For about two years I taught an English class to a group of International students at my University, but most of the time they were teaching me. They taught me about their languages, customs, and food, but their questions often taught me things about my own culture I had never realized. One day I asked my students what surprised them most about the US, and one of my students from Korea said “holidays.” It was at this moment that I really and truly realized Americans love their holidays.

I proceeded to write down every holiday that we feel warrants some sort of party or celebration:

• The Super Bowl (and every other championship game for every other sport)
• 4th of July
• Labor Day
• The big ones such as Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving
• Birthdays (which of course you must have a separate kids party and family party)
• Graduation from middle school, high school, and college
• Halloween
• Valentine’s Day
• April Fool’s Day
• Anniversaries, etc.

This led me to wonder: It is worth the time for a company to create a marketing campaign for every single holiday?

Marketing for specific holidays can be tough because a lot goes into a campaign. With all of the new mediums and platforms available to send out information to the public, marketing a product or service has become expensive and time consuming. Most companies want all of their efforts to stand the test of time for this very reason, but holiday marketing tactics simply cannot offer this long-term satisfaction. Consider a few of the reasons it is, however, worth a company’s time and energy:

To Market or Not to Market for the Holidays

Aside from just the time commitment involved, marketing for the holidays can become stressful. It is difficult to know when to start these campaigns (after all, everyone makes fun of those shops ready for Christmas before Thanksgiving), and it’s difficult to know whether or not your holiday tactics have made a difference. For this reason, some companies pass on the holiday marketing festivities. Unfortunately, this is a terrible mistake for a few reasons:

According to Media Post, in 2010 the top five days by sales conversion volume included Black Friday at 23% (the day after Thanksgiving), Nov. 28 and 30 at 17%, Dec. 6 at 17%, and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) at 16%. In other words, marketing during the holidays is a great idea. Furthermore, the holidays are on the minds of these buyers, and your company should capitalize on that by getting into the holiday spirit.

5 Tremendous Thanksgiving Marketing Tactics

Although Thanksgiving is coming up quickly, it isn’t too late to create a marketing campaign for the holiday. The general rule of thumb is to start marketing for Thanksgiving just after Halloween (and Christmas just after Thanksgiving), but as the statistics show above, there is still plenty of time. Consider a few of the things you can try to help jumpstart your holiday efforts:

• Greeting Cards – Send Thanksgiving themed greeting cards to your customers thanking them for being loyal. Consider giving out a coupon in the spirit of the holiday.
• Newsletters – The holidays are a great way to jumpstart that newsletter you’ve always wanted to offer. Customers and clients will be more apt to join during the holidays in the hopes that your company will help them know what to buy their friends for the holidays!
• Thanksgiving Deals – If you offer a deal specifically around Thanksgiving, consumers will certainly pay attention. While Christmas promotions are common, Thanksgiving deals are still a hidden secret.
• Fall Occasions – Creating a fall event is a great way to get consumers interested in your company. Consider setting up a corn maze, fall festival, or pie eating contest to help draw in new customers. This may be a bit on the expensive side, but it should be a very positive way to get people noticing your business.
• Volunteer – Thanksgiving time offers many opportunities to get involved with other companies. This will help you not only network and spread the word about your company, but you’ll be doing something that really matters (ex: work at a food shelter, donate toys for children, etc.).

In the end, marketing for a specific holiday is a fun experience. Do not worry about having to pull the marketing tactic after the holiday because it should give you what you need for the short time it’s up and running. Many companies also recycle holiday commercials or materials each year to help make it even more worthwhile.

Author Bio:

Amanda DiSilvestro is an expert writer on VoIP business phone systems based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as document management. You can find more of her articles as well as vendors comparisons for your small business needs at Business.com.

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Post tags: black friday, Christmas, Holiday, Marketing, Thanksgiving
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Over the last several years, I’ve done a lot of product development. I’ve developed products for myself and for my clients. Through doing so, I have learned many lessons, not only about the technical aspects of developing a successful product, but also the marketing and business side of taking an idea from concept to profit. Every product is different, each with different development and marketing, but there are some valuable lessons I learned that can be applied to almost any product. Here are a few to think about when you develop your next product.

Vision Is Everything

Okay, so I know this might sound a little hokey, but the truth is, if you do not have a clear and concise vision for your product and its future, the rest of the process may be lost. Developing a concise and clear vision means understanding all aspects of how your product should work, who it should work for, how they will find out about it, and what its inherent value is to them. Understanding these points will better enable you to create a concise vision for your product. Without concise vision, you can spend years developing “the perfect product” with no end in sight. Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve makes it possible to set reasonable goals, and to know when you are done.

Launches Are Overrated

Product promotion is often the hardest part of developing a successful product. Many entrepreneurs focus on the initial launch as the central piece of their promotional strategy. However, launches only succeed when the right media outlets or influencers cover your product. In every niche, there is a top-tier of influencers, and if your initial launch does not attract the attention of one of these top-tier influencers, then any buzz or traction will quickly die after your launch is over. A better strategy is to develop a soft launch approach that builds sustainable momentum and buzz about your product over the long-term. This is comparable to investing time and money into your product promotion rather than just a flash in the pan media blitz.

Create Feedback Loops

During product development, you will encounter many problems and bugs that you will need to work out before you can sell. If you are a software developer, this might include the software functionality or user interface. If you are developing an informational product, it might be the choice of language you use. No matter what the case, you can quickly resolve unseen problems by developing a feedback loop that includes beta testers and trial users. During this process you will gain invaluable feedback from real users that can help to improve your product prior to sale.

“Half Assing” is Bad.

Developing a successful product takes time and energy. Oftentimes you will reach a point where you might say to yourself it’s “good enough” to sell as it is. If this is your attitude, then you’re destined for failure. Successful products have every element fully completed before promotion begins. This includes product functionality, marketing materials and customer service infrastructure. Ignoring the quality of any of these elements will create the inability to develop trust and authority with the consumer. With product promotion, perception is everything, and if you come across as unfinished, then your product is dead on arrival.

Build Measurable Assets

Hopefully you have already nailed down your primary business model for your product. However, one aspect of product development that is often overlooked is the inclusion of measurable assets that can greatly expand your bottom line in the future. For example, you might be selling an e-book on how to raise rabbits. Your initial business plan might include making a profit off the sale of each copy. However, requiring users to register with your website or mailing list during the purchasing process allows for you to build a targeted mailing list that you can leverage later to sell more products. These types of measurable assets can also greatly increase the valuation of the product if you ever decide to sell the intellectual property rights and business model to someone else.

There are many other aspects to developing successful products. But hopefully, the ones above will give you some good food for thought when developing your next idea. Because the truth is, no one else appreciates your ideas like you do. As a product developer it’s your job to make ideas come alive and sell them to the public. Even if you don’t gain from the experience, you will learn more than you can ever imagine. Then you can write your own list of tips!

Author Bio:

Joe Hall is a bona-fide web head, code poet, marketer, writer, and the man behind Contact Plugin. Follow Joe on Twitter today.

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1. Start with an idea for a new website.
2. Find all the relevant themes within that site’s niche.
3. Click a button to discard the only-slightly-relevant themes.
4. Click a button to discard the themes that don’t bring in good traffic.
5. Click a button to discard the themes that have too many competitors.
6. Click a button to discard the themes that are relevant, have good traffic, and have acceptable competition – but don’t have enough monetary or commercial value to you.
7. Click a button to see how strong the top 10 competitors are for any particular theme that’s left in your filtered list, so you can determine which of the remaining themes are the best to target.
8. Click a button to find an excellent domain name for this niche.
9. Click a button to find products you can promote within this niche.
10. Click a button to research and find the authorities in the niche and the subtopics that are popular within the niche.
11. Click a button to compose and publish content on your new site.
12. Click a button to find promotion and backlink opportunities for the content you create.
13. Click a button to track and analyze the rankings increases you receive over time.
14. Repeat a similar quick and easy process to find and use additional long tail keywords to augment and enhance your site’s content.

I’m an old SEO who has been doing this for years, so over time, I’ve come up with my own ways to handle most of the processes above. It all takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and frequently ends in me forgetting some vital tasks. When I forget something, the site I worked so hard on, ends up with the rest of the failed sites on the ‘net.

