7 Essential Processes for Online Success

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Will Edwards

Well today, over at the Warrior Forum, I read a post by Paul Myers, one of the forum moderators, and it made me smile. Somehow, it caused me to notice his signature and I went over and signed up to his list. The freebie he gives away for joining is a very interesting read. As I read the book, I made a few notes so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.

Firstly, I was impressed by his list of seven things that constitute what it means to be focussed. Actually that list was the main reason I wanted to make this post because I wanted to put it somewhere I could revisit easily. If, over the coming year or so, I manage to focus my efforts on just these things, I would expect to see a significant improvement in the bottom line (you understand I’m not talking about my physical shape here). I just thought I’d chuck that remark in as homage to Paul’s writing style.

In everything you do, Paul suggests, you should be looking to incorporate these seven things:

1. Sell Product
2. Generate Subscribers
3. Recruit Active Affiliates
4. Generate Targeted Traffic
5. Generate Links
6. Create Product
7. Build Your Network

It is an excellent list in my opinion representing the seven different processes you need to master in creating an effective business. I will be dealing with each of these items separately in future posts, fleshing out each of those processes. But for now, I am grateful to just have the list.

A second nugget I took from the book was what he had to say about the business of producing content. He says that three things to constantly bear in mind are to make your writing useful, relevant and interesting and he is at pains to emphasise the importance of those things.

Of course, he is right, but, I rather liked something else that he said, a little earlier in the book, about the same subject. He said that writing should be doing the following:

  • Ask Questions
  • Present New Concepts
  • Challenge Conventional Wisdom
  • Push the Boundaries

And that’s what I intend to make my own little mantra for inspiring future posts not just at this blog, but also at my other sites especially my Inspiration Blog. It makes a very nice statement of intent for what I am trying to do there.

Sometimes, the importance of reading or learning something is about giving language to express ideas that we already know. There is a lot of value in that concept, as I sometimes point out to delegates who attend my workshops. For me, that’s the real value I was able to extract from Paul’s book. You can get a free download here.

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Copy Writing: I Was Absolutely Disgusted

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Will Edwards

Today I overheard a lady talking with a small group of her friends, in a public place, in a quite agitated manner. I was not listening to their conversation as such, but as her voice rose and her expression became more heated, I happened to catch the line, “… I was absolutely disgusted!” She spat it out with some venom.

Naturally, my attention was captured for a few moments and I glanced across to see the small group of just three women who were deep in conversation. The woman who I had overheard was becoming more and more animated and her friends seemed to be nodding in agreement, “… it was so infuriating. I have never in my entire life …” she continued. Of course, I did then start to listen because I became interested in finding out what it was that she had found so disgusting.

I’ll tell you what it was in just a minute. But first I wanted to discuss the importance of developing good copywriting skills and, in particular, the importance of your headline. If you don’t write a good headline, then your sales pitch does not get read and secondly, if you don’t manage to hook people in those first few words, well … your sales pitch still does not get read. Those are the difficulties a copywriter must always face head on.

How do we get someone open our mail and read our sales pitch? If your email or your sales letter does not get read, then it cannot influence the prospect no matter how well it is written. So the purpose of your headline or your email subject is quite simply to get your sale pitch read. You need to somehow hook your reader and one sure fire method of hooking your reader is by leaving them hanging, wanting to know the answer to something.

Human beings are programmed to seek closure. That’s why this technique works so well. You ask an interesting question, raise an important point or leave something incomplete, in some way. You tell the reader that you are going to deal with that the issue you raised and then you take your time about answering it. The chances are that a good number of your readers will stay with you simply because they want closure and that gives you your opportunity to make your case.

That’s why I told you about the woman. It’s all very well me telling you about some technique, but it is a different matter entirely to experience that technique at work on yourself. You see, as we began to talk about the business of copywriting, one part of your brain still wants to know the answer to the matter I raised: what was it that so ‘disgusted’ that woman?

