Internet Marketing Articles

Just like the offline world, one should never confuse marketing for sales. Online, the disparity between the two is quickly brought to notice when stats in the log-file show numerous visits with no sales made. This is why it is prudent to first streamline your conversions techniques in increasing web revenues. Conversion happens as a result of synergy amassed from sales and marketing.

Marketing involves exposing potential customers to numerous messages about your offer. Online this may be done using Search Engines, syndicated articles, Pay per Click (PPC) Ads etc. The messages have the express intention to create the inclination to visit your website and propensity to take up your offer. Essentially marketing should warm up your prospects and make them more receptive to a sales pitch. However propensity to buy is not buying. Indeed all marketing is able to do is create room for sales, conversion.

On the other hand, attempting to convert your visitors without doing your due diligence can frustrate even the best conversion strategies. This is probably the reason for the meager C.R online. Cold leads are very hard to sell. Coupled with the fact that few visitors ever return to a website, you could as well have only one shot to convert your visitors into customers.

The fact that sales online have significantly different dynamics to off-line sales, introduces a learning curve even to expert salesmen and copy-writers. This is without mentioning that conversion whether online or off, is in itself a complex process. These not withstanding, proven principles have been identified that always work. These fundamentals do not change regardless of medium in use.

When a warm lead arrives on your sales page they want to be sold, or should we say convinced? This may sound untrue because what we commonly know as selling are pushy and forceful insurance salesmen and network marketers. But what they do is not selling, it is, well, pushing and forcing.

In contrast selling is an art and science of persuasion that involves matching customer need to product features. It further involves guiding the prospect to take action now.

Consequently the basics of online conversion depend on a purposeful and well structured process of prospecting, creating awareness and propensity to buy - marketing. It is then followed by a systematic persuasion that attends to both the emotive and logical needs of the customer with the express intent of matching product or service to customer needs and wants - sales. A seamless process of marketing and selling forms the foundation of an optimal conversion rate (C.R).Trying to sell your visitor without marketing to them will always result to a lower conversion rate.

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What is your web strategy? Does your site need to generate sales leads? If so, how is it working? Do you know the basic metrics for traffic and conversion? How about more advanced metrics such as conversion by entry page or conversion by search term? How many clicks to conversion? How many bounces off of your “contact us” method without hitting submit? Did you know that all of these metrics can be measured, alternative methods can be tested and you can improve both traffic and conversion?

Start with a Traffic Based Design

Anyone familiar with The Net Impact knows our approach to building web navigation and thus generating traffic to a site is called Traffic Based Design. The very simple principle behind this strategy is the identification of different web audiences that may be interested in your company and then to create a web plan that will lead each segment to the proper page on your website based upon their search. What they search for is what they want. So, why not quickly give them what they want?

In a non-lead generating example: posting job openings for your firm on your website is an inexpensive and effective way to generate resumes. If a viewer is looking for a position with your firm, you want to make the application process easy. Provide a page devoted to employment opportunities and make it visible and obvious for navigation. It also might be helpful to allow them to easily print the job description, upload a resume and fill out a contact us form related to the job. Why not even post a phone number and hours to call for inquires or add the popular “e-mail to a friend” option, especially since the “friend” could be the individual’s personal email address if he or she is searching from a computer at their work. Makes sense right? This would be a simple approach, post your jobs, let searchers find them and then make it easy for them to apply. The information should be obvious and the path for engagement clear.

Making it easy

If making it easy for the job applicant is the best approach, then shouldn’t making it easy be the general rule for the business prospect as well?

Well, let’s put this plan into action. Say I operate a manufacturing company. What kinds of business needs would I want to satisfy through my website? Here are a few that you might consider:

* Employment opportunities and hiring as we discussed above.
* Upcoming events and trade shows we will attend.
* Company information, press releases and news of interest.
* Product and services, especially new product or service, information.
* White papers and technical information that will help me establish industry authority.
* Case studies or examples of how my product or service solved a problem.
* Location and contact information.
* Client or distribution partner account and service information
* Employee Intranet for private communication.
* Privacy policy… and oh yeah…
* A way for prospects to contact us.

All of these are valid uses for your website. Do you notice though how the application of these pages and tools will have unique appeals to different audiences? Your HR communication through an employee Intranet can certainly be enhanced through web-based time keeping, insurance information and company wide information distribution. But this is not where prospective clients will want to go. Your current client or distribution partner account and service information is a great use for a site, if these viewers are already customers. Finding new employees with on-site employment opportunities also is a great use. But none of these help you generate new leads from new customers.

What pages of your website will generate the most leads?

Highly defined and very specific pages devoted to your products and services (think search terms) that also provide the right amount of technical information, case studies (testimonials) and a very clear cut call to action will undoubtedly bring you the most leads. Notice I did not say your “home page”.

The more competitive the search engine marketing world becomes, the more important it is to build individual landing pages that are specific to your individual products and services. Your home page alone cannot compete with your competition’s pages built for product or service specific searches. Your home page is for those customers that already know you, it is built to establish industry authority and display your “Trophy Case” of awards, successful projects and credentials. As far as new search engine driven traffic is concerned, your home page should be built for only the very broadest of searches on keywords that are important. Your other landing pages, built for specific areas of your business, will bring you more raw searches from longer tail search terms and thus, better leads.

What lead generation elements need to be on a page?

Standards are going to vary from business to business, but think about it this way. One function your website should serve is as your worldwide 24-7 411. When you dial 411 what do you want? A long message? An ad? No, you want a phone number! You need an address! You are looking for the quickest and easiest way to contact the people you are searching for! That’s why you dialed 411; you want information you don’t have.

When prospective customers come to your site, how quickly can they get in touch with you? Is your 800 number at the top right of the page or in another position that is clearly visible? It should be if you want them to call you. Is your address easy to find? It should be if you want them to visit you. Are your calls to action obvious and working whether they be “contact us”, “click to call” or “quick quote”. They should be if you want them to contact you. Again, making it easy works.

Five “must” guidelines to generate leads from your website:

1. In order to maximize leads, you need to know who you want to bring to the site.
2. You must know how to bring those specific viewers to the site.
* A great on-site approach includes the right content, keywords, titles, description and other content efforts.
* It also means information of value, events, tools and industry calendars..literally something of value to the viewer.
* For off-site efforts that means press releases, PPC, posts to industry blogs and even traditional advertising as examples.
3. Once you bring them to your site, you must provide them with defined paths that lead to conversion (click submit) with as few additional clicks as possible and, very importantly, no dead ends.
4. You must also provide them with very clear and user-friendly calls to action. What makes a prospect click?
5. You must measure results (web analytics), test new approaches and continuously refine your calls to action. Constant refinement means constant improvement.

Simple enough to understand right? But the devil, as always, is in the details. Through good advance planning, analysis of your web analytics and a commitment to refine your approach, you can turn your website into a marketing machine!

Steve Thomas is President of The Net Impact, a Web Design Firm and writes regularly on SEO, Web Development and Internet marketing related topics. He can be contacted at steve.thomas@thenetimpact.com.

We have seen that you can increase your revenue by increasing your traffic, merchandising and improving your C.R (Conversion Rate). Though you should use all the three techniques, there is a particular order in which when applied will result to making more money more easily and consequently is more effective. This order has such far reaching effects on your total web revenues that it worth dedicated attention.

In trying to increase sales in your website there is a natural urge to increase your traffic. Simply double your traffic and you tend to double your income. Unfortunately increasing traffic is the most ineffective of the three. As we have previously seen here, you have two options in increasing traffic; first, you can buy traffic through PPCs (Pay per Click Search Engines) and/or you can optimize your website for Search Engines (SEO). Buying traffic is the more ineffective of the two. This is because every visitor to your site costs you money. This automatically eats into your revenues. On the other hand SEO is a specialty few internet businesses willingly want to tackle. It involves designing your web-pages to rank high in Search Engines like Yahoo and Google. This in turn results to increase in internet users who find your web-business. This traffic is free. Unfortunately the mechanics of SEO have a long learning curve few are willing to learn. And to make matters worse, results are not guaranteed.

The more prudent approach to increasing revenues would be first to increase your Conversion Rate (C.R) before merchandising and/or increasing traffic. And this can be attributed to two reasons. First, a higher C.R ensures you are making the most money possible from a given volume of traffic. A poorly converting website is equivalent to a leaking bucket. Such a website loses willing and able buyers which amounts to losing money. The cost of losing willing and able buyers can be enormous. Apart from the immediate loss of profit, there is the loss of repeat business. This makes other strategies like merchandising ineffective. All in all the cost of losing willing and able buyers due to poor C.R amounts to the lifetime worth of a customer.

The second reason to opt first for an improved C.R to increase revenue has to do with control. Unlike increasing traffic to your website, improving your C.R involves testing and changing elements within your website to find the most effective combination. Though not an easy task, the fact that you control nearly everything about your C.R gives desirable control that you can manage to your benefit.

Once you have a optimized your C.R, you can then reap the maximized benefits of other two techniques for increasing web revenues, namely merchandising and increased traffic.

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Last week we looked at Adsense etal that have proven to be both powerful and effective revenue streams as a compliment to your primary offer. However, most internet businesses still search for methods to increase their total revenues. Indeed most websites are producing far below their potential. There are three main ways you can increase your web revenues.