Now, I’ve known that a tool existed for about a year now that claimed to do all of the above. I even tested it a while back (for about 5 minutes, and then something distracted me, and I forgot to test it further). I may even be the last internet marketing person on the planet to have really latched on to the awesomeness of this tool. Still, just because I’m late to the game, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t rave about it. Just in case there’s anyone out there who doesn’t already use it, ya know. I know my tedious process has been forever changed for the better, since I bought this product. Maybe yours will too.

So what is this amazing product, and does it really live up to its claims? It’s called Market Samurai, and yes, it does. Ah, see? I knew most of you had already heard of it!

So for the few who haven’t tried it yet, you should know why I think Market Samurai is currently the best tool on the market to ensure that you don’t waste time creating sites that bring no traffic and make no money.

Yes, I’ve created sites that made no money. And I may still do that occasionally, but I bet it won’t be nearly as often anymore. Market Samurai finally gives me all the info I need and all the tools to implement the info in one place.

Let’s look at a summary of the modules that Market Samurai includes.

Keyword Research

This module goes beyond just spitting out a list of relevant phrases. Clicking the Analyze Keywords button will check various factors about each, such as SEO competition, and you can then filter the results based on whatever thresholds you set. This is a powerful way to quickly find the sweet spot of phrases to target. Want to know how much traffic you can expect if you rank #1 for a phrase? The tool gives an estimate of that as well, and much more.

SEO Competiton

One of the things I love is the color-coded competition chart. At a glance, you can see which keywords are the easiest or hardest to rank for, so it’s the perfect next step after keyword research. It gives a ton of info such as anchor text distribution, number of backlinks, PR, cache info, and domain age.

Domain Tool

If you’re researching a new niche, you’ll want to use the domain tool that’s provided. It not only helps find domain names related to a keyword, but it also shows aged, expiring and for-sale domains that are already ranking well for the phrase! That’s sweet! (A free account at domainface is all you need for the aged domains list. If you want extra info on the aged domains, you’ll need to have a paid domainface account. But since the free version of domainface does provide the aged names, it’s still a great feature).

Monetization Tool

Ok, so you know what phrases to target, you now have a perfect domain to build on, so what’s next? How to monetize it? Yep! Fill in your various affiliate details (such as username for cj, amazon, clickbank, etc), and the tool finds products related to a keyword that you can promote. In addition, it will generate dynamic ads for you, such as Google’s contextual Adsense ads or Amazon content-relevant ads. Need a landing page or sidebar ad? No problem. The tool will create them for you by displaying relevant images, headlines and sales copy from the affiliate sites. Just drag and drop the headlines and sentences you like most into a blog post, sidebar, or banner generator. The ad can also use your short url account (like your bit.ly account) to generate a short link to the product. Any ads you generate, dynamic or affiliate, can easily be published to your self-hosted WordPress blog with the click of a button. If you don’t have a WP blog, you can simply copy/paste the content or ad code into your site as you normally would. This module of Market Samurai is unique. I’ve never seen this done in another tool of its kind.

Find and Publish Content

Although you’ll be creating your own content, Market Samurai makes it easy to find the most popular content related to a keyword, so you can determine what types of content your visitors will love. The tool does a great job of letting you find specific types of content (blog posts, videos, etc.) to help you research the niche. Once your research is done, you can use the Publish feature to easily compose and add content to WordPress blogs right from the tool. (And yes, you can choose to easily publish articles from article directories too).

Promotion

This section helps you find backlink opportunities and niche authorities, letting you filter by type (blogs, forums, q&a, etc), and then analyzing each (just use the Analyze All button) to determine the best ones to promote to. You can then choose to participate in those conversations, and promote your site to them, which can generate traffic and backlinks, or you can reference sites by adding links to other relevant sites that except pingbacks to blog posts you’ve previously published right from the tool, which will ping those sites, notifying them that you linked to them. Any pingbacks created are backlinks to your site.

Rank Tracking

Again, this goes beyond the standard tracker that merely shows where a phrase ranks; it also lists the particular page url that ranks for the phrase, what it’s PR is, and gives the number of backlinks that page has. Because it keeps this history, you can always see a graph of how well your efforts are paying off over time.

More Info

Price: Forget monthly fees. Pay one price, one time and get use of the product for life. If you work it right, you can get 35% off as well. Just try the free trial of Market Samurai to get that opportunity.

Cross-Platform: Runs on PC, Mac, and Linux. Double-sweet!

The only drawbacks for me are:

• Managing multiple projects isn’t as smooth as it could be, but I wouldn’t doubt that this is a feature they’ll improve upon at some point.
• I’d also love to be able to print a nice report that shows me a basic to-do list based on all the information gathered. It would be very cool to have a tree diagram showing the main theme keyword at top, category keywords next, and long tail keywords last. From there, a content research and creation plan could be listed so that I can easily build the site using the plan as a guide. The various modules do have a .csv export feature, but I’d love to see a nice human-oriented report that sums it all up for me.
• Some parts are slow. Startup, for instance, can take a couple of minutes. While you stare at a blank gray window, you might think the program has died, but it hasn’t. I use these slower bits of time to grab a diet coke or a snack.

Summary – Marketing Samurai answers the following questions:

• What keywords should I target? (most profitable / least competition)
• How hard will it be to rank for the phrase(s) and what will I need to do to compete?
• Who are the authorities in this niche?
• What type of content do visitors in this niche prefer?
• What products can I promote?
• How can I create compelling ads for those products?
• How can I create and manage targeted content?
• Where can I find backlink opportunities?
• How well are my efforts working?

Try it. You can actually use it for free for a while. After the trial period is up, guess what? You can still use the keyword research module freely forever! For that reason alone, you should try it. They don’t snag your credit card info or paypal info just to try it. Really. You won’t have to worry about some stupid automatic charge that you didn’t remember to cancel. Nothing like that will happen. Just try it for free. No risk, no hassle.

By the way, I strongly recommend using the free tutorials offered. While the product isn’t overly complex, the tutorials will ensure that you don’t miss some important steps that can make a huge difference in your success rate. For example, the first tutorial looks at the relevancy of your keywords, and why it’s so important, how to filter out the useless keywords guaranteed to cost you time and money, and how to slash the number of people who leave your site because they can’t find what they’re looking for. Missing out on any of that because you decided to just “wing it” would be a mistake I don’t recommend. Even if you quit using the product, watching the tutorials will be an education into smart internet marketing!

Try it for free. Actually watch the training videos. Really. Don’t skip that step. Actually USE the free version after watching the videos. Don’t make the “5 minute test and move on to something else” mistake that I did. Give it a real solid test. I think you’ll be glad I bugged you to do so. Even if you still can’t part with the cash to get this product, you’ll have learned how to go through the process and can do what I’ve done all these years – putting all this into practice using various free tools and lots of manual labor. Either way, you’re probably better off than before.

Just try it for free to find out:

• What markets are worth targeting;
• What markets are worth avoiding;
• Which keywords you should focus on for fast results;
• Which keywords should be avoided;
• Which markets have weak competition;
• Which markets show impossible levels of competition;
• What are the chances of achieving front-page rankings for a keyword;
• What topics you should write articles on for your website;
• Where to find quality backlinks;
• How many backlinks you need;
• What quality backlinks you need;
• How to determine the quality of a page for a backlink;
• …and so much more!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Keyword research, Marketing, Search engine optimization
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In the beginning…when blogging and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook first became a part of our lives, it felt like this:

And Then We Caught The Need For Speed

I think it’s obvious to everyone that it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with everything these days. We are able to see it all streaming past us, and we recognize that much of it is forgotten within a second because something else is flying past us, looking to catch our attention. It now feels like this:

Personally, I’m finding this difficult for two reasons:

1. I can’t stay focused as well as I used to be able to do.
2. I can’t get YOUR attention as well as I used to be able to do.

Now, that second point will come off as just another marketing person whining about being unable to capture attention – and that’s ok – because that’s what it is! However, I strongly suspect that I’m not alone in this. I believe it’s becoming more and more difficult – verging on impossible – to capture the attention of the audience that anyone in business might be trying to reach.

