than famous Einstein The Parrot, right? This african grey parrot seems to be smarter than Albert Einstein himself.
The African grey parrot has got to be one of the most charming parrots. The African grey parrot has a wonderful character, a combination of intelligence and charm. African grey parrots have been kept as pets for over 4000 years. The Egyptians are thought to be the first to keep the African grey parrot as pets, as depicted in their hieroglyphics. The Greeks also highly valued the African grey parrot as pets, as did the Romans who kept these intelligent birds in highly ornate cages. The tradition of keeping the African grey parrot continued with King Henry VIII keeping one as a pet. Today, the African grey parrot is still kept as a prized pet.
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July 27th, 2009 by admin
Cooking has grow to be a assignment for many women in today’s high pace civilization. For many families where both the husband and wife must work in order to meet the financial obligations, the scarcity of time has caused food preparation duties to become a problem. But as is widely accepted in all that we do in life, access to the suitable tools can make even a complex job easy and the usage of a pressure cooker may perhaps simply be the apparatus that each contemporary domestic kitchen needs. In this concise piece of writing, we will discover the benefits that pressure cookers offer and when you read, you could very well be provoked in utilizing them in your own kitchen.
Because increasing the pressure will cause liquids to cook at higher temperatures, a steel cooker allows for water, which is the basic liquid used in cooking, to boil at a certain temperature that is higher than the usual boiling point of two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. From a realistic point of view, this means that your cooking time to roast the same food will be a good deal lower. This is a vast benefit in our time strapped society. Anything that will decrease on the time to cook meals is highly appreciated and these gadgets present this feature.
One more benefit of using pressure cookers is that because food cook quicker, less energy is consumed in the procedure and with the rising costs of energy, this is an additional gain. With using a lesser amount of energy, you will be doing your part in protection and green living. A third advantage is that there is no possibility of burning the foodstuff. Many meals get overcooked during grilling or shallow or deep boiling. This issue is avoided when preparing food with a rice cooker. You also dodge all of the cholesterol dangers and other bad fat from cooking oils when you cook meat and other provisions.
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July 27th, 2009 by admin
When choosing a body shop, it is important to evaluate whether or not the shop is large or small. In many instances, larger shops may overlook certain details during collision repair, while smaller shops like City Body Shop in Rockford, IL ensure that the collision repair is completed to the manufacturer specifications.
When having your vehicle repaired, you must be extra careful to ensure that the body shop will be restoring it to factory specifications. If it is not, then you could run into other automobile problems in the future. Smaller body shops like City Body Shop spend extra time with each vehicle so that the customer does not have to worry.
Collision repair centers must have the latest equipment in order to repair newer vehicles to factory specification. City Body Shop has all of the latest equipment for collision repair in Rockford and they continue to make major investments to stay as up to date as possible. Not all collision repair centers have quaity standards similar to City Body Shop. When evaluating whether or not to use a particular body shop, you should feel encouraged to ask about the training of their repair specialists and painters. At City Body Shop, the collision repair specialists attend ongoing training classes to ensure that they are up to date with the newest vehicles and their specifications. Additionally, the painter at City Body Shop in Rockford, IL has over 21 years of experience in the collision repair industry. Feel free to visit their site at http://www.CollisionandTowing.com.
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