Archive for the ‘Needed Information’ Category

Three Things to Ask Yourself Before You Buy Cart Software

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

In today’s day and age of increased internet usage, it has become imperative to have an extensive, if not working, knowledge of the World Wide Web. Other than that, however, the internet also has become a lucrative career option for many, given its increased usage and ready and easy accessibility.

One of the most lucrative ways of earning money through this medium is to advertise your products online and have the buying and selling completed from the comfort of the customer’s own home. This beats having to stand in long queues and sweat it out in the sun!

That said, however, what also needs to be seen is the ease with which you are accessible to the public. In this age of stiff competition, even the slightest edge over your rival can go a long way towards ensuring better profits. This is where shopping cart software comes into the picture.

Even the most attractive website with the highest rankings may prove to be a dud if you don’t give shopping cart software due thought.

- Size – Always an important parameter, the size of the shopping cart should be chosen with due care. Agreed that you do not need to capture the lion’s share of the market at the first attempt. But since cost-cutting is also a major part of an enterprise, you’d do well to choose the size and capacity of your basket accordingly.

- Meet those Targets- Another important aspect to consider is to set solid, attainable sales goals or targets and make all-out efforts to achieve them, no matter what. A very important mark of your acumen as a businessman is how well you set your targets. What comes second is that you achieve those targets without fail (or overcoming failures along the way) so as to ensure that you stay on a steady growth trajectory.

- Ease of Use – Simplicity is the key when you’re looking to build a comfortable rapport with your customers. No customer would prefer a website loaded with the lingua franca when they could just as easily access the product from a similar competing website!

Why You Need Shopping Cart Software

If you’re worried about the cascading effects of conducting business online you need not worry anymore as ecommerce is extremely cost-effective. It ensures that the needs of your pocket are well taken care off and your worries are concentrated on other important things!

If you thought you had to pay to be an intellectual, think again. Ecommerce is also growing in popularity because with the vastness and the quality of information available online, you can be a walking encyclopedia from the comfort of your own home. It’s just a click away.

Thus one of the most lucrative ways of earning money through this cart solftware medium is to advertise your products online and have the buying and selling completed efficiently and easily from the comfort of the customer’s own home. This beats having to stand in long queues and sweat it out in the sun or cold, without a doubt!

Author Bio: For more info on this and other cart software topics please visit: ecommerce software

 

Three Questions You Should Ask Yourself When Starting Your First Business Website

Friday, April 13th, 2012

When planning to start up your first business website, you should ask yourself three questions:

1 – Who is your target audience?.

2 – How will your target audience find you?.

3 – How will you convert your visitors into sales?.

These questions are the key of success, many people don’t hassle, and then complain that their website doesn’t bring them any genuine business.

1 – Who is your target audience?

Think deeply of your target market, Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something, a product or a service.
Asserting that your market is anyone and everyone is far too blurred, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximize its prospective. Ideally, you should be aiming to create a niche.

2 – How will they find you?

Creating a niche will help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your website.

Think about what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you.

In fact do the searches yourself.

Who comes up in the top 10? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their websites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.
Those keywords, or key phrases to be more accurate, need to be included into your pages of your website, in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.

Be specific with your key phrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localize or specialize to get in that top 10, and the top 10 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your website, As I am sure you are aware of your own experience, if you haven’t found what you are looking for in the first page results, you look elsewhere.

The key to obtaining high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages that are pages on external websites that link to pages on your web. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth, where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to your website should be relevant, on-topic and ideally, the same keywords, especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation, your website be settled by what other preferably high ranking pages say about your page.

3- How will you convert your visitors into sales?

Don’t just tell them what you do or sell, Tell them why they want it, Offer incentives, freebies, discounts, or anything to get that business started.

Current research designates that the human brain makes a judgment about a website within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long time in order to make an impression.

So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page.

After all, it’s not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, especially if they have found you via a search engine.

Then make sure that you list the benefits of your product or services and the warranties you are offering.
Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors.

Finally, make sure that your website has a navigation menu that points to the internal pages. Your internal links are external equivalents and should describe the target page.

If you sell laptops, don’t call your product page “Products”, just call it “laptops”, and make sure that the links pointing to this page also called “laptops”.

This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will lead your visitors to that all important pages on your website.

Author Bio: -To Your Success : Shadwan Swed Shadwan Swed’s Personal Website

 

What Are Keyword Tools And How Do You Use Them ?

Friday, April 13th, 2012

Keyword Tools are a group of tools that provide analysis and reporting on the use of keywords or phrases on your (or your competitors) website. They are a vital set of tools in terms of optimising your website for high search engine ranking and also for analyzing your competitor’s websites.

Keyword tools comprise such tools as:-

1) Keyword Density Checker – this tool extracts lists of keywords or phrases from a website and calculates how often they occur – this is known as keyword density. This is a vital characteristic to understand as it has a high impact on how your site ranks in the search engines. Also very useful to use to analyze your competitor’s websites to find out how they managing to get high rankings i.e. what words and phrases are they using and at what density. It is also useful to check that your keyword density is not too high as many search engines will penalize this (it is known as keyword stuffing or keyword spamming).

2) Keyword Extractors – as the name suggests this tool extracts lists of keywords from a website in a form that is easily exportable. This tool is useful for generating ideas around which keywords or phrases you should choose to optimize for – particularly if it is used to extract lists of keywords from a high ranking but competing site.

3) Keyword Rich Domain Finder – this tool finds websites that have high keyword densities for the chosen keywords or phrases. The list of sites found by this tool can be an invaluable source of data for your keyword research and also a very useful piece of competitor analysis.

4) Keyword suggestion generator – another great tool for when you are generating your lists of keywords and phrases on which to base your pages or site. The Keyword suggestion generator tool will normally produce lists of keywords or phrases that are related to your seed keyword, this is usually in easily exportable format so it can easily be moved into other tools for further analysis.

5) Keyword position / rank checker – this tool usually comes in three different varieties, these varieties are:-

a) Multiple Keyword Position Checker Tool – this tool will check the ranking of a site for multiple chosen keywords. It is useful for checking your ranking for the keywords you are trying to optimize for in order to determine if your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts are paying off.

b) Multiple Website Position Checker Tool – this tool will check the ranking of a list of multiple websites for a chosen keyword or phrase. A useful tool to check how you are ranking compared to other sites in your chosen area.

c) Search Engine Rank checker – checks the ranking of a website for a chosen keyword across multiple search engines.

As can bee seen from the above descriptions of the various keyword tools they are invaluable for any serious SEO campaign and no serious web marketer should be without access to them.

Author Bio: Search Engine Submitter is the leading site for your search engine ranking needs, . For your FREE Keyword tools and loads of other free tools and resources get along to http://searchenginesubmitter.com/seo-tools/tools/cat/keyword-tools/

 

How and Why You Must Keep Your Website Visitors Longer

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

One of the secrets for the success of an online business is to keep your website visitors longer. How this is to be done depends on your ingenuity. The longer your website visitors remain in your site the greater is your chance of benefiting from their visits. Site visitors are very important guests. They are very busy people and will not hang around in any website unless they get what they are looking for or identify something that will really attract their attention as indicated below.

1. Write unique and quality content that will keep the visitors focused on your content. Provide unique information and resources for which your visitor will be for ever grateful to you for having visited your site. Put in your best effort to keep it that way.

2. Ensure that your website loads fast. Refrain from using too many videos and images. This is very critical because if your site takes too long to load he will click out and move on to another website never to come again.

3. Most website visitors remain for only a few seconds in a new website. Hence within this short time you have to attract their attention and show the visitors what your website is all about. Have large powerful titles and sub-titles to grab their attention.

4. Ensure that your website is easy to navigate so that your website visitors will know where to go and what to expect when they click.

5. Offer your visitor a freebie such as an eBook or free software that can be downloaded from your website. While downloading he will have the opportunity to look around your site.

6. Have a special page to entertain your visitors with News, Sports News, Videos, Jokes, Thought of the Day and other interesting content that will keep them interested, stay longer and entice them to return to your website later.

7. Provide free online tools such as link checker and search engine submission, which they can use right from your website.

8. Have an article directory where your website visitors can read articles related to the theme of your website and also submit articles for publication.

9. Provide a search option in your website so that visitors can search the content in your website using keywords.

Why are all these strategies adopted to keep the site visitor longer? You will certainly want answers for this question.

The longer the site visitor stays the more he appears to be enjoying his stay.

If he enjoys the unique content of your site he will not hesitate to link your website to his, to give his own site visitors a good website experience. You will thus get a valuable one way inbound link.

Some webmasters of quality websites might request you for a link exchange partnership.

If the website visitor is impressed he might suggest a joint venture which can be very useful and beneficial.