Your Turn To Speak

What do you think? I’m keeping this post short because I want to hear your thoughts. I’d love to see this post become a real conversation, rather than me spouting off and you simply absorbing it – or more likely – forgetting you read this 2 seconds from now. Of course, that in itself would speak volumes, right? LOL. Anyway, I open this up to you – and your ideas – on ways to deal with the ever-increasing stream that we all find ourselves in. Your turn…comment below.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Marketing, social media, social networks, Twitter
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Keep in mind when I use the phrase, “customer base”, I am not merely referring to a group of people who have bought product from you. You may not sell products. You may be a blogger who monetizes a site via Adsense, for example. In that case, “customer base” might refer to the blog readers who have subscribed to your RSS feed, or anyone who has actively connected with you in some way. Purchasing products, joining your mailing list, subscribing to your RSS feed, etc. all qualify to fit into the general phrase “customer base”.

Ever been irritated because someone offered a free report, ebook, or whitepaper, only to find out that in order to get it, you had to supply a name and email address? And then, for the rest of your life, and that of all your children’s lives, grandchildren’s lives, and forever after, you received marketing offers via email from the guru who used your email address to help build his list! That guru knew that he stood a much better chance of making a sale to you because you were willing to give him your contact information in return for his freebie.

I hate getting that constant stream of marketing offers as much as you do, but I do understand the importance of marketing to your current customer base. I’ll never be one of those gurus I guess, and I suppose I’ll never show you a photo of me driving a Bugatti (or whatever the latest status symbol car is these days), because I refuse to market as aggressively as those gurus do. Yes, I have a mailing list. Yes, I try to send valuable information to that list once in a while (definitely not often). But I always give way more than I ask in return, because that’s just the way I do things. I don’t want to annoy the people who have kindly signed up to my list; I’d rather help them instead. Still, that doesn’t mean I can’t benefit from an existing customer base without annoying them in the process.

Here are some ideas to help you benefit from your existing customer base without becoming a major annoyance to them. I’ll try not to judge those who choose to market like the big “gurus”, but for those who prefer a less aggressive method, read on.

If you sell and ship products, include a little paper insert with each shipment. If you don’t ship products, include a “digital insert”, or simply a special marketing message, with whatever form of communication you have with your customer base. From here on out, any time I refer to an “insert”, you substitute either “paper” or “digital” in front of the word, depending upon your situation.

This insert doesn’t have to be fancy. Just a simple message printed right onto your normal inkjet printer paper works well, or a clearly marked message in an email is fine. Do include product pictures on this insert, however, as a picture is worth 1000 words, as they say.

What do you include on these inserts? Here are 5 creative ways you can market to your existing customer/user base without annoying them – all within a simple insert.

1) The Special Deal Just For Valued Customers/Users

Let your customers know that because they are valued customers, they can get special deals that aren’t offered to anyone else. Include links to special, SECRET, product pages on your site that only current customers know about. These special product pages might be specially-priced products, or might be specially-bundled groups of products. The point is that these pages aren’t shown to just anyone. Only your valued current customers know about them. And only they get the special price on those pages, or the special bundled group of products at a savings. Use your imagination when thinking about what YOU can offer THEM that will mean increased sales for YOU and special deals for THEM.

2) The Helpful Tip and Related Offer

Don’t just market to your customer base on these inserts. Offer tips and information as well. If you’ve sold them a product, you may want to include usage tips or ideas for creatively using the product. Whatever types of tips you include (whether they are geared towards a purchased product or not), be sure to include a special deal on a product (see #1 above) that would complement the tip in some way. If the tip is about using a purchased product in some way, then a special deal might be offered on an accessory product that would complement the main product (like the old idea of selling razor blades for razors). If you don’t sell products, but do promote affiliate products, then a tip on how to do something your customer base is interested in, followed by a marketing message about a related affiliate product would make sense.

3) Ask For A Favor

Don’t be shy. Ask for something from your customer base. Ask for a testimonial – either of your products, your services, or just your blog posts. Ask for a link! Ask for word-of-mouth recommendations. Ask your customer base to share your site with their social networks, by tweeting about it, or linking to it on Facebook. All of these kinds of things can easily be placed into an insert, without you having to put anyone on the spot. You’ve asked. They can take action or not, without anyone feeling pressured to do so. While you may not get a large response, ANY response is better than none – which is what you’ll likely get if you don’t ask!