It is something of an art to know how and when to reveal the answer. If you leave it too long, you might still lose your reader. Having said that, if the matter is compelling enough, they will stay with you. In a way, that’s what happened to me too when I overheard that woman. I was not interested in their conversation at all, but when she made that forceful statement that I was not able to ignore, my brain wanted to know the answer too.

Now as it happens, it is amazing what can disgust people. In her case, I believe it was the price she had been asked to pay for a packet of crisps. If my memory serves me well, she had been asked for the sum of £1.65 – a little expensive perhaps, but hardly anything to get so worked up about. However, I am grateful to her for making me think again about just how powerful a technique the unresolved question can be.

Hopefully, you got the message too. If you wanted to read to the end of this article, in part it may have been because you wanted to find out what has so disgusted the lady in question. If so, then you also experienced this highly effective technique at work. Now think about how you can use it in your copywriting.

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Posted in Copywriting | Tagged conversions, sales page, Writing | Leave a comment

Where to Make Money

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Will Edwards

In this post, I am simply going to list all of the places I have found to make money online. They are in no particular order, but each of these sites represents a solid method of making cash using the internet.

Fiverr – Sell Services

Fiverr is a marketplace where you can sell services for just $5. The site keeps $1, so you actually make $4 a pop. You can sell pretty much any service you can offer there. Writing articles is a good example. You can get paid $4 for a 500 word article straight into your Paypal account. Of course, that’s not a particularly large amount for some people, so I suggest using the site as a kind of shop window into your writing services. See this post for more info..

Constant Content – Sell your writing services

Constant Content is another site where you can sell your writing. You can make a decent living as a writer here because you can advertise, provide samples and charge what you want. The standards at this site are extremely high. A single misplaced comma will be enough to get your article rejected. Now that’s good news for serious writers because it keeps away those who do not have a good grasp of the language. The result is that you can charge significantly more for your writing at this site.

eBay – Sell goods and/or services

eBay is not something I have had a great deal of success with myself, but that is simply because of what I tried to sell there. Nevertheless, it represents a great way of starting an online business. You can get other people to send the goods (drop shipping) to your customers and just take orders through the site. Definitely a good business model for some people.

Warrior Forum – Sell products and/or services

The Warrior Forum is an internet marketing forum. Actually, it is probably the internet marketing forum. They have a section for Warrior Special Offers (WSO) that allows you to sell goods, digital or otherwise, and services to their members. You have to pay to post in the WSO section, but the people who visit it are generally willing to buy so it can be a great model if you understand the market and get your offering right.

Flippa – Sell Websites

Flippa is a place to buy and sell websites. There are many people who make a decent living out of creating sites, installing monetisation methods (Amazon, ClickBank, Adsense etc), making a fw bucks and then selling (flipping) the site. It works because there are many people who simply do not know or do not have the expertise to setup a money making site. Instead, they prefer to buy one and then start marketing it.

Kindle – Sell eBooks

Kindle is one of those opportunities that will make some people into millionaires. Of course, in order for that to happen, you need to be an excellent writer and you need to have written an excellent book. But, if you are prepared to so that, you get the might of the Amazon marketing machine behind you automatically.

Odesk – Sell services

Odesk is another marketplace where you can buy and sell services, everything from accounting to web design is in demand. I have not used this site myself, but it looks very professional and it comes highly recommended. It’s definitely an excellent way of buying and selling online.

Payperpost – Sell your writing

This site allows you to do one of two things: either you get paid to post reviews on your blog or you pay people to blog about your site. It’s a very simple method of earning money for writing and also a simple way of getting backlinks to your sites.

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Posted in Make Money Tips | Tagged Constant Content, ebay, Fiverr, Flippa, odesk, Warrior Forum | Leave a comment

WordPress: How to Setup Your Blog

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Will Edwards

Now, as I mentioned in the previous post on how to choose a domain name, we are going to be using a WordPress Blog. There are many reasons for this. Here are the main ones:

  • It’s SEO Friendly
  • It’s Easy to Use
  • It’s Easy to Change the Design
  • It has Great Plugins Available
  • It’s Free

Perhaps I should mention that there are two types of WordPress installation. You can setup a free site on their domain or you can have WordPress hosted on your own domain. You must have your own domain to have full control over your own policies in relation to your content. You don’t want someone else telling you what you can and cannot do and you don’t want your blog to disappear because you inadvertently didn’t follow someone else’s rules.

Without a doubt, you want WordPress hosted on your own domain. Now, you could download the WordPress package from their site and, if your are competent enough, you can ftp it up to your own domain and follow their installation instructions. It is not particularly hard if you have a decent standard of computer literacy.

When I setup my own site, I did go through the process myself in exactly the way I described. It took me about two hours in total. These days, I can setup a WordPress blog quite quickly because I know what I am doing. However, as I mentioned in the previous lesson, we have an arrangement with Anders over at ChealWebHosting. If you take out hosting with him, he will install your WordPress blog for you free of charge, so that is what I recommend. In addition, he will include a shopping cart which is ideal if you want to sell products.

So one way or the other, you now need to get your site setup. Register your domain and get hosting (that just means storage for your site) and get WordPress setup. Here again is Anders’ link. He can get you over this little hurdle completely painlessly …

Cheap Web Hosting

Now from this point forward, I am going to assume that you have completed the above steps that have been covered so far:

  • You have chosen you domain name based on your primary keyword
  • You have setup your WordPress Blog
  • You have setup your Shopping Cart

So, the next thing we need to do is to take care of the remainder of the onsite optimisation that we mentioned in the previous lesson. Our goal here is to get your primary keword into those important places we previously mentioned:

  • Domain Name
  • Page Title Tag
  • Description Tag
  • Page Heading
  • Page Content

If you selected your domain name well, we already have the first of these items taken care of. We now need to get our primary keyword into the other places.

So login to your new blog which will be located at your new domain. Login as the admin user and you will see the WordPress dashboard.

On the left hand side, at the bottom, you will see the ‘settings’ option. Take the ‘settings > general’ menu option. You now need to choose your Blog Title and write a short description. This is very important for SEO (Search Engine Optimistaion) purposes. You want to use your primary keyword in your Blog Title and also in the description

There are other options here. The golden rule is: don’t change anything you don’t understand. You can safely change the date and time format and time zone. Leave the other things alone for now.

Remember to save your changes.

That completes the basic setup of your blog for SEO purposes, because each post you write in the future will give you the opportunity to make a new page and for each page you write, you will individually choose your post title and page contact – the remaining two factors.

What I want to do now is to continue with some of the more advanced settings for your blog. We need to install some plugins and we need to change the blog link structure. Let’s do the plugins first.

When you get used to it, installing WordPress plugins is a breeze. So let’s start of by installing a really important plugin. We want a row of social bookmark icons to appear below each of our posts in the blog. This will allow other people to ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ our posts very easily and, guess what, this will help us tremendously with the search engines.

Now, if you would like more explanation as to why this is important, read this on why you need to get serious with Twitter …

So, this is an example of how to install a WordPress plugin. From the dashboard, choose ‘plugins > add new’. You will see a little search box. If you know the name of the plugin you want to install, typ it in here. If you don’t, you can type a search term in and then browse the result to find what you want. For our example, type in ‘simple likebuttons’. At the time of writing, the first result was the this plugin: ‘Simple Likebuttons (Facebook, Google+, Twitter)’ and that’s the one I have installed at this site again, at the time of writing.

  • Click Install Now
  • Click OK
  • Click Activate Plugin

That’s how easy it is to install a WordPress plugin. We now have the three most important social bookmark icons (Twitter, Facebook and Google +1) added underneath each of our posts. Now some plugins do require a little bit of additional configuration after they are installed, but you will soon get the hang of the procedure.