If he is convinced about your integrity he might want to purchase some of your recommended products.

He might also recommend your site to his friends so that they too could enjoy a good website experience.

If the visitors are authors of repute and if they submit expert articles to your site then you should consider yourself lucky to get authoritative articles without any effort.

You can thus see that the mantra is to keep the website visitors as long as possible and reap the benefits.

These website promotion methods will keep your business and the URL in the lime light all the time. This will result in ongoing conversations, discussions and word of mouth promotion for your business.

Author Bio: Copyright © Kanaga Siva. For a Free Newsletter and more Tips about website promotion and for anyone to start a successful Business from Home visit Expert Author and Marketer Kanaga Siva’s Website and Internet Marketing Blog that teaches ordinary people to make money from home.http://www.business-fromhome.com

 

Finding Keywords With Google

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

Keywords are king these days; without them nobody will ever find your website or your article at one of the article directories. There are a couple of ways of finding keywords with Google.

First of all you can use Google’s suggestion feature. All you do is type in the title of your post or article or just the beginning of it into Google’s search box and you will see suggestions appearing below the box which you may want to use as keywords for you post.

Another way of finding keywords with Google is by using their Adwords Keyword Tool. To use this you will need to have an AdSense account; once you’ve registered for AdSense you can use the login details for any of Google’s other tools.

When you’ve logged into the Keyword Tool, you may be asked to enter some letters and/or numbers that you will see on your screen. This is a security check to prove that you’re a human, not a robot.

There are two different ways of finding keywords with Google Adwords. Firstly you can enter your keyword or phrase in the left hand box on the screen or you can enter the url of a website in the right hand box for the keywords relating to that site to be shown.

I’ll deal with the first method first. After you’ve typed in your keyword or phrase, click on “Advanced options” under the box. Here you’ll see a number of choices you can make to refine your keyword search. For example, if you live in Japan, you’ll probably see Japan highlighted in but you may be targeting the American market, so you need to change the country to United States.

You can also choose your language, whether you want adult content or mobile search stats. The default is that all ideas relating to the keyword you entered will be shown but you can refine this further if you only want key phrases which include your exact term. For example if I type in “cat litter” I get “tidy cat litter”, “cat litter boxes”, “cat litter pans”, “cat litter trays” and “flushable cat litter”, to name but a few of the 82 results.

Down the left side you can select categories too so that you don’t get search terms which aren’t relevant to what you want.

You can sort the listing by any of the column headings and you can download the whole list or whichever items you check and you can see competition volume and trends.

When finding keywords with Google, you do need to know that this isn’t an exact science. Google themselves admit that their results can be out by up to 35%. This is probably because of all the internet marketers out there who are entering search terms to find out how many competing sites there are as well as other influences. However, this is a good, free keyword tool and you will get a general idea of search volume for your keywords as well as some good ideas to use.

Author Bio: If you’re interested in learning more about finding keywords with Google and other methods click here and sign up for the Mad Marketing Method free course.

 

Why Being Good Isn’t Good Enough

Monday, April 9th, 2012

Remember when. . .

You’d thumb through each trade publication you advertised in to see how many of your competitors were there? Or you’d do your best to have your mailing hit on a Tuesday or Thursday because those were the lightest mail days?

Good was enough when you were only competing against a single day’s worth of mail or a single magazine issue’s worth of competitors.

Today good isn’t enough because every competitor on the planet is one click away, thanks to Google. I know you know this. But a reminder will do you some good.

Today, you need to BE exceptional and be able to communicate it clearly and quickly. . .or click, they’re gone.

Being Exceptional

Yep, sorry, you need to get to work on that handful of things you just thought of when you read “Being Exceptional.” Continually improving what you do is hugely important. And difficult. And necessary.

Which brings up a couple points-

If you aren’t an exceptional distributor, for example, what part of your distribution business is exceptional? Pare down and only do what you are exceptional at. This makes you far more unique and much easier to recognize (and sell).

If you’re thinking, jeez, we are exceptional for our larger (more profitable) customers, but can’t afford to do it for every customer. I understand. You can raise your prices so you CAN afford to be exceptional for smaller volume customers, or specialize in just the size customer you CAN afford to be exceptional for. What does it cost you to give the type of time and attention it takes to make a difference? Make sure you’re charging enough to be profitable at this level.

This isn’t a “reaching for excellence” lecture. This is a how-you-don’t-go-out-of-business in 2010 talk. Just be good at what you do, and you do so at your own peril.