4) Trade Favors

Ask for one thing in return for giving another. This is one of my favorites. A friend of mine often says, “You wouldn’t believe what some peoople will do for a free t-shirt”. And she’s absolutely right. Everyone loves to get a freebie, so give one away in return for your customers giving something of value to you. What kind of value can they give you? Here’s where you get to be creative. I’ll offer a possible suggestion, but you should take this as an idea-starter and come up with your own ideas geared towards your needs.

Ask your customer base to create a video that is relevant to your site in some way, and in return, you’ll give them a freebie (t-shirt, product, etc). If you sell widgets, then ask your customers to create a video showing how easy/fun it is to use your widget, or how they use your widget in a non-traditional, creative way. If you blog about climbing widgets, or cooking widgets, or making widgets, ask your customer base to create videos that show them climbing widgets, cooking widgets, or making widgets. The point is to get user-generated content that is difficult for you to always create. Let your users take the time to create videos, and you will have awesome content to share, and possibly convert lots more sales because you’re showing actual customers enjoying the product! Again, these are just generic ideas, but if you can get customers to create videos for your site, you’ll reap the benefits in many ways – which may include better search engine rankings (Google loves video) and more conversions on your site.

5) Point Out Important Sections Of Your Site

Finally, it’s always a good idea to include a link or two to some important sections of your site on your inserts, that your users might not be aware of. This might be a link to your FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page, or a link to your community forum, etc. The key here is to keep the user engaged with your site, either by answering questions she may have, or by involving her in portions of the site she may not have noticed before. If you can remind users to return to your site for reasons beyond the purchasing act, you have a chance of converting them again when they do.

Summary

The key is to not make a nuisance of yourself. These “inserts” are only included as part of another correspondence that isn’t annoying. If you ship products, including a slip of paper with this kind of information on it isn’t annoying. The customer is happy to receive her order, and won’t mind the little insert in the box. If you send out informative newsletters, the user won’t mind a marketing message inserted at the bottom of the email, because you’ve just supplied her with engaging, interesting content that she asked for previously. Aggressive marketing gurus believe the marketing IS the message. That’s not the Insert way at all. With inserts, the product or the useful information is the message – the insert is merely supplemental, and therefore much less annoying.

I may never get the nearly $2,000,000 Bugatti shown below with the “insert” method, but I won’t be despised as a slick marketing “guru” either. That’s the way I prefer to do business.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet Marketing, List Building, Marketing
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31 Conversion Optimization Tips – and Counting

How can you reduce Distraction on your pages? How many links can you eliminate? … You don’t sell features. You sell solutions to problems.

>> Follow Chris Goward

Copy that Converts: Interview with Copywriting Maven Roberta Rosenberg

You need the words to make the sale, period. Whether we’re looking at text-only email, a simple direct mail letter or even skywriting for that matter, the words are the key to the message. However, as I mentioned in a previous response, good design supports the message and makes it easy, even pleasant to read. It also helps direct the reader from point to point, acting as a visual roadmap to the essential bits and pieces that deserve particular attention. However, what’s even more important than the creative – copy or design – is a strong, attractive offer and visitors who are hungry for what you have to promote.

>> Follow Roberta Rosenberg

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Post tags: affiliate products, Chris Goward, Conversions, Marketing
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Every marketer that has a website has learned about bringing visitors to their site through SEO. He knows that a proper SEO campaign takes a lot of time and patience, but in the end, he’s rewarded with great rankings. Conversion optimization is also a patient task and is another never-ending process. But through constant testing, you’ll be able to dramatically improve your conversion rate.

If you offer a service of some sort this will more easily apply to you, but many of these techniques can be applied across the board no matter what kind of niche you are in. Conversion rate doesn’t only apply to selling a product or generating leads from a website. It can be applied to anything that you want a visitor to do when they get to your website/blog.

Perceived Authority and Trust

No one will use a service from someone they don’t trust. Building trust is crucial in getting a customer to complete a transaction. I’ve found (and many agree) that including customer testimonials, press mentions, secure website certificates, a physical address, and a picture, as well as maintaining a personal tone within your web content are all instant solidifiers in capturing the trust of an impatient web visitor. In order to complete the trust picture, you should make sure that you are keeping the search results clean with online reputation management.