Here is a list of the WordPress Plugins I would recommend:

  • Akismet – keeps spam at bay
  • Meta Seo Pack – allows you t optimise post titles
  • Pubsubhubub – announces your blog posts
  • Google XML Sitemap – helps Google find all your posts
  • Adsense Now – monetise your traffic
  • Top Commentators Widget – gets people commenting on your posts
  • WP Archives – again helps Google find everything
  • Zemanta – help you write posts

OK – that’s it for plugins (for now anyway). What I want to cover now is the post title structure. The default WordPress structure (for posts) is not as good as it could be. The default is this:

Blog Title » Blog Archive » Post Title

Now for SEO purposes, that’s not very good. What we want is out post title to be the page title and we can do this easily by installing one of the many SEO plugins for WordPress. The one I use is listed in the above recommendations - Meta Seo Pack. Once you have it installed, you can set you page and post titles to be more search engine friendly.

It adds a Meta SEO Pack option to your sidebar in the Dashboard. One of the options within the Meta SEO Pack is ‘Title Rewriting’. All you need do is set the “Title format for Posts” to %title% and you then have what you want – a search engine friendly title for your posts.

So that just about covers the basic steps in setting up your WordPress blog for the search engines. You now need to add good quality content to build your readership. When you add posts, take the time and trouble to use good keywords in your titles and, if you also followed my advice in the previous post about domain names, you will be well on your way to seeing some traffic.

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Posted in SEO, Wordpress | Tagged Domain Name, Facebook, Google, Plugins, Twitter | Leave a comment

How to Choose a Domain Name

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Will Edwards

This lesson concerns how to pick your domain name. Read it through once and then return to it again after you have had a little time to think. Work through the examples and make notes as you go. This information is something I wished I had understood before I started my own main site White Dove Books.

If I had understood this properly, I would not have chosen the domain name that I actually did. That means of course, that it is still possible to rank your site well despite making the fundamental error that I made, however, doing this little bit of preliminary work will definitely assist you in getting what you want i.e. good search engine rankings, so make sure you read it, think about it and apply it.

OK, so let’s get into the meat …

You have a single opportunity to rank your home page, so you should think very carefully about your primary keyword term. To beat the competition you need to do two things:

i) Get your primary keyword in all the right places (on-site optimisation)

ii) Get enough relevant, quality inbound links from other websites

Let’s deal with on-site optimisation first. It’s relatively easy. You just need your primary keyword in the following places:

  • Domain Name
  • Page Title Tag
  • Description Tag
  • Page Heading
  • Page Content

Don’t overdo it in your content or Google (Big G) will see that tactic as spam. Just use it naturally, but make sure you do use it in all those places. We are talking about using the exact same term in each of the above places.

With regard to your content, you should also make use the main keyword phrase but you should also use semantically-related words and phrases. That’s all you need to do to get G to understand what your site is about.

OK, so how do you go about picking your primary term? It’s part black art, part science. Let’s take an example and work through it. Supposing I was thinking about starting a new site on the subject of ‘Judo’ (I don’t know why I chose that). Here’s what I would do to research the best term to target.

First go here …

Google KeywordTool

Type your root keyword (judo, in this example) in the ‘Word or Phrase’ box.

In the left column you will see related keyword terms; in the other columns you can see how much traffic those terms attract. What you want to do is to target a term that has sufficient traffic and not too much competition (that’s where the black art comes in).

Click on the ‘Global Monthly Searches’ column and you get the keywords ranked in order of searches.

The term martial arts gets 7.4 million searches per month – wow! However, I bet there will be a shed-load of competition for it. This next bit is not an exact science, but it will give you a bit of an idea about how easy or difficult it would be to rank for that term.

Go to Google and type in “martial arts”

Of course, that’s not how people will search for it, but what this will do is give us an idea of how many websites may be actively targeting that term. When you type the term in, take a look at the number of results returned by the search … 124,000,000 results.

Now that doesn’t mean you can’t rank for that term; just that it would probably be very difficult. So let’s pick a few more terms from that same list that we got from the above:

  • “judo throws” 130,000 results
  • “what is judo” 69,200 results
  • “judo techniques” 22,200 results

Just as you would expect, as the traffic drops off, so does the competition.

Next thing I would do is have a look at the top 10 results for any keyword term that I might be now thinking about targeting. For example, let’s take “judo techniques”. So I would now go to Google and type in judo techniques

If we are going to be on page #1, we need to do a better job than the site that is currently sitting in 10th spot. That site, when I looked was ehow.com and notice the page that has the ranking is not the home page; it is … http://www.ehow.com/judo-techniques

Site Note: This make have changed since I looked, especially since this course was released. If that is the case, don’t worry, it is the principle that we need to understand here.

So we now need to find out how many links that page has and where they come from. To do this, head over to Yahoo.com (don’t use Google for this step, she is notorious for providing inaccurate information for this particular search).

In the Yahoo search box type the following:

link:http://www.ehow.com/judo-techniques

Unbelievably (at least for me) I can see that site has only 2 links!!! (We’ve hit gold)

The site above it, in number 9 spot only has 7 links.

This should be very encouraging because we can easily build more links than either of those sites currently has. We can get links in lots of different ways. Here are a few methods:

  • Article Directories
  • Guest Posting on Blogs
  • Press Releases
  • Commenting on Blogs
  • Forum Signatures
  • Social Bookmarking
  • We Can Buy Them

What we need to do to outrank those two sites is to get more links. But not just any links: quality and relevance are the watchwords.

Now, you need to be careful because Google trusts those sites and it does not trust our new site yet. So the thing to do is to build content slowly and build links slowly. Add one good article per day to our site and get perhaps one quality inbound link per day.

And pretty soon you could be on page #1 of Google for the term ‘judo techniques’.

Now, you remember we said we want our keyword term in the domain name, well here’s where it could get difficult. What we ideally want is one of these:

  • judotechniques.com
  • judotechniques.co.uk
  • judotechniques.net
  • judotechniques.org

So, I happen to use doteasy.com for hosting, so I would go over there …

www.doteasy.com

Type judotechniques in the search box and wait for the results.

As you can see, all the best domains have gone, but there are a couple I would consider using that are still available (at the time of writing):

  • judotechniques.org.uk
  • judotechniques.tv

The alternative is to be a bit more creative. We could expand our search a bit using terms like easyjudotechniques, greatjudotechniques, a1judotechniques or judotechniquesnow. It takes a bit of doing and you need to just work with it until you can find something that you are fairy happy with that does contain that exact match (it gives us an edge over the others that didn’t do it).

Using judotechniquesnow as an example, you can see all the domains are available including the .com

Most people don’t realise this, but Google does not rank websites, she ranks pages. That means you can achieve your goal of getting on page #1 of Google for a multitude of related terms provided you optimise each page for a single keyword term.

Summary:

  • You need to decide upon your domain name based on your primary keyword term
  • You are looking for a phrase that gets sufficient traffic and is not too competitive
  • You want an exact match domain ideally or a domain name that contains the exact match

When you have chosen your domain name, you are ready to get your site setup. We will be using a WordPress Blog for a number of reasons that we’ll do through in a future lesson. If you are sure you have found the domain you want to use, you may wish to go ahead and register it. If so, I recommend you use this service …

Cheap Web Hosting

Anders will setup your Blog and a Shopping Cart for you completely free – no catches. All you need to pay for is hosting and your domain and he is very reasonable too.

Now, let me make sure I emphasise this: don’t get your blog or domain until you have completed the research we have gone through above. You won’t be able to change it later, so it is very important to get it right at the outset. It might take you quite a bit of time before you come up with the right domain name, but this time will be well spent.

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Posted in SEO, Wordpress | Tagged Domain Name, Hosting, Wordpress | Leave a comment

Use Flippa to Reverse Engineer Profitable Sites

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Will Edwards

This tip concerns establishing a business model that is almost guaranteed to deliver results. Of course, there really are no guarantees in this business, as I am sure many will agree, but this I think, is as close as it gets.

OK, so we are going to use the site flippa.com to do the research. Flippa, as I am sure most people around here will know, is a site that is intended to be about buying and selling websites. Well, I have been thinking about reinvesting some of my income into other sites, so recently I have been paying a bit of attention to their site. What I have discovered is that this site is a mine of useful information for internet marketers.

I am going to give you an example so you can see how you can use this resource to your advantage. But this is an example only. It is important that you understand the underlying principle we are talking about and that’s what I am suggesting that you use.

So, first off, get yourself over there and click on the ‘Buy Websites’ button. Down the left hand column, you will see various criteria you can enter to find websites. Here’s some criteria I like to use, but with a bit of practice, you will come up with your own:

  • Auction Status: Still Open
  • Property Type: Established websites
  • Net Profit: 1 – 1000
  • Gross Revenue: 1-1000
  • Monetisation Methods: Advertising

Now, I don’t need to bother with traffic stats, PR or any of that stuff. I am just interested in established sites that are making a profit and I like to see that profit being made via Adsense. There are other things to take into account, but this search is a good start.

When I just popped over and did that search, I got 129 results – great, that’s weeded out a lot of crap. Personally, I don’t mind looking through those 129 results manually. Some of them will be rubbish still. But, we will have some gems in there and we can get full access to their business models.

For example, just doing that search, I found a site where the guy had posted Adsense stats, SEO stats, keyword stats, analytics and backlink stats – wow!

Now that site apparently makes around $7 per month via Adsense from only 100 visitors. It is a new site and there is no guarantee that this info is 100% accurate, but he has a page #1 listing in big G for his main keyword – very easily verifiable. So I have no reason to doubt his figures – i.e. they seem reasonable for a site with that ranking. By the way, I did consider buying it.

Anyway, you can see the ClickBank product he is promoting and the Adsense placement he is using – he says he is using a premium theme for varied placement – all interesting stuff. Now, I have used this site only as an example simply because I was seriously looking at it earlier today, but when you find sites that are genuinely profitable (and, yes you do need to do your due diligence) it is fairly easy to work out where their traffic is coming from, what their monetisation methods are and how many links you need to out-compete them.

Of course, there will be people who will tell you that you cannot trust the stats on Flippa and of course, you do need to be careful. As I said, do your due diligence, but with a little discernment, this site is indeed a mine of useful information. So I hope you can see the benefit of doing a bit of research on Flippa – that site is a goldmine right under your nose!

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Posted in Make Money Tips | Tagged Adsense, Business Model, clickbank, Flippa | Comments Off

Why You Need to Get Serious with Twitter

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Will Edwards

You know, for a long time, I have not really thought too much about Twitter. At present I have about 150 followers and I am on 5 separate lists i.e. 5 lists are following me.

Sure I have it as a part of my marketing mix. My blog posts get automatically tweeted and I have a ‘follow me’ link on my blog. But that’s it. I have not given it much extra thought.

I have read one or two Twitter WSOs (from The Warrior Forum) just to see if someone else has got the thing cracked and could help me see where it would best fit into what I am doing and, perhaps more to the point, why I should be concerned about it.

None of the information I gathered from the web and the WSOs really explained the power of the platform and many of the systems consisted of following as many people as you could in order to get reciprocal following. Apparently there are tools that do this kind of thing and you can ditch people after they follow you etc etc. None of that appeals to me.

But today, as sometimes happens to me, I relalised exactly why I need to take Twitter a lot more seriously.

I was doing a bit of keyword research. By the way, this is not my most favourite of tasks and if anyone knows of a good service, I would love to hear of it. However, I realised that my site has a number #2 position on page #1 for a ‘time management’ related term. So I decided to actually type ‘time management’ into Ms G.

I wasn’t on page #1 for that term, but scanning the page I noticed something very interesting. The company I used to work for were on page #1 of Google!

Now, I genuinely was just about to draft a congratulatory email to my old colleague, the marketing manager, because that company, as good as it was (and still is) at what it does, actually normally has crap rankings in Google. I initially thought what a great job that he must have done.