Communicating Your Exceptionalness

Is exceptionalness a word? No matter, you know what I mean. You need to communicate on two levels-

Basic and simple so people “get” why you are exceptional. Quickly. My clients average about 1:15 spent on the landing page from organic and paid search visitors. And, on average, 50% of your website visitors never make it past the page they came in on. You have one page and precious little time. Lose the buzzwords and corporate-speak bullshit. Tell your visitors why you are exceptional, be direct and tell the whole story on the landing page (or your home page if you get a lot of organic traffic).

Congruency. Everything about the experience of your website/brochure/webinar needs to reflect the thing that makes you exceptional. The best way I can explain is to invite you into an Ikea store. Notice their signage, how they dispense carts, how they check you out, their racking system for the cafeteria tray you just used. Everything (everything!) says simplicity, low-cost, good design. Apple is another great example of congruency, so much so you get what I’m saying without my saying anything more. Steve Jobs is a once-a-generation marketer and it shows.

Communicating how and why you are exceptional is challenging enough. Actually being exceptional gives you a good shot at actually being successful communicating it.

I know, this “being” stuff is new territory for many marketing people. But times are different now. Being good at what you do isn’t enough today. Marketing people can’t hide a good piece of software or good training program or good contracting job or good technical product behind clever marketing anymore. The best they can do is stem the tide; slow the decline. Marketers ARE responsible to their customers to offer the best, most exceptional product or service they can. And, oh, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but we’re all marketers. Ignore the exceptionalness of what you sell in your marketing and you do so at your own peril.

Author Bio: Hamilton Wallace is a small business marketing consultant in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is an expert in direct response marketing, including sponsored search, SEO, direct mail, message and story, and in creating simplified, effective marketing consulting solutions for small businesses.

 

How to Use Web Analytics to Your Advantage

Friday, April 6th, 2012

There is no dearth of people who have dabbled into the prospects of self employment but just because you own a business is no reason to give yourself a pat on the back. Today, its well known fact that if you have business you also need to have a presence online; regardless of the products or service that your company sells, you are expected to have at least a modest website. However, if we move away from this widely accepted norm, the crucial question is what is the website doing for your business in other words how is it helping you?

It is very common for web marketer to analyze the answer t this questions, if you have traditional brick and mortar business which also maintains an online presence you my not have analyzed this facet f marketing. The impact of traditional marketing media including newspapers, televisions advertisements, radio commercials etc is difficult to track and most business owners are used to investing money in these forms of marketing and then hoping that the customers foot fall in their shop increases; however, we all know that there is nothing scientific about hope. In simple words, you should be able to predict and measure the outcome of a well designed marketing effort. Fortunately, web marketing offers various tools with which you can measure its efficacy; web analytics is one such tool that can be used to help you increase the number f visitors to our site and grow your business. The first site here is:

Track and Track some more:

Use web analytics on your site to track just about everything from where the traffic is coming to visitor demographics and their behavior and action. For instance some of the metrics that can be tracked include:

-The site that referred a visitor to your website

-The search engine or keyword used which resulted in the visitor showing up at your site.

-The location of the visitor

-The operating system, monitor resolution and browser being used by him/her.

-the network

-The duration for which the visitor stayed on the site

-The web pages that were visited

-The bounce rate( this is the percentage of visitors who viewed a single page before leaving the site)

-Conversion rate ( this is the number of customers who buy a product or complete a preset task )

If you are planning on putting a web marketing campaign into action, either through search engines or by advertising on other websites or through emails you will need to have a clear idea about the traffic figures before and after the execution of the marketing campaign; this will tell you about the efficacy of the marketing efforts and to do so you will need to have web analytics in place.

Link the web analytics data to user action:

The data that you get from web analytics will only give you half the picture unless you link it to user actions; for instance, common metrics that you get will tell you that your bounce rate stands at 75% ;needless to say, thus is a very high; the metrics will also tell you that ideally the bounce rate should be lower than 59% . Notice how you are being shown what is wrong and what should be done without any explanations on how to improve the bounce rate or what is causing them to deteriorate. Similarly when you advertise on websites or through list, web analytics will provide you metrics on how many customers were sent to your website through the other site but this will not be enough information because you will not know why one website is offering better traffic than another or why this specific strategy is not working.