Speed of Service

A potential customer doesn’t like wasting a lot of time, so don’t give them junk they don’t want or care about on a landing page. For example, when searching for [surety bonds], people want to get in and out as fast as possible so we keep a clean layout and short, concise content that gets to the point. If you run a fitness site, you may want to have a lengthy article that gets the reader emotional before deciding to buy your service/product. It all depends on your niche, so you’ll have to test to see which method works best. Either way, make sure to show your visitors what you want at the top of the site as you only have a few seconds to grab their attention to start them down the conversion process.

If you offer a service, be sure to have a fast follow-up. Through our bonding site and other experiences I’ve had, I’ve found that the more quickly we follow up with a web site contact, the more likely they are to turn into a completed transaction or customer. It’s important to immediately contact users whether through a live customer agent or even a simple email system to let them know that you received their info and will act on it shortly.

Testing, Testing, Testing

A major aspect of conversion rate optimization is testing. You need to find what works best and what just doesn’t make the cut. An easy way to do this is to use Google’s website optimizer. This allows you to send half of your traffic to one version of a page and the other half to a different version. Not sure if ‘Military Housing‘ converts better than ‘Military Homes‘? This will let you know. Then you can test it against a different phrase and keep the one that works the best. After repeating the test for a while, you will eventually find the phrase that always gives the best conversion.

Test form layouts, test different pictures, test everything. This is the biggest advice I would give people. You may not realize it, but a different picture or even a different background color can increase your conversion rate. With the proper dedication and a little time, you can turn visitors into customers.

This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Surety Bond Co., a surety bonding agency.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Conversion optimization, Conversion rate, Marketing, online reputation management, Search engine optimization
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Let’s begin with the definition of synergy. Synergy is defined as:

the interaction of two or more forces so that the combined effect is greater than the sum of the individual effects

If you succeed in achieving this synergy, you’ll very likely succeed at making a living online.

So what two things are needed in this synergistic equation? Great content and targeted traffic.

Allow me to repeat that:

Great content + lots of targeted traffic = enough income to make a living online.

Your efforts alone can produce both of those vital parts of the equation. Your knowledge – the information you’ll provide – creates the content. Your marketing efforts – the things you do to tell the world about your site – brings the traffic that is interested in your content.

Great content, without targeted traffic doesn’t guarantee success. Likewise, targeted traffic, without great content doesn’t guarantee success. If you have both of these forces working for you – great content and lots of targeted traffic – you have everything you need to produce a liveable income.

Nearly all revenue models produce increased levels of income as your traffic levels increase. For example: If you’re selling advertising spots on your site, the price you charge for those ad spots goes up as your traffic goes up. Just as circulation numbers influence newspaper ad prices, your unique visitor numbers influence online ad rates. In general, no matter what form of monetization your site employs, more traffic means more income.

The first thing some people think is “Well, great, I’ll just buy lots of traffic”. You’ve probably seen ads all over the Internet that say:

We’ll send you one hundred thousand visitors for just one hundred dollars, or whatever the pitch might be. Don’t fall for these ads. Don’t waste your money. That’s not real traffic; most of the time it’s not even real people going to your site. But even the ones that are real people aren’t real traffic. They’re not interested in your site, they’re not interested in your content, and they won’t increase your income at all. Fake traffic is worse than no traffic.

You need real traffic; targeted traffic – and that requires great content.

This synergistic equation does have a starting point. You must have the content first. There’s absolutely no point in bringing targeted traffic to a site without good content. So you’ll need to focus on that first. One you have high quality content available however, you can begin marketing the site. At that stage, you’ll be working on content creation and marketing (acquiring traffic) simultaneously and continuously. You’ll stay in a cycle of continuously creating good content and continuously marketing your site, so that the two pieces of the equation can work together to create the end result: income.

Each time you read one of my blog posts that focuses on making a living online, you should think about how the post fits into the synergy of efforts equation. Everything you learn should help with:

1. creating good content, or
2. attracting targeted traffic, or
3. learning how to make those two pieces work together to create more income

So if you want to succeed, keep the synergy of efforts equation in mind:

Great content + lots of targeted traffic = enough income to make a living online.

At some point, you may find yourself ready for private, one-on-one coaching. When that happens, consider hiring me as your eBusiness coach and consultant. You can get more information about how that works, at my site, www.eBuzzCoach.com.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Marketing, success, Synergy
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.