First, you can choose to increase traffic. The life blood of internet businesses is in traffic, your website visitors. No traffic means no customers which consequently means no sales. The more targeted visitors come to your site the more money you can make. For example, if your site has 10,000 targeted visitors a month at a C.R of 1.8% and you make Ksh 1,000 per sale, then your revenue would stand at Ksh180,000. If you doubled the traffic to 20,000 your income would automatically double without doing anything else. It is no wonder that this is the most preferred means of increasing revenue for most internet businesses.

This involves strategies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PPC campaigns, Article submissions and Link exchanges to mention a few.

Secondly you may opt to merchandise. This involves encouraging the already paying customer to spend more money. This technique that is so popular in our local supermarkets also has it uses online. ‘Back-end products’ is a common term used to refer to merchandising on the net. This is whereby once a visitor makes a purchase of your lead product, you overtime introduce them to other similar and/or related product- the back-end products.

For example, you can sell a Fitness e-book and make Ksh 1,000 per sale. Thereafter you can introduce your customers’ mail list to fitness equipment that nets you a profit of Ksh 5,000. Usually if you have gained your customers trust from the first sale, a significant percentage of the customers will make a repeat purchase. This automatically increases your revenue. One can keep recycling the same customer list making money by offering value through merchandising.

This technique is especially useful in introducing high ticket items that customer would otherwise be too cautious to spend on first time.

Thirdly you can increase your CR. For example a site with a C.R of two percent can be redesigned and reworded to increase it C.R to six percent. Such a jump would automatically increase your sales by 300% without merchandising or increasing traffic. Though the most potent of the three strategies it is the least used because of it complicated nature. It involves alot of testing and retesting of different elements of your web pages as well as website structure. However for maximum effect you should use all the three strategies.

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You may know that the conversion rate of your own internet home business website is much more important than the number of visitors.

A good website, which converts well, brings returning visitors through recommendations and bookmarks better than anything else, because that is the most important element of your marketing system.

1. Direct Your Website Into A Narrow, Special Focus.
During the business planning of your internet home business opportunity, you have done some sharp selections to be able to offer unique content and to be able to stand out from the crowd.

Now you should be able to write the consumer promise of your offer with a couple of words and very simply, that is your focus. Almost everything on your website should lead the visitors toward deciding to take that primary action. Nothing on the page should distract them and “lead them off down other trails.

The most used actions are to join your optin list, buy a product or get a free report. Make sure that you know what you want your visitors to focus on and get rid of the other distractions.

Many researches prove that without a clear focus, a consumer promise, the website does not succeed to reach the success, especially if it has too many calls into actions. The result is then, that your visitor will continue surfing.

2.The Website Must Be A Part Of Your Personality And The Visitor Must Meet You.
All internet home business connections are based on two things: trust and brand. If the site visitor will not meet the owner of the site, how he could trust a site and how he can build an image of the brand.

One of the best ways to build a unique website and stand out from the crowd is to personalize your site by putting your own personality into fire. Your visitors want to know your expertise and your history.

No one can copy your own personality, it is the utmost best way to build trust and brand loyalty in a unique way.

You can easily add video or audio to your website, and allow it to “touch” your visitor on an emotional level. When people hear your own voice or see you talking and when they see your body language, you communicate so more effectively than just with the written copy.

And how easy these two are to make. If you want to add audio to your internet home business website all you need is microphone plugged into your computer and if you install a video, you need a webcam.

You will find services that will take this audio or video, allow you to edit it with some clicks of the mouse, and then stream it from their servers or upload it to your server.

A totally splendid service is called Audio Acrobat. You can use it to have customers, subscribers, etc., call in and leave their testimonials.

You can record video from webcam to this service too. You can also upload video recorded on a regular video camera to this service, and then stream it from their website.

3. Use Your Own Credentials.
Imagine that you have just landed a new website and see just fantastic information, what do you think first? I am sure you will ask, what makes this site owner so professional that he can recommend these things to me?
So the owner must have a separate credentials page, where the visitor can read his experiences to be able to build a picture about a very professional, serious marketer.

Even better if the testimonials of earlier buyers will tell you, how this guy has served them or how they have benefitted?

4. Use Optin Form To Capture Email Addresses.
A short stats exercise: the conversion rate of your own website is somewhere between 0.5 to 1.0 %, so the fraction of site visitors will buy, but what you offer those 99 %, who are not ready to buy yet?

Another fact is that only around 1 % will buy during their first visit, so how can you speak to the 99 % of the visitor later to make a needed impact with the repetition? Normally the sales reaches its peak after the fifth visit.

The answer is that you must capture their optin email address during their first visit and then you have a tool to reach them over and over again.

By giving them a useful related free gift, a special report for instance, as a thank you present, they will give their addresses via the optin form on your website. Now you can follow them by the autoresponder during a long period of time and a part of your marketing is automated.

It is important to have a mechanism which take the visitor back to the point, where he has was before he started to fill in the form, because otherwise he may be gone. The form can be also on the popup or popunder form.