- If a given source of traffic sends visitors your way with a bounce rate of 85% or more; there is a very strong indication of the fact that the customers are not getting what they want form your site; this may be happening due to one of several reasons such as:

- The content on the site does not appeal to the visitors or the website on which the listing is placed may not provide visitors wh0 will be interested in you niche.

- The landing page or the home page may not live up to the promise made in the listing.

- The visitors do not find the information that you offer on your site good enough.

- Your site lacks ease of usability and attractiveness or has a poor design which sends visitors away.

When you know what is going wrong and why, you can correct it.

Author Bio: Seomul Evans is an Marketing Services consultant specializing in Marketing marketing health services and Hospital Marketing Consulting.

 

Setting Up Your Online Shopping Cart & Choosing Your Autoresponders

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

It is now easy to set up your own shop. Forget about the hassles of finding a prime position in busy business hub and huge investments related to it. Now you can virtually reach the whole world with your products or service from comfort of your home, if you can set up an online shop or get help doing so.

In short, to run your business it is sufficient to have a computer that has access to internet connection. If you are wondering what’s next, read on to know the simple guidelines to set up an online shop.

-Identify the products or service that you wish to sell online. Do some research about your probable competitors. Make sure that your products or services are unique in some way. When you are planning to open retail shop verify about the wholesale distributor network that will support you.

-Find a catchy name of your online store. This name will serve as the website address of the online store and also the URL of your shop. It is crucial to look for reliable, secured and fast service from host vendor of your online shop. The host service should be able to support ecommerce solution. An annual fee is charged by host for hosting your online store.

-Design and develop a smart landing page of your website. This is also referred to as “Home” page of your site. It is prudent and convenient to seek help from qualified web designers. Give your visitors and prospective customers an overview of products and services in the landing page. Graphical interface must enable them to navigate to desired product or gallery easily. Pictures, prices, short descriptions are necessary to attract visitors. Do not forget to mention mode of payment accepted by you and delivery schedules that are followed.

-Shopping cart software is essential part of your online store. It helps your customers to shop products from your site. The software allows them to indicate amount, quantity, size, color and other such details of the product while shopping. It also gives the total cost of product or products by including costs like shipping and handling. Payment option for the purchase process is also provided by shopping cart.

-Fast, secured and reliable payment system supporting payments through credit and debit cards is necessary for your online store.

5 Things to Look For In Your Autoresponder Package

These days, no one can think of doing any online business without some basic tools like shopping cart and autoresponders. Autoresponders have become a great medium for increasing the scope of a business and thus have become a favorite in the ecommerce world.

With automation, one can rest assured that email to the company will be sent and other promotional campaigns will reach the targeted customers / shoppers in time. The whole set up, in fact, may look quite lucrative to you if you are planning for business growth, so make sure that the following features are there.

1) The mailing list is the most important thing for the autoresponders to work to their maximum capacity. So the autoresponder software must be able to handle a number of contacts and many such contact lists. Normally the paid versions allow infinite numbers of both.

2) Customer data is another essential item of your ecommerce venture. Often a detailed break up of customer data can give you better result in the long run. With it, you can design group specific campaigns like for a certain age group, or a certain locality, etc. Thus your autoresponder software must be able to collect all the data that you want it to gather. You should also be able to customize the required fields of data.

3) The autoresponder must be able to send customized messages to specific targets like an individual, a group or each and every person on the mailing list depending on the nature of customization. The software should also allow you to schedule mailing times and dates in advance so that messages are delivered just at the appropriate time.

4) Tracking email and following up properly is a very important task that your autoresponder should perform. Such actions help you to find out whether that particular campaign is really working or should it be replaced with something else. The actions include checking how many mails were actually opened.

5) Finally, autoresponders should be easy to use and the company providing them should offer service, upgrade offers, etc.

Author Bio: For more info on this and other shopping cart and autoresponder topics please visit: http://www.1AutomationWiz.com

 

Measurement: Are You Honestly Measuring the Success of Your PPC Advertising?

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

This article speaks to small business owners and entrepreneurs who are either utilizing PPC (Pay per Click) or are thinking about using PPC to generate targeted search engine traffic to your Website. I personally am a big advocate of PPC and feel it is a very important marketing tool for many business Websites.

The challenge is maximizing your PPC spend and understanding if your PPC campaigns are truly profitable. I started this thought process about five years ago when I started asking businesses if their PPC advertising was profitable. The most common answer that I was received was that their PPC campaigns (typically Google Adwords) were generating targeted leads and sales but they were not sure if the ads were actually showing a profit. This is because most sales are done offline and Google and other search engines has no way to know if a sale was made and cannot report if the campaign was profitable or achieving a positive return on your investment.

Let’s say that you have a business that sells Outdoor Furniture and you have three PPC ads running on Google; Google reporting tools will tell you how often a specific ad is seen (impressions), clicked (click thru rate) and converted (customer takes an action such as submits a contact form). If someone searches for a Gazebo and your PPC ad appears; the searcher first sees the ad, then clicks on the ad, then takes an action to request a price on a Gazebo. Google reports all that information but they do not know if the Gazebo was sold. That is incredibly important information to be missing when making advertising decisions. Without knowing the sale was made and how much was generated it is very hard to know for sure if your Adwords spend is profitable and would be almost impossible to know what the ROI on that spend was. In addition you do not know which ads are generating a positive return and which ads are not. It is very beneficial to know the ROI of every advertising campaign that you do in order to make smart marketing decisions.

Hopefully we now agree that calculating the ROI of each PPC campaign is extremely important. Big business are already tracking this data, my goal is to illustrate how smaller businesses and entrepreneurs can accomplish the same.

Step 1 – The URL

Every URL has the ability to store what is referred to as variables. In a URL, variables are set after a question mark (?). Here is an example; www.company.com?variablename=variablevalue. What you need to do is set up the variables that your Website will read from the URL when a searcher clicks your PPC ad. My suggestion is to have a different variable value for each different PPC ad that you have. To keep this a illustration more easily understood, we will just use one variable name and one variable value in this example. By having just one variable value, we will be tracking your entire campaign, not separated by different ads. Here is an example of what your URL should look like: www.YourWebsite.com?google=1. The variable Google can be any descriptive word that you choose. You can name this variable Adwords, Yahoo, Bing or whatever works best for you. I personally prefer using Google as the variable name when I am measuring an Adwords campaign.

Step 2 – Extracting the Variables

When a searcher clicks on your new ad the URL that will be live at your website will be www.YourCompany.com?google=1. You need to read that URL and extract the variables from it. I use the Cold Fusion programming language to accomplish this, but you can also use PHP, .NET, ASP or any other dynamic language.

Step 3 – Creating a Session

There are different ways you can create a session for that user. The easiest way is to set a Cookie which will create a session for that specific user. This Cookie will follow that user throughout the Website as he/she surfs from page to page. Basically what the Cookie is storing is that this specific user came from a Google ad (variable name) and from the first ad your tracking (variable value).

Step 4 – Recording the Data

Almost every Website that is using PPC advertising should have a call to action. Some type of action you want the user to take, such as filling out a contact form, requesting a price, downloading a white paper, purchasing a product or service, etc. Every action should include the user filling in some type of information, with their name and email address being the minimum. That information being filled out in the form needs to be inserted into a database. Along with the personal information submitted you need to also submit the Cookie data into the database in the same row as the personal information. Do not forget to include the date in which the form was submitted, this is extremely important. At this point the application will know that a specific person took the call to action on a specific date and that person came from a Google Adword with the number one indicating which Adword this user clicked. This can be referred to as a lead from that Adword campaign within a specific time frame.

Step 5 – Recording the Sale

As an example; Person A come to your Website from Google Adword campaign 1. Person A then requests a price on a “Shed” that they were interested on your Website by filling out and submitting a “request for price” call to action. Person A should then be recorded in your database. In this case, Google will be recorded and campaign 1 along with their name, email address and date submitted. Now Person A purchases a shed for $2,000 offline. You need to record in the database that person A spent $2,000. If person A later purchases another item such as an Outdoor Table for $500, then this has to be added to the original $2,000 spend. Person A is worth $2,500 and came from Google Adword campaign 1 during the month of April 2010.

Step 6 – Recording your PPC Expenditures

In a separate database table you need to record the Google Adwords expenditure for each month that you want to run a report on. I run my PPC campaigns monthly with a specific monthly budget. Let’s use April 2010 and an expenditure of $10,000 as an example. You need to record in the database that you invested 5,000 between 4/1/2010 and 4/30/2010 for campaign one.

Step 7 – Generating your ROI Report

Your database has two tables; one that contains your PPC expenditure within a monthly time frame and another table that holds the sales data. To report on the ROI for the month of April 2010 you need to run a query that pulls the spend from Google Adword campaign 1 during April 2010 (table 1) and a query that adds how much revenue was generated from Google Adword campaign 1 from leads during the month of April 2010 (table 2). It is important to note that it doesn’t matter when the sale was made; instead we focus on the date in which the lead was generated.

