It truly amazes me to see advertising that is weak and lackluster. Advertising should stand out right from the start to entice customers to be impressed right away and become interested in what you are offering. Sure, it’s hard to get just that right formula to make a successful banner ad, but every company has that “unique” quality that makes them stand out from their competition.

Online advertising becomes effective when you get that right “call to action” idea which achieves the desired behavior. This might involve something engaging like watching a video or playing a game. Pursuing the right mix is very important to keep bringing people back. Immediate value and enticement is what makes great advertising. People need that bond right away to be lured in to make choices and see offers that are appealing to them.

Here are ten good calls to action to keep the customers coming in for more!

1. Cost

Cost is enough to motivate anyone. In fact, isn’t cost one of the first things that comes to mind when you’re out shopping? What’s peculiar though is that while people are willing to haggle over the price of clothing, when it comes to technology, they are more willing to put it into the ‘need’ category and are more likely to ask for a quote. Entire businesses make their leads based on the ability to give you a quote – an estimated cost – right in the ad or at least promise a quote. Once you have the person clicking on your advertisement for that quote, you’re in! J. P. Morgan once said, “When you expect things to happen – strangely enough – they do happen.”  In other words, when people ask for a quote, request more information, or show interest, then they want an answer – and once they have that answer, they are more likely to buy!

2. Give Something to Benefit the Reader

When you download a white paper, guide, or research of some sort, it makes it more interesting to the reader or consumer if the call to action is concise, shows benefits, and is informative to them. A call to action that is interesting might be “ten things to ask when buying a car” or “ten things to do to save money” instead of “read this research report” or “white paper info”. Give them some meat that they can sink their teeth into. They will enjoy the process while learning something about your business, and you’ll be giving them something worthwhile so they will come back again and again!

3. Show Interesting Visuals

People love to visualize what you are trying to sell. It’s nice to see your brand on a poster, magnet, notepads, etc. This is a call to action that they see often. The next time they see your brand, they just might realize they need something that you are selling. These calls to action give potential customers something tangible and visual at the same time.  People love little tokens and free things – especially if it is something that benefits them.

4. Coupons

This will really bring the people to you. Every time I get a coupon to my favorite store or site I am ready to spend money.  We all love rewards and discounts, don’t we? Go even further and make sure it shows the particular item that you want to sell as well as the location of the store to lure them into the store.  For example, Bed, Bath, and Beyond always mails a 20% coupon to customers.  This brings customers back into the store even if they hadn’t planned to. Plus, they know that a coupon is coming in the mail, and many wait eagerly for the next one.

5. Videos

A great video is 60 seconds long; that’s all it takes!  Either you can do one yourself or you can pay a professional to create one. Video is a sure-fire tool for any website. Be precise in your information. Instead of saying “this is a demo of our products”, you should talk about how the product will work for them, and show them the product in action. At the end of the video, insert the web address where they can buy the products or services. Again, a good “call to action” entices the customer, making them want to take action.

6. Social Media is Imperative

Facebook is such a popular tool for any company. A good “call to action” for getting Facebook fans is “Like our page for relief from allergies,” instead of “Hit the ‘like’ button and become a fan”.  Giving them a reason to hit the “like” button is very important.  People love information about how things can help them, and don’t want to just waste their time.

7. Distribution of Material

The little “Chiclet buttons” on Facebook and Twitter let posting become a vital part of your business’ success, giving users the opportunity to share your business with their networks. Your goal is to get everyone involved to share the item or items you are selling, so by using Facebook and Twitter you are advertising widely instead of putting a banner or landing page that is stagnant — spread the word through these social media outlets. Furthermore, you don’t have to pay a cent to get advertising! Now how cool is that?

8. Good Old Email!

Yes, emailing is still popular and can be a very productive tool. Getting people to subscribe is still a good tactic, and getting them to opt in keeps you on their radar screen. To get email signups, say something like, “Get savings alerts” or “Valuable information about Vitamin E”. Keeping it concise and to the point encourages people to opt in for valuable information. They will sign up for your email lists more often by enticing them with good “call to action” words.

9. Human Connection

Just because the world thinks that we’re desk jockeys and glued to our computers – which most of us are these days – doesn’t mean that we don’t still like human contact.  Phone calls and talking to prospective clients is still magic when it comes to sales. Getting people to call you is extremely important, so a good “call to action” would be something like this, “Call now and talk to a live person today”; that’s music to the right pair of ears and a good way to get conversions. Personal service and following up is a key to any successful business, so use a call to action that encourages that human connection.

10. Trading on the Desire to Buy Now

Why not offer deals to customers that want to buy now? Creating immediate desire and enticing them at the same time is very effective.  Offer them something that will want to make them buy now, such as a discount, or prompt them to add a related item to whatever they already have in their cart. Another popular tactic is to offer free shipping when you spend X amount of dollars; that one gets me every time! A good salesperson is someone that listens and creates desire, but doesn’t twist someone’s arm to buy.

Sales are fun and the more creative you are the better the outcome.  A good “call to action” with any type of advertising is a must to a successful business.  Keep that in mind the next time you are marketing or putting an advertisement together.  Keep it concise, informative, interesting, and keep them wanting more. You’ll find this is the key to bringing people to your site or business.

Nitesh works with BannerWeaver.com – a site that specializes in designing Flash banners for your affiliate campaigns as well as ad campaigns, specifically, Adwords campaigns in Google’s Display network. So, next time you need a custom banner design, feel free to give us a shout!

© guestposter for DazzlinDonna, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Call To Action
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Look to the right. See the widget that says Are You In My Top Spots? Of course, you do, how could you miss it?

That is the Scratchback widget. It essentially functions like a tip jar or donate button, but in return for tipping someone, the person receives an advertisement. That in itself is really cool. But as they say OnTV, wait there’s more.

There are several options for how the process works, but here’s the default one and it’s the way I have it set up. Every time someone tips me (I’ve got the tip set up to be $1.00), their link gets placed in the #1 spot, bumping the #5 spot off and everyone else down. With this autobump method, the spots could stay for a while, or get bumped quickly. You can, however, set the options to not auto-bump, and instead let listings stay for 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.

Ok, is this going to upset Google? No, that’s the next cool thing. This is Google-friendly, with text links no-followed. So no penalties to worry about with this.

There’s all kinds of other cool things about this, but I want to test it out before commenting any further. So far I like the concept A WHOLE LOT, but it is in beta, so time will tell.

That’s it for now. This system officially opens up to everyone tomorrow, October 31 – Halloween! I think it’s got big, big potential.

If you want to understand a little more about it, you can visit my advertise page.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Google, Halloween, Jim Kukral, monetization, Scratchback, tip jar, top spots
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

• What you were going to focus on as a topic
• How long to expect it to take to come to fruition
• How to purchase a domain name
• How to purchase a hosting plan
• How to install WordPress
• How to personalize WordPress with a new theme
• How to begin blogging

You’ve put all of this together and now you are asking the burning question, “How do I actually make money doing this?”. As with so many things, the general answer is simple, and the details are a bit more complex.

Generally speaking, you will earn money in one of two ways:

1. Advertising. Advertisers pay you to place their ads on your site.
2. Affiliate Sales. You promote products you believe in to your readers, and in return, you get paid for any sales that result from your promotions.

Let’s begin with affiliate sales, because the details are pretty straight-forward. The concept here is that companies are willing to pay you a percentage of their sales if you send traffic to them and that traffic purchases a product. So, in our kite flying example, you may become an affiliate of a kite manufacturer. You tell your readers about a kite that the manufacturer makes, and you recommend that they purchase it. You link to the product with a special link code given to you by the manufacturer. Your readers click the link and some of them end up buying the kite. You receive a percentage of the sales price for each of the kites sold to your readers.

Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time, and the industry is stable. It works well for some and not so well for others, but that is typical. Much depends upon the products available in your niche, and the type of readers you have (whether or not they are actively seeking to purchase something). In any case, it is ALWAYS a good idea to at least try affiliate marketing. Sometimes, it can be very lucrative and you would hate to miss out on that.

The quickest way to start testing the affiliate marketing waters is to sign up with Commission Junction. It’s free and easy. Register an account and begin searching through their thousands of affiliate merchant listings for any products that match your topic. Sign up as an affiliate for those that you think would be a good fit, grab the special link code they offer, and place the code on your site. From then on, any clicks on that link that result in sales will earn you a commission. (Note: We’ll discuss the best way to add code into your site near the end of this post).