5.Let Others Tell The Benefits They Got.
The testimonials of your earlier buyers are more effective than your own words. When they tell how they got benefits to their businesses from your products or information with their own words, it will touch your visitors greatly, especially if you manage to get a testimonial from some known expert.

Testimonials with photos, audio, or video, are very effective. Testimonials with just a set of initials or with just a first name, have NO credibility.

6.Website Visitors Wait For Benefits, Not Features.
The difference is clear. Do not tell your internet home business site visitor, how good products you have, tell them how they will improve their lives. People do not want to buy 12 millimeter drills, they want to get 12 millimeter holes.

7.Do Not Focus On I, Focus On You.
Speak about how these great products can help you to make better earnings, because that is the whole idea, why you are on the market. Again: not features but benefits!

8.Offer The Right Payment Options.
Most internet home business website visitors want to pay by credit card or some payment processor, like PayPal. Make sure the selection of these options is wide enough and includes the most used ones.

9.Do Not Use Too Many Different Fonts.
Many website owners seem to think that the site must be fancy to be successful. That is not the case. If you think the two things, trust and great brand, the copy is absolutely in the main role.

You can use different fonts for some very special reason, to underline some important thing for instance.
Your pages should be built in such a way that your urgent visitor can go it through by just reading the headlines and subheadlines and to get a picture.

Remember the power of the P.S. The visitor should be able to go to the bottom of the page, read the “P.S.” where you’ve restated your promise and order without being forced to read the rest of the page.

10. The Job Of The Header Graphics Is To Promise The Main Benefit.
It should draw the attention and be simple enough to tell the visitor in one second, what benefits you promise to him from your internet home business website.

11.Underline The Guarantee.
A guarantee is an important element of the trust and the brand. It is a sign of a fair play and about risk free purchase. If the visitor will buy by credit card or by payment processor, he will get the guarantee anyway.

But if the customer claims his money back from the credit card company, it will pay you extra money.And if they do this with Clickbank, for instance, this company will most probably stop doing business with you.When you use a refund guarantee, it will improve the conversion rate but not your refunding rate.

12.P.S. At The Bottom Is An Effective Call To Action.
This is because many busy surfers will jump directly to P.S. to get the idea of the main promise. This is the case especially, if they have been presold before landing to your internet home business website with the article marketing for instance.

As a summary, your internet home business website is the most important element of your business and it must convert well. You may have found out that the conversion rate is more important than the number of visitors you manage to drive to your site.

The good news is that you can always improve the conversion rate by testing the different elements regularly. Follow especially the websites of the best performing internet home business marketers and think whether their ideas fit to you and your business plan.

Juhani Tontti, B.Sc., Marketing. The 12 Points Above Carry Your Website To Success And It Will Beat 99 % Of The Sites Online. Get More Information About This Topic From My Internet Home Business

One of the most difficult marketing realities to get your head around is this:

People will usually buy what they WANT
before they buy what they NEED.

This is particularly true online where temptation and opportunity lurk around every page corner.

A woman may need to get from her house, to work, and back.

But, she wants a Hummer H2.

Fulfilling the need to get to work and back could be a bus pass. But, the Hummer H2 fulfills her wants though the Hummer is serious overkill for meeting a transportation need.

Add to this counterintuitive concept, the filter that wants and needs are dominated by is our own personal perception. If you’ve ever spoken the words you don’t know what’s good for you, then you have some idea of how murky our understanding can be of our own situation.

I need to get to bed and get some sleep has frequently been trumped by I think I’ll have another beer.

So, if you come to the marketplace seeking to fulfill someone’s needs, you run the risk of missing the mark and setting up a sales system that won’t convert to very many sales.

This is not an exact science, but an aspect of your marketing that you should pay attention to. People will often TALK about what they NEED and dream or think about (or even do Google searches for?) what they WANT.

When you start to examine a market look carefully at what people are saying and the WAY they are expressing their desires and questions.

Words mean things. They have a meaning that begins in the mind of the searcher and are expressed in the context we find them online. Pay attention and when you are looking at discovering your client needs and wants always ask yourself to look deeper.

Consumer-society has trained us to eat your dessert first and it is not uncommon for a truly useful product to sit in the shadows of a sexier one that is just fun.

This is something that divorced people can often relate to.

Keep an open mind here and be willing to challenge your assumptions about your market as you look for the pony in the pile. You may need to start with a cheaper fun product and evolve the customer toward a more profitable needs based purchase after they have begun to trust you more.

Don’t wait around forever doing research. Reach a reasonable conclusion and move on. If what you are offering to your market is not what they want they will vote by not taking you up on the offer and you can learn from that and get better.

Barry Wayne is an online business consultant and project manager with 13 years experience in web development and Internet marketing.
Please visit his blog, 1Cat.biz, for more information on how to start a blog and use it to grow your busness.