from: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/splash?hl=en
Website Optimizer is an easy-to-use tool for testing site content that delivers actionable results. Below are just three of the many benefits that testing brings
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from: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/splash?hl=en
Website Optimizer is an easy-to-use tool for testing site content that delivers actionable results. Below are just three of the many benefits that testing brings
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from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/websmarts/article191050.html
With the growing rate of internet shoppers, make sure you design your site with the customer in mind.
By Mitch Meyerson and Mary Eule Scarborough | February 29, 2008
This article has been excerpted from Mastering Online Marketing by Mitch Meyerson and Mary Eule Scarborough, available from Entrepreneur Press.
There’s never been a better time to take advantage of the expansive opportunities for online business development and growth that the internet affords. According to a Juniper Research study, the number of U.S. internet shoppers will grow at an average rate of 12 percent per year through 2010, resulting in more than $144 billion in online sales.
These positive forecasts should be music to the ears of any aspiring e-commerce entrepreneur. But there’s more to building a thriving online business than getting your site up. There are some very important things you need to know first
Adapt Strategic Marketing for Sustainable Online Success
While online businesses are unique in many ways, your e-commerce site is merely a tool that you will use to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. Therefore, you should develop yours using the same sound, time-tested, and well-thought-out business methodologies that companies have used for generations. Yes, the internet is relatively new, but good business skills have been around for thousands of years.
Design and Navigation: Make Your Website Dynamic and Visitor-Friendly
Your website’s appearance and ease of navigation are a direct reflection of you, your company, and your products and can literally make or break your business. That’s why it’s vitally important that you do everything in your power to ensure that your website is welcoming and easy to read and use.
Dynamic Web Copy: Get People to Respond
Since you’re building an e-commerce site that will offer exceptional products, you must be able to effectively converse with your prospects and customers and talk to them using language that is relevant and comfortable. That’s why your first task is to candidly evaluate your own writing skills. Ask yourself where you fit, and be ruthlessly honest–the success of your website depends upon it.
Even though your copy should be honest and simple it can still be exciting! Turn on your imagination and spice it up with controversy, anecdotes, colorful figures of speech, power words or phrases and powerful headlines.
Traffic Conversion: Increase Sales and List Building
Traffic conversion is a committed process for building relationships and rapport with your targeted audience; it helps visitors to know, like, and trust you. When done correctly, it provides the opportunity for online marketers to achieve their ultimate objective of acquiring and retaining loyal and profitable customers.
Since you can’t improve what you don’t measure you should be asking yourself: How many visitors come to my website? How many visitors opt in to my e-mail list? Hoe many people click on the buy buttons? What is my visitor value?
In order to optimize your website so your prospects and customers will be compelled to opt in to your mailing list; learn more about your products and/or services and feel comfortable purchasing from you, you need to make your website professional looking, eye-catching and well-written. To improve opt-in conversions, use attention-grabbing graphics, make sure your opt-in box is positioned “above the fold,” make an irresistible offer and include a privacy statement.
Automation: Increase E-Commerce Profits
In addition to being the most effective time-saving tools available, automation programs are an internet marketer’s best friend, hands down. These software gems allow you to reap the benefits of work you’ve already completed, over and over again. Simply said, there are so many benefits to automation programs that if you’re serious about growing and sustaining a profitable online business, you’d be foolish to ignore them.
Multimedia: Increase Your Impact using Audio, Video, and Conferencing
The benefits for including customer-centric multimedia elements on your website are so forceful and undeniable that failing to do so is a huge mistake. You’ll receive many paybacks when you add audio and/or video elements to your e-commerce site. But before beginning, keep in mind that multimedia content has to be delivered in the way your audience wants it. It must be available 24/7, on demand and two-way.
Web Audio
There are so many ways to use the web audio effectively. You can use audio to let your visitors hear recorded testimonials from happy customers, greet them warmly and enthusiastically, help alleviate and lingering doubts would-be customers may have by reassuring them that purchasing from you is essentially risk free and enhance e-courses.
Podcasts
Podcasting combines the ease of blogging with the fun of hosting your very own radio or TV show.
Web Video
Web videos afford you–or someone else–the opportunity to combine words, tone, body language, and facial expressions to convey meaningful information about you, your company, and your products and services. Let’s face it; some of us should just not be in front of a camera for a variety of reasons. If you choose to avoid the camera, you can still do such things as:
Use Video to Increase Revenues: YouTube
Fueled by the Web’s 2.0 social interaction concept and technological advances, novices and experts alike are adding their own videos to share ideas, entertain, demonstrate products, connect with others, and much more. And since access to the site is free and uploading a video is simple, it’s a wonderful vehicle for practicing and honing your video skills.
Taking Your Video Viral
One of the most affordable (it’s free!) and effective ways to materially increase your opt-in conversions is by taking your video viral–in other words, letting others help you spread the word to their friends, family members, associates, mailing lists, and so forth.
Video Blogging
Blogs are wonderful alternatives, or additions to, more traditional websites because they can be up and running quickly, usually in a matter of minutes; anyone can use their professional-looking templates without any prior design and/or navigation experience or expertise; they’re inexpensive, dynamic, and fresh, and since new content is added regularly and often, the search engines love them.
Teleconferencing and Web Conferencing
Teleconferences and teleseminars represent wonderful, cost-effective alternatives to in-person meetings and classes. Additionally, they are
Traffic Strategies: Get More Visitors to Your Site
With a bit of typing and a simple click of a mouse, millions of people all over the world go to search engines (e.g., Google, MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, AskJeeves, Dogpile, etc.) to hunt for specific products, services, information and/or opportunities. And since the vast majority of online sales begin with search engines, they are an extremely valuable resource for any e-commerce business. People who are searching naturally assume that the sites listed first–particularly those on the first page–are the best, and that’s where they click. The closer your site appears to the top of the list, the better.
Optimize Your Website
In order for search engines to find you (and deem you relevant) you’ll need to include your most powerful keywords in various places on your website–your copy, headings, anchor and footer text, and alongside photos and graphics. Use unique page titles and meta tags, and focus on your most important keywords one at a time. Use search-friendly design and navigation techniques. Make sure it is easy for search engines (and more importantly, your visitors) to find their way from one of your web pages to any other via internal links. So, in addition to choosing the most relevant keywords you’ll also want to make sure that you overdeliver valuable content; your prospects will love you for it, and so will the search engines!
Web 2.0: The Key to Using Social Media Effectively
Web 2.0 is an online movement that encourages users to participate in the fresh, interactive nature of the internet by using widely available, less expensive, and more mature state-of-the-art technologies.
Some of the many ways you can use Web 2.0 technology and its people-oriented culture to enhance your online business include:
Mitch Meyerson has been a visionary and bestselling author and consultant for more than 20 years. He created the much acclaimed Guerrilla Marketing Coaching Program as well as other landmark internet programs including the Product Factory and Online Web Traffic School. He can be reached at MitchMeyerson.com
Mary Eule Scarborough is a former Fortune 500 marketing executive, independent marketing consultant, and also co-author of The Procrastinator’s Guide to Marketing, available from Entrepreneur Press. She regularly writes business and marketing articles for many online publications as well as for her own website, StrategicMarketingAdvisors.com.
from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/ebusinesscolumnist/article202322.html
Keep your online business running smoothly with a monthly check-up of these crucial areas.
By Allen Moon | June 16, 2009
Recently, I was at the car dealership watching the mechanic work on my car, and suddenly a thought struck me: How many online business owners regularly check under the hood to make sure theirs websites are running smoothly?
And even if you do perform frequent check-ups on your website, are you sure you’re giving it a really thorough once-over? About once a month, you should “pop the hood” to perform a comprehensive check-up, find what’s not working and fix it. Here’s what you should be looking for:
Traffic Statistics
Your web host should provide basic statistics, but consider getting the free Google Analytics program or using the services of a fee-based web analytics company–you’ll get a deeper look at how your visitors travel through your website. You should be able to answer the following questions:
Sales Statistics
Traffic is good, but sales make you money. Keep track of your conversion rates–the percentage of your visitors who actually become paying customers. Lots of traffic with few conversions indicates that there’s some kind of disconnect between the message bringing people to your site and the message they’re seeing when they get there. Look at where you lose those people and you’ll see where to start tweaking and testing. Lower traffic with high conversions means you’re doing the right things on your site and you need to concentrate on getting more traffic.
E-mail Response Rates
Always check your traffic and sales numbers carefully after each e-mail you send. You can find out which subject lines and promotional offers are working best for you, and even which times of day, week and year are best for your mailouts.
E-mail is still one of the most effective marketing techniques around, and you’ll get the most out of it if you automate all those e-mail tasks from the start. An e-mail management system like iContact will save you time and deliver in-depth results in a user-friendly format so you can easily analyze what’s working and what needs work
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General Housekeeping
Here are some other things related to your website that you should keep a close eye on:
A malfunction on your website can be just as damaging to your business as a brake failure would be to your car. Ideally, you should set aside one day each month to undertake a major site review. It’ll keep your business running as smoothly as a well-oiled engine.
Allen Moon is the Marketing Director of the Internet Marketing Center, which creates information products, software, and training services that have helped thousands of people establish and grow their own profitable online businesses. He has just released the completely updated 2009 edition of the comprehensive Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet course.