But then … it hit me!

The reason that the company was on page #1 was nothing to do with how well their SEO was getting at all. It was for the following two reasons:

1. I was logged into my Google account
2. I follow that company on Twitter

Now stay with me here, because this may not have struck you before either.

Sure you need pages that are optimised for the relevant terms, but you can get Twitter traffic without backlinks because you can clearly get page #1 listings in the SERPS for those people who follow you.

OK, now I know there will be people who might want to chip in and say stuff like: yeah, well that’s only if they are logged into Google and that’s true. But do you know something, with Google+ and the +1 button plus gMail, Adsense and a whole host of other reasons, my view is that more and more people ARE going to be logged into Google when they use the search engine in the future.

So, let it sink in if it hasn’t already, and before today it simply hadn’t for me, you need to work on getting a huge Twitter following because, in the future, the SERPS results for YOUR Twitter followers will be heavily influenced in YOUR favour.

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Posted in Make Money Tips | Tagged SERPS, Twitter | Comments Off

3 Hot Sales Page Conversion Tips

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Will Edwards

Here are three hot sales page conversion tips that I highly recommend. They are very easy to implement and they are guaranteed to increase your conversions. OK, here goes …

If You Use Aweber, Tell People on Your Squeeze Page

One reason that people fail to sign-up for your newsletters, free book, course or whatever else it is that you are giving away is that they feel they may not be able to trust you. They are not just worried that you will spam the hell out of them. They are worried that your unsubscribe link will not work or that, worse still, you won’t even have one.

So, if you are marketing to the IM (Internet Marketing) niche/crowd and you are using Aweber as your autoresponder, make sure that on all of your squeeze pages, you let people know that you are using Aweber as your autoresponder. This should increase your sign-ups. Why? Because people know that with Aweber there is a proper double opt-in process and that Aweber will always include a genuine unsubscribe link in every mail.


If You are a ClickBank Vendor, Tell People on Your Sales Page

Similar to the above tip, but this time for sales pages directed at people OUTSIDE the IM niche. One reason people fail to buy is that they suspect that you may not honour your refund guarantee. However, again if people belong to the IM market, they probably know that ClickBank itself will underwrite the guarantee.

Regardless of what the vendor says and does, ClickBank will always issue a refund is the customer asks for one, but people OUTSIDE the IM niche will NOT know this simple fact. So, if you are marketing OUTSIDE the IM niche, make sure you tell people that this is the case because people outside the IM niche have no idea who Clickbank is and what their policy is on the matter. This tactic will increase your sales conversions.


Tell People that Your Payment Processor Accepts Their Local Currency

Having analysed where my sales are coming from, it turns out that most are from the USA. Now that’s a good thing in my case because I actually target the US audience since I run a Personal Development site and I believe US citizens are more switched-on to the genre that most other countries.

Now that said, I get sales from all over the world as I am sure you do. It is increasing sales from this latter group that this tip concerns.

The thing is, quite a lot of people, I believe, do not understand when they see a ClickBank sales page with the product priced in USD, that the ClickBank payment gateway converts the transaction to their local currency. So by making this plain with a carefully worded line of text placed near the Buy Now Button, I believe you will increase your sales.

Now, here is the text I use myself …

Payment Securely Processed in Your Local Currency

This does two things:

1) Reassures the visitor that the payment is safe ‘Securely Processed’
2) Announces that your site handles multiple currencies

Just one more thing. Now I have absolutely no affiliation with this site, but you can get a really cool currency converter (free) and put it right there on your sales page by pasting a snippet of code. It automatically translates your prices into other currencies.

Here it is … Dynamic Converter

There you go. Implement these three little tips and watch your conversions rise!

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Posted in Make Money Tips | Tagged autoresponder, Aweber, clickbank, conversions, currency, sales page | Comments Off

The Google Panda Update

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Will Edwards

No doubt you will have heard of the Google Panda (aka Farmer) update; a major rewrite of the algorithm used by the search