Online advertising Traffic, Business promotion and the First Law of Web Surfing

How do you convert online advertising traffic into customers? The key is a phenomenon of human behavior that only comes into play on the web.

You won’t read about this phenomenon in books or articles on general principles of advertising or direct marketing. In fact, traditional advertising professionals and direct marketers often create only so-so online advertising campaigns simply because they’ve never heard of this phenomenon, even though it’s essentially the first law of human web surfing behavior.

How to convert your online advertising traffic into customers

Ready to find out what that all-important first law of web surfing is? Prepare to be not very amazed. You see, everyone who surfs the web already knows about this phenomenon of human behavior because we all do it–even you.

So here it is, the first law of human web surfing behavior, which you absolutely must take into account when marketing your website: While surfing the web, almost everyone will hit the “back” button if they think there’s a chance–even a small chance– they’ve come to the wrong web page.

The corollary to this law of web surfing behavior: Anyone who clicks through to your site via an online advertising link needs to know they’ve arrived at the right place as soon as they get there.
Immediately. Within a second. From a click glance. Without having to read anything. The average human attention span on the web has been measured at eight seconds, and you’ll have already lost a few seconds while the page downloaded.

The Key(word) to Converting Advertisement-Clickers into Customers

How do you make absolutely sure visitors feel like they’ve arrived in the right place?
Make the title and first heading of your landing page (the page on which a visitor “lands” after clicking on an advertisement) the same as the headline of the advertisement that brought your visitor there. If the landing page links to a banner (image) advertisement, use the same pictures and color scheme as the advertisement.

The landing page absolutely must immediately remind the visitor of the advertisement.

The advertisements, in turn, must flow logically from the keywords they are targeting. Even if your advertisements are appearing on websites rather than search engine results, you need to be thinking in terms of the keywords people are using to search for your product in order to speak the language of your prospective customers.

That’s why it is very important both your advertisement and landing page incorporate the target keyword prominently, in headings as well as the page body. That’s also why it’s so important you don’t send your visitors from online advertising to your homepage–it’s unlikely you could optimize your homepage for all your possible advertisements. Visitors who arrive via advertising need to land on a special “landing page,” or they may crash and leave your site.

Conversions: your advertising campaign’s goal

But what happens once visitors land on your site and decide to stay more than ten seconds? It’s no use if they just hang around. They need to convert.

Please generate and paste your AdSense code here. If left empty, the default referral ads will be shown on your blog.

Important definition: In online advertising parlance, saying a website visitor “converts,” means he or she has taken a desired action toward becoming a customer, either 1) buying something or 2) contacting you for more information, thereby becoming a lead.

The percentage of visitors who convert out of the total number of visitors who arrive at your page is the conversion rate. Your goal is to get this rate as high possible. You do that by finding the right message to display on your landing page, and also by targeting the advertising so you are getting visitors who are most likely to convert.

In order to get your visitors to convert once they arrive, you need to make sure they have a clear path to conversion from the landing page. The simpler the path, the better–a winding road might lose some potential customers. This conversion path could be as simple as a “buy now” button or a contact form, or as complex as a multi-step shopping cart with required registration with required email confirmation to scare away those who are not truly devoted buyers.

Targeting your traffic

What you show visitors who arrive at your site is only half the equation. The visitors themselves are the other. As with everything in life, you can’t convert a sow’s ear into a silk purse. In this case, the sow’s ear is paid traffic that is not targeted, or is coming from popunders or other forced viewing, or is just plain faked (there is software specifically designed to emulate human visitors so fraudsters can sell the “traffic”).

Even in the best of cases, some traffic converts better than others. Generally speaking, visitors who are looking for you are the likeliest to convert, so conversion rates tend to be highest from advertising on search engines. Conversion rates tend to be lower from advertising on websites (so-called “content” or “contextual” advertising).

Conversion rates are lower still on advertising on website popups, and lowest of all on so-called adware (programs that display popups on a user’s computer; the people who sell this advertising often label it “targeted traffic”). Sending emails that consist of nothing but your advertisement, even if you’ve skirted the legal definition of spam, is not worth the bad will and damage to your brand.

Preaching to non-converting online advertising traffic
A significant percentage of visitors, maybe a majority, will never just click “buy now.” How do you reach them?
Many people simply will never make a purchase without speaking to a salesperson first. For them, provide a convenient contact form, as well as a live chat option–if you can afford the time and expense–your email, and a telephone number. A telephone number is especially important since there are some visitors who will never convert without hearing the voice of someone on your end.

For visitors who are not ready to convert immediately, you should have informational articles, “about us” pages or FAQs ready to help them make up their minds.

For visitors who simply will not be ready to convert today, give a reason to bookmark your page. Good articles. A special offer. A newsletter to sign up for. Free advice.

Just make sure you don’t place these alternative non-converting options in too prominent a position, or you’ll risk distracting prospective customers. A few paragraphs up from the very bottom of the page is a good place to catch people who are interested in you enough to read the entire page, but still haven’t converted. The very bottom of the page should be reserved for a conversion option for all the prospective customers accustomed to scrolling to the bottom of the page to get a quick overview.

Top Internet Marketing Services

Unfortunately, good internet marketing agencies are rather rare. Many internet marketing services are just scams pure and simple. Many of these internet marketing services make promises they cannot and will not deliver on. Many people have lost a ton of money on these internet marketing services. Some of these internet marketing services include things like “We will send 1 million targeted hits to your website for $2999.95″. Many of these internet marketing services make fraudulent claims. Dishonest internet marketing companies take advantage of people who are attempting to make a living online and who are not fully educated on internet marketing principles. They are completely aware that they cannot provide the results they have promised. The concept we are trying to convey, is to be careful when choosing an internet marketing agency.

As a business who is doing online business, you need to be cognizant of these types of internet service organizations. You have to be careful that you don’t squander your online budget. To be able to discern the legitimate from the fraudulent you need to educate yourself on internet marketing concepts and principles.

The fraudulent internet marketing providers like you be be uninformed so they can deceive you more easily. Why do they do this? They engage in this behavior so that they can over charge you and charge you for unneeded services. The people running these internet marketing services are some of the lowest and unethical people I have ever come across. Most significantly, the internet was originally supposed to be a place of education, these fraudulent internet marketing companies have deceived people to make some fast money. Of course there are some legitimate internet marketing services, but they often need to overcome the bad publicity created by their fraudulent counterparts. This makes life much more difficult for the reputable internet marketing providers.

We are making the assumption that you are a merchant who is searching for an internet marketing company to assist you with the marketing of a service or product. Or maybe you are a home business owner trying to build a home business.

As a business owner or home business owner you must make it a point to become informed on Internet marketing. If you don’t educate yourself, you will likely fall victim to deceptive practices. As an example, we will examine the internet marketing providers who say they will provide you with two million unique visitors to your site. First off that is not even realistic but let’s not even get into that. We should examine the source of this traffic. Is this traffic going to consist of two million unique visitors? Meaning 1 million individual people or IP addresses will visit your website. Now that is completely bogus, but let’s go through it. As a business owner, you must be able to confirm where the hits are coming from so you can determine if it is targeted traffic. But how will you be able to ascertain the quality of the visitors. You will not be able to, however, you can see how long the visitors stay on your site on average, if this amount of time is very short, the traffic is very poor quality. There goes $300 to$ 2,000 dollars down the drain right there. The crucial point to remember when searching for internet marketing providers is for you to become an educated consumer, so you can discern the legitimate from the illegitimate.

source: http://articleleader.info/

TOP TIPS ON BECOMING A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

Building a business on any type of social media service takes a light touch and an experienced mindset. Unfortunately not everyone can boast having both of these attributes. If a small time businessman includes himself/herself in the equation than that usually turns out to be a recipe for disaster. No one can think of managing a social media business presence without the aid of relevant management skills. You can opt to hire a social media manager to do the job for you which helps lesson the learning curve and saves you tons of hours.

One thing you must understand is that hiring a social media manager is not the be all and end all of online business management. You can’t just pay one off, sit back and dream of the oodles of cash just waiting to be tipped into your bank account. Before even thinking of hiring one, it’s always best to learn the ropes of social media management yourself. So, how should you go about it?

Get to know the lay of the land

The first thing you must do is to map out the online terrain and get to know the lay of the land. In layman’s terms that means you have to familiarize yourself with the best social networking and bookmarking sites and direct a large portion of your activities there.

Choose your tools wisely

Keep tabs on your most frequently visited sites and choose the most suitable tools to make your social management easier to manage. You can do that by regularly posting your progress online. Take Twitter for instance. If you have an account on that social media network along with a large following you can automate your tweeting with tools which will aid you in updating regularly.

Strategy is Key

Every website needs regular maintenance to keep it afloat. The same applies to business sites which need more than usual tune ups. The key to doing this is through website traffic analyzers like Google analytics which will provide you with detailed reports regarding where your traffic is coming from as well as the most used or popular keyword searches to your site. The geographical diversity and density of your users can also be found out through the use of these analyzers making. This continuous update will allow you to strategize your business website accordingly.

Importance of Market potential

Be sure to check out the popularity of any good websites and blogs. When you find them try and have your advertisement campaign displayed on it especially if it is related to your products or services.

Don’t be the Needle in the virtual Haystack

The World Wide Web has been perceived as a potential business venture by billions of users around the world. Making your presence known in this dense corporate jungle can prove to be the key to many successful business ventures world wide. It’s therefore essential that you make yourself as visible as you can amidst the immense cluster of other business websites.  You can do that by ensuring that you get listed in the top search results to help your enterprise.

source:http://theblogisdead.com/

SOCIAL MEDIA AND COMMUNITY BUILDING:ESSENTIAL TIPS

Social media and community building: essential tips

The world of social media has presented some unique opportunities not just to marketers, but to community organizers and communicators.

In fact, social media marketing is all about community building. Building a community is not limited to people with a product to market, it can be a remarkable opportunity for entrepreneurs who are still deciding on a product, non-profit groups looking to unite passionate people, and of course, marketers looking to connect with a wide audience.

These four methods will help you build a community, connect with your users, and create social media ‘permission marketing’ assets.

1. Bundle your best content with your community

It is hard to predict what will ‘tip’ and what won’t in the online world. The best strategy for ensuring that community can gather around your best content is to always provide a platform for it to grow. That could mean a feed or other system for your most popular blog posts, a Twitter account feeding out your recent articles and presentations, or a community forum with a thread for every blog post. However, do not forget the content that is generated by the community!

2. Comments are a thin attachment, so find something thicker

Blog comments have often been considered a good indicator of connection and value. If you racked up a lot of comments, you were connecting with people and your blog was valuable. The problem is that blog comments are not a particularly deep connection. Instead of merely taking comments, link to your forum or Ning community at the bottom of every post, and encourage readers to join the community.

3. Offer unique content to your community

Got a podcast? Take suggestions from your community members for episodes, and offer unique content and special features to them. A little goes a long way when it is exclusive, and you will find that your community really values being offered something that nobody else gets to see. Offering content like this is great for two reasons; you get ideas and inspiration from your community, and you tighten your bond with them by offering something unique.

4. Actively participate and keep in touch with your members

Some of the most impressive and important online communities were built by people or companies that truly interacted with their customers and fans. Even if they are not huge names in business or entertainment, they kept in touch with people, built their recognition and created a friendly relationship with their fan base. If you can actively communicate with your community, do it. If not, don’t start a community. Nobody is too big to keep in touch with customers and fans, and when you embrace your community you will see their word of mouth marketingefforts increase.

Engage your community and do not see it as yet another way of spreading your ideas and content (alone).

It’s about dialogues and including your community, and the content it generates, completely into everything you do. A community is something that you earn.

Source: articlesbase.com

10 Tips to Affiliate Marketing Success

Many successful internet marketers have made a fortune from affiliate marketing.

Some of them may have a seven-figure income that can match the salary of a CEO in a fortune 500 company.

If you don’t use affiliate marketing to generate income, you are leaving a ton of money on the table.

There many ways to generate income in internet marketing business. We have CPA, selling ad space, Adsense, sell our own products, and promoting JV partners products. The idea is to set up as many income streams as possible in your business so that your income would not depend on only one source.

Start to add affiliate marketing in your business as one of the strong income streams if you want to succeed in internet marketing.

Your advantage is to leverage other people’s assets which are already made. You can skip the hard work for product creation, writing salescopy, billing, and handling customer service.

Here are 10 tips to create your affiliate marketing success.

#1: Build passive income

If you are in the internet business long enough, you will notice every successful marketer has some kinds of continuity programs to build passive income. The continuity programs come in various forms: membership site, monthly report / newsletter subscription, coaching program, or monthly PLR.