Now let’s turn our attention to advertising. The general concept of advertising is simple. Just as a magazine or newspaper makes the bulk of its money from the sale of advertising on its pages, you too can make money from the sale of advertising on your site’s pages. Advertising, however, can come in several different forms, so the details can get a little more complicated. Still, advertising can be very, very lucrative, and you should seriously consider using it as a form of monetization.

The various forms of advertising usually consist of:

• Graphical banner ads
• Text link ads
• Contextual ads
• CPM ads

Each of those may be a direct sale from you to an advertiser, or may be managed via a third party. Generally, if you sell an ad directly to an advertiser, with no middle-man in between, you earn more money for that ad. However, it can be difficult and time-consuming to manage direct ad sales to multiple advertisers on multiple pages. This is usually something you won’t want to even consider doing until your site is well-established and is receiving a lot of traffic.

The better bet for you at this stage is to let a 3rd party manage all ad sales for you. They do all the work in arranging the ad sales, and in return they get a cut of the profit. You get less money, but you are doing almost no work to get it.

Since this is all new to you, I recommend doing what everyone else does in the beginning. Start with Google Adsense.

Adsense is a contextual ad program that allows you to show ads on your pages that are directly related to that page’s content. Because they are related to the content of the page, the readers are more likely to be interested in those ads. You get paid any time a reader clicks on an ad. Unlike affiliate programs, the reader does not have to actually buy anything for you to get paid. Just clicking the ad results in payment to you, however, that payment is much smaller (perhaps just a nickel or a dime). However, lots of traffic generally results in lots of clicks, and those clicks can add up to thousands of dollars per month. Now, I’m going to say this in big bold words to make sure you clearly understand this. NEVER, EVER, CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS! NOT EVEN ONCE! YOU WILL VERY LIKELY BE BANNED AND WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO MAKE MONEY FROM ADSENSE EVER AGAIN. DO NOT CLICK YOUR OWN ADS. DO NOT ASK YOUR FRIENDS TO CLICK YOUR ADS. DO NOT ENCOURAGE YOUR READERS TO CLICK YOUR ADS. READ THE ADSENSE TOS (TERMS OF SERVICE) CAREFULLY.. Ok, have I made all of that clear enough? It is extremely important that you heed the words or you will be forever upset when you get banned. If you are banned from Adsense, you’ve lost a potentially lucrative source of income. So…don’t do anything to get yourself banned.

The easiest way to place any of these ads on your site (affiliate or Adsense ads) is to use a free WordPress plugin that makes it a little easier to insert code without you having to understand how. I suggest using Adman. Download it, place it your plugins folder, activate it, and use it. You can find detailed instructions at the Adman site.

There you have it. By running a mixture of affiliate advertising and contextual advertising (Adsense), you have a fully monetized site that will begin to earn you some money. If you only have a handful of people coming to your site each month, you probably won’t earn much (maybe enough for a cup of coffee). But as your traffic increases, so will your income. Everything you do from here on out will be working towards creating good content that will attract more good traffic, so that more money can be made.

With time, you’ll want to learn how to become a super affiliate or a pro blogger. The more you know, the more money you can make. I’ve only given the basics here because you are just starting out. You can only handle so much information at one time. But at some point, when you are feeling more comfortable in your new career, you’re going to want to move on the next steps to earn more money. When that time arrives, I suggest the following resources: *

• Super Affiliate Handbook
• Affiliate Business Blueprint

In addition, once you’ve mastered the basics that I’ve outlined in this series, I’d suggest spending some time with the following resources as well.

Problogger Make Money Advice
Choosing Profitable Blog Topics
DoshDosh
Blogging for beginners
Good Headlines

The next post will be the last in the series and will summarize the entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part One (The Introduction)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Two (The WHAT)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Three (The DISCLAIMER)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Four (The Domain Name)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Five (The Hosting Plan)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Six (Installing WordPress)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Seven (Your WordPress Theme)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Eight (Your Blogging Voice)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Nine (Making Money)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Ten (The Summary)

*

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, affiliate sales, contextual advertising, Google, make a living in your pajamas, monetization options, monetized site, pretty straight-forward, pro blogger
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.