Step 8 – Make Smart PPC Advertising Decisions

You are now armed with critical data to help you decide where to spend your advertising dollar. Let’s use the following report as an example; April 2010 spend was $10,000 and the website generated $50,000 in revenue from that April 2010 spend. Your return on that investment was $40,000 or 400%. I personally like to focus on the dollar amount and not the percentage in this measurement. Obviously the $40,000 was not all profit, you need to estimate how much of revenue is actual profit. For example 50% of a sale can be profit and 50% goes to expenses. So in this case out of the $50,000 revenue generated only $25,000 was profit, then you subtract the PPC investment of $10,000 to come up with a total profit of $15,000. With a positive return you know that the ad performed well and that you may want to increase your budget to maximize your return. Let’s say in June you increase your Adwords spend to $20,000 and you generate $60,000 in revenue off that spend. Now you take the $60,000 in revenues and cut it in half to get $30,000 in profit, and then subtract the $20,000 PPC spend to get a ROI of $10,000. This data tells you that you were more profitable investing $10,000 than investing $20,000 towards your PPC campaign. You should not entirely make your PPC advertising decisions off this data, but this data would be an important part of that decision making process. A better ad or a better offer could have generated more revenue. With a better ad, possibly the $20,000 spend could have generated $80,000 in revenue which would have given you a total profit of $20,000 (80K revenue – 40K in expenses – 20K in PPC expenditure = 20K in profit).

Author Bio: Jason Lomberg is a 15 year veteran Philadelphia Internet Marketing Consultant and the founder of Philadelphia Internet Marketing Resources and Philadelphia Website Developers Directory. Jason focuses on working with Philadelphia area businesses in helping them develop Internet Development and Marketing strategies

 

Become an Authority – Seven Hot Tips to Becoming an Authority in Your Field Overnight

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Why become an authority? Credibility, exposure and opportunity. Theses 3 reasons are why you should become an authority in your field. The best way is to become an overnight authority in your market.

Credibility

You get more sales and more customers due to this visibility. You can do this by contacting magazines and write articles for them for free. This will give you the exposure to a vast free user base without spending any money!

Look the Part

Your Brand is the most important part of yor business. People are looking at your brand and build a perception of you and your company are when they interact with you. A logo is part of your marketing and makes you recognisable..

Start an article Campaign

Cover your market by saturating your market with the products and service. The idea of the article is to teach and not to sell. This will boost your traffic overnight. Submit these articles to article directories using articles submission services. At the end of the article use the about box to promote your site.

Leverage your articles. Post the same articles to your blog and this is where people most likely buy from you as they see what you are talking about and like what they see. Your articles will teach them how to do things.

Start a newsletter

Create a weekly or bi weekly or monthly newsletter and feed them content on a regurlar newsletter. This way you enforce what you tell people and they will trust you.

Research top blogs

Research the most popular blogs, find the blog owner and offer to write articles to post on their blog with good content which teaches their users. They get content for free and you get instant visibility. This creates success through association with this blog owner.

Interviews

This establishes you as an authority, to do this make yourself available to be interviewed. This creates trust and drives people to your sites. In the interview give people information on where they can find information about you. Done overdo it or try and sell let curiosity do the rest.

Write a book

This does take time but it creates credibility as people see you in print. You can write a 60 – 80 page book with tips on your market and gets you visiblity. This will help you gain traction in a market like never before.

Be a player

You are not a player until you have 20 product earning you money in your market. This makes you visible.

They key to do this is to doing it fast. This will overlap the promotions and they will see your name, your face and that you are a authority in the market. When you are everywhere it increases your visibility and trust. This will only be the case if the information you provide is of valuable service.

They key to do this is to doing it fast. This will overlap the promotions and they will see your name, your face and that you are a authority in the market. When you are everywhere it increases your visibility and trust. This will only be the case if the information you provide is of valuable service.

Author Bio: I invite you to to find out this and more by coming to my website to download your FREE article on how to become an authority. To do this go to become an authority and sign up for the FREE newsletter and the tools you need to do this. Lance Lovelady is a avid internet marketer to find out more go to Dragons Gate marketing and sign up to his site for more free information.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: article marketing, become an authority, authority tips, authority training, authority marketing


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