Why are they so keen to build the continuity program in their business? It is the power of recurring income that helps them to build financial stability months after months. Subscribers will churn out, but they will stay in the program normally for about 3 to 9 months. In the case of hosting service or autoresponder service, the customers will stay for many years.

Don’t envy them. You can build your passive income by promoting their continuity programs too.

#2: Look for high ticket items

Do you know that selling high ticket items and selling a low priced ebook take similar amount of marketing effort if you target to the right audience? If you want to make huge affiliate income, you have to add high ticket items in your marketing funnel. There are many expensive internet seminars or coaching programs you can promote. Don’t let the high price point scare you. Some high income professionals like attorney or chiropractor are easy to get the value back from a $5,000 investment simply by learning how to increase 5% in their business revenue.

#3: Look for high commission rate

Do you know a lot of marketers are willing to pay 100% on a front-end product? I am not talking about a $7 ebook. I am talking about perhaps a $39 information product. Some marketers even pay MORE THAN 100% commission. No, I did not type the number wrong. It is more than 100%.

Why? It is because those marketers actually know how to play the game to drive their competition out. They make a lot of money in the backend and multiple ways to monetize the leads.

#4: Look for backend offers

Like I said in the above, some marketers are willing to offer high incentive to affiliate. Their aim is to build a long-term relationship with their customers and generate the income over many years. Many of them are willing to pay commission on front-end AND the backend too. Sometime, they have a marketing funnel to upsell, downsell, and cross sell the prospects. So it is possible you can earn multiple commission from a single customer your refer. Check with the details in their affiliate program.

#5: Look for life time commission

There are extremely large variations on how marketers count the duration of an affiliate referral. Some counts only for 60 days. That means if you refer a prospect to their sites and the prospect make a purchase after 60 days, you won’t receive any commission. You may say that isn’t quite fair. That is why it is important for you to watch out the terms and condition in the affiliate program.

There are still many smart marketers offering lifetime commission to attract more affiliates to build their business. Identify them and partner with them.

#6: Ask for a review product

You want to promote something you know that is beneficial to your subscribers so that they will keep buying from you in the future. You care about your reputation in the long-term. And you want to build your own personal branding too. So review the affiliate product before sending your prospects to the salespage. Of course, some marketers would turn down resending you the review product because of not knowing you enough. But some are fine with it.

In some cases, you may want to spend money to buy the product and to test the product if you can’t get a review copy. Your genuine personal review is a terrific way to increase your sales conversion.

#7: Look at their salesletter

After all, your affiliate success is built upon the successful marketing platform created by your JV partners. If they do a lousy job on the salesletter, the sales conversion process, and the product creation; you will get a lousy affiliate result too. Look at the quality of the salesletter. Ask yourself if you feel comfort to make a purchase if you were a visitor. Go through the whole salesletter to study their copy to see if it’s compelling. Is there any proof of results? Are there any compelling testimonials? Are there any sales videos? Only invest your time and money to promote a product you feel comfortable it is a winner.

#8: Pre-sell the affiliate offer

Here is the key to affiliate success. Don’t just send the visitors to the affiliate salespage. You can build the trust with the prospects by telling about your background. Tell them why you want to promote this affiliate product. Share with them what kind of benefits you get after using it. If you use the product and get a favourable result, you can show them the proof. It is the most powerful way to increase the sales conversion.

#9: Work with the reputable marketer

There are stories I heard about some partners not paying the commission to the affiliate. They just rid off people. Check the reputation about your business partners. You can Google search to see if they have any scam in the past. Undoubtedly, there are many good and ethical people to work with in the internet marketing industry. Start finding them and building a partnership with them. Once you find a suitable partner, you can develop a long-term relationship with him / her to prosper.

#10: Build a list

Even affiliate marketing is an excellent way to generate income. Keep in mind your goal is to build a long-term BUSINESS for yourself. To build a successful business, you have to build assets that can help you to create income over and over again. Your prospects and the customer list are the assets you can use for years after years. With a list, you can promote various affiliate offers and see which can have a better conversion rate. And later on you can build a more profitable business by selling YOUR OWN product.

But don’t just build a list. The real asset is the relationship with your list. You need to continuously educate your prospects and customers by sharing valuable content, tips, or tools. The key is to move them through the path of know, like, and trust you. Once they trust you by knowing you can give them value, they are very responsive to your message and your PROMOTION too.

As you build your business in affiliate marketing with the tips given above, you are going to generate some very attractive income. And at the same time you are building a business empire with valuable assets: the list of prospects and customers, and a network of business partners to synergize for a lifetime.

As the old saying in Chinese Proverb, the thousand mile journey starts with the first step. If you get overwhelmed by many of the details in affiliate marketing, just start to master one thing at a time.

The greatest way to create huge income is by building a huge list. You heard again and again the money is in the list and the relationship with that list. Stop using those hard, long and expensive methods to build your list slowly. You can quickly get to your goal by using the smart list building technique.

source: http://www.markflavinblog.com

Internet Marketing Tips

If you are already aware of this phenomenal phenomenon called internet marketing then read on. You’ll learn a few easy tips and tricks to add that much needed zing to your internet marketing efforts.

For the uninitiated, internet marketing is the advertising, publicizing and doing similar stuff for your products, services, or yourself using the internet. Most of you would think you need a website for it. A modern day myth if there could be one! Having a website is definitely a plus but you need not worry if you don’t have one. You are as good without it too.

For starters, get your presence online. If you only have on youtube video or a couple of images or a bunch of books to market/sell, just register or any of the popular video, images or online book merchants.

A good way to let people know about what you are doing is to commission people to write articles about your initiative. You can ask them to upload these articles on popular articles websites like ezinearticles or associated content. Identify a few good bloggers by page rank and readership, especially blogs related to your product/topic. You could pay them to blog about your product with a link to your video, ad, site, campaign etc in the post.. However, keep in mind that search engines do not approve of this practice and it also happens to be a blackhat SEO technique. A better way to pull of the same stuff is to search for forums and websites dedicated to your topic. Signup and share your knowledge. This way you also affirm your authority on the topic, earn people’s trust while also garnering a lot of positive publicity for your online marketing campaign.

Viral marketing is the order of the day. Rope in your friends, family and everyone else you know to view your website, video, ad campaign (not if it’s a pay per click or campaign…you obviously do not want to waste money on so many non-productive clicks!) and ask them to spread the word to increase page views.

Social bookmarking is another phenomenon that follows closely in the footsteps of viral marketing. Signup on facebook, orkut, myspace, twitter, and link to your website, webpage, ad campaign or wherever else you want the public to go! Also, signup on delicious, diggg and similar sites with the keywords of your choice to let people know of your existence. These also count as back links to you webpage giving you a solid page rank boost.

Social bookmarking is another phenomenon that follows closely in the footsteps of viral marketing. Signup on facebook, orkut, myspace, twitter, and link to your website, webpage, ad campaign or wherever else you want the public to go! Also, signup on delicious, diggg and similar sites with the keywords of your choice to let people know of your existence. These also count as back links to you webpage giving you a solid page rank boost.

Web Site Traffic Utilizing Three No Cost Approaches

Have you been search for year for a method to drive far more web web site traffic. I will show you just 3 methods you can apply in order to get a lot more internet web page traffic. You don’t have to buy any software in order to gain traffic. You don’t even need to develop into an professional marketer and Guess what, these methods are Guaranteed and Totally free.

These techniques are useful and free of charge to start. Below are the Totally free strategies.

# Guide Writing

Guide writing has always been effective and a powerful marketing tool. When you ask a lot of internet entrepreneurs on what helps them to turn out to be far more successful, you’ll discover that article marketing has a role to play. This is how it works; you write high quality articles about your niche topic, submit it on the net and contain an author resource box. The resource box is the most vital part of your write-up mainly because it can help you drive a lot more world wide web web site traffic simply.

# Weblog Commenting

You’ll find many blogs in your niche that have a high page rank on Google and other search engines. You’ve to locate them by conducting a search on the web. Whenever you get 1 which is active, comment on the posts made by the author. To make this useful, write rich contents, add your contributions to what has currently been written, or ask an expert question. Doing this, the blog readers will see you as an expert and click on your link.

# Video clip Creation

Have you ever visited YouTube? You’ll uncover that most of the newly uploaded clips are already receiving thousands of views. This is a single reason why intelligent marketers use videos to drive far more world-wide-web site traffic instantly. You also need to realize that people believe a lot more on what they can see more than what they are able to read. It is straightforward as creating a video clip about your product, upload it to absolutely free video clip websites like YouTube, Google movies etc… Make sure you consist of your site link so that viewers can click through to your internet site.