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.

Managing Your List: Paid List Servers vs. Free List Servers

This week we will be discussing how to manage your email lists. It can be a big job but we’ll discuss how you can get a handle on it with minimal fuss.

As you build up your subscriber list, you’re going to find yourself with a problem. Whichever mail program you’re using, whether it’s Outlook or Eudora or something else, it’s just not going to be set up to deal with the kind of mass mailing involved with newsletters.

If you have more than 50 people on your list—and that will probably take you less than a week—you’ll need to use a listserv. Don’t even try to do this by yourself!

The Host

This installment will deal with finding the right host for your site; from the free to the very expensive, we will discuss what your options are so that you can find your “perfect host”.

A host is a server which provides a home for your website on the World Wide Web. Just as your computer contains all your files, so a host contains all the files needed to run your website. Why can’t you just keep all those files on your own computer? Because that would mean users would have to connect directly to your computer to see your website. Not a good idea—it wouldn’t be secure and it would make your machine run like a tired snail. With a host, you can simply upload everything you need to the server and your users can then connect there to see your site. It lets the site run faster and allows it to have all the security and extras it needs.

Making your website attractive, interesting, engaging and interactive

In this article you will learn the importance designing your website around your customers and their needs. A websites form and content is what will determine if a visitor will stay just a visitor or turn into your next customer. Today we will discuss how to accomplish the later.

To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling your own product/service or are selling for other merchants as an affiliate), you need a Web site created just for that - a simple, focused site. One that is easy to build, maintenance-free, low cost, credible, and a powerful traffic-builder and customer-converter.

What businesses are succeeding on the Net?

This week we will address the most basic question any Internet business owner will have to answer at one point or another…”what should I sell?”.

After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially, a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet. Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful place. In breakthroughs that show the promise of e-commerce wasn't all smoke and mirrors, four dot-coms recently reported their first quarterly profits. The list of the Internet’s publicly held moneymakers includes eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Overture Services Inc., Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc. and E-Trade Group Inc. Several privately owned dot-coms, including search engines Google and DealTime, say they have been making money, too.

How to attract affiliates

In this article we will discuss how to attract affiliates to you program.

One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates may not be very difficult. Given below are some tips that may help in attracting new affiliates.

Find complimentary sites
*******************************
"Complementary" sites are a sites that sell products or services that compliment your offerings. If you sell "gardening tools", a site that sells books on "gardening tips" would be a perfect affiliate. If you sell software, try looking for sites that sell computers or computer parts. Finding sites that already attract your target market, and can benefit from recommending your product or service to their visitors, is the goal.

Getting Rich from Affiliate Programs

Some times it pays to work with others. In this article we will discuss how to make money with affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes. You recommend a site to your users and pick up a percentage of any sales those users generate. You benefit from the commission and the site benefits from sales it wouldn’t otherwise have made. If you’ve ever gone to a website and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliate links.

You can run an affiliate program from a site you’ve already set up, or create a site specially to promote a product or service. As long as it brings in more cash than you spend on building it and buying traffic, you’re laughing.

Getting subscribers and generating leads for your newsletter

There are many different ways of getting subscribers to your Newsletter. Obviously, the first place you should start is on your website, doing this can get you an immediate flow of subscribers. You should advertise your Newsletter and place a sign-up box on every page of your site. Always use the sign-up box instead of a simple email link when you can because the results are far better. The top of the page is a better place for your sign-up box as it gets more exposure but the bottom is still good. Always include a privacy statement telling people exactly how you are going to use their email address and how you will keep it private, with all the talk about spam nowadays this is bound to reassure them, which in turn will increase the number of new subscribers.

Cultivating New Customers

In this edition we will discuss how to think out of the Web…out of the World Wide Web, in the never- ending quest for new customers.

Text links, banners and search engines are all ways to attract clients and build a customer base. It’s our buyers that’s we’re really talking about here. But the Web isn’t the only place to look for customers even for Web-based businesses. Some of the old traditional methods like word-of-mouth referrals still work just as well, and still bring me a fair bit of cash each month. Here are some tips to help you grab as many customers as you can while you’re setting up your business and getting your online marketing programs in place.

Creating Newsletters That Sell As Well As Inform

Running you own free Newsletter or Ezine can bring huge benefits to your website and profits. In this article, we will discuss how newsletters are one of the most important components for you to drive traffic to your website and build your online business.

The popularity of these newsletters is based on the need for information. The main reason people are online is because they want and need information and that is exactly what newsletters provide. Newsletters are mostly delivered via email, some however are delivered as HTML pages. Newsletters which are delivered as HTML pages still utilize email, as the webmaster will email subscribers notifying them that a new issue is ready.

Creating an effective newsletter

Creating a successful newsletter can be extremely rewarding. Subscribers and customers respond with glowing feedback, online sales jump and your customer relationships and brand
loyalty deepens. Here are some useful tips that might help in creating a successful newsletter.

Define Success
****************

Ask yourself “What is the purpose of your newsletter?” A newsletter is a substantial investment of company resources in terms of time and energy, and you need to define in as tangible terms as possible the purpose of your Newsletter.

Creating effective Ads

Today’s article deals with a subject that we all need to read, study and understand…how to create an EFFECTIVE ad.

Online advertising on the Internet leaves a lot to be desired. We have ads that emulate Windows-warning boxes. We have pop-ups and pop-unders. All of these are developed with the intent to make people notice them. However, most of them only end up irritating them. Advertisers, especially those with small budgets, can't afford to waste money on ineffective buys. In order to optimize your advertising buys, you need to concentrate on improving your creative.

Here are some tips that might help:

Choosing a Domain Name

In this article you will learn how to chose an effective and memorable domain name and learn how you can actually increase traffic by using an old, expired domain name.

Times wasting so lets get started…

In the physical world, you can distinguish a business because of its structure, window displays, or signs. You can tell that a bank is a bank, or a clothing store is indeed a clothing store.

In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story altogether. Your domain name is the only clue to your online business. You do not have visual clues: no location, no look, and no store design. Instead, users have to type in a word or a set of words to reach your site. Your prospective visitor has no way of knowing what your site is all about until he/she finds it and reads its contents. Who can ever tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that Excite is a search engine?

Create a Blogs

In this article we will discuss a relatively new intertnet tool – the Blog.

Blog (also known as Weblog) is traditionally a webpage where pre-surfer or a blogger “logs” all pages he/she finds interesting. In other words, it is a Web page that contains brief, chronologically arranged items of information. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.

Weblogs provide a series of annotated links to items such as news stories, and often include personal rants. They are maintained by one person, most commonly someone who is involved in Web design or some other tech-related field.

A blog is often a mixture of what is happening on a particular website and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people. Blogs can be used to introduce products to potential customers.