Web Copy

We have all heard that “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”. Well, the same applies to website content. In this article we will discuss the importance of web copy and how to turn your visitors into customers.

Your website content should convince visitors that your service is either unique or superior to that of your competitors in terms of quality or is competitively priced. It should show your potential clients that you can provide the solution that they are seeking. Your product or service
will solve their problems, answer a dream, enrich their lives, and/or improve their businesses. You are the dependable expert that they want and need!

Your website copy plays a major role in establishing and growing your customer base. Web site copy creates the “voice” of a company, just as the look and feel of a site put a “face” on the company and on otherwise intangible products and services. On an e-commerce site, the copy plays a key role in closing sales as well as in up-selling and cross-selling products and services. Good copy delights first-time visitors, encourages return visits and propels both customer acquisition and retention.

Top Search Engines

Ok, so you may know how the search engines work and you may know that you need to be listed by them, but do you know which engines get you more bang for the buck? In this week’s installment, we will review the top search engines on the Internet today.

************************************************************
Google

Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the Internet's largest index of web pages in a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the web and provides updates to Google's index about once a month.

Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in returned searches.

Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines

In this article we will discuss how search engines work and how to use them to your advantage.

It doesn’t matter how great your website, if no one sees it, you’re not going to make a penny. You can spend days producing the perfect design, weeks tweaking the copy, and months writing the code and uploading the pages, but if no one knows where you are, how are they going to know they should buy from you?

When I first started selling on the Web, the first major problem I ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads on other sites, organized reciprocal links and joined Web rings. Those methods all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me, what turned my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber, was figuring out how to use search engines.

Sure, I’d submitted my sites to the major search engines as soon as I’d finished building them, but I didn’t really pay them much attention. After all, I figured search engines are just for people who are looking for information; they’re not really good for commercial sites.

Second Tier Marketing

In this article we will review the principles of second tier marketing or selling to your existing customers. We will also discuss how to cross-market and find potential customers that you may not have been aware of.

************************************************************
Importance of Back-end Selling
************************************************************

Considerable effort is required to get customers for your products. You design killer web pages, work hard for high search engine rankings (or pay for them), submit classified ads, etc. but still do not manage to sell enough. This is where the concept of back-end sales is useful.

Most marketers are successful because they apply back-end selling into their marketing efforts. Back-end selling is when you sell other products or services to your existing customers after they have purchased an initial product.

Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines

This week we will discuss the key to improving your sites listing in the top Internet search engines.

When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’ into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

***********************************************************
Ask your competitors
***********************************************************

This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has downloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then ‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build the Web page, including all the keywords that have been specially inserted.

Navigation

Finding your website is one thing, but knowing what to do once you get there is quite another. In this article we will discuss the importance of website navigation and how it can make or break your site.

The aim of a web site's navigation is simply to allow users to get to the content they require. For sites that have a large number of sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of these) the navigation plan has to be properly researched and designed. You have to consider different types of visitors and simulate the most common steps they would take to find what they want on your site and the navigation plan has to optimize this movement. For example the steps required from searching a catalog of items, selecting from the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart, proceeding to check out, to entering the payment particulars is a specific sequence that should be facilitated by the navigation system. If the sequence is haphazard, it could lead to frustration or the user may miss an important step and you would have an aborted sale.

Monitoring and Tracking

In this addition we will discuss the importance web site tracking and explain to you why it is so important to pay attention your current web traffic.

Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information, not to mention interesting. If your visitors proceed to purchase a product but then a large majority leave the site when they get to a specific page in the order process then you need to know about it. It could be that this page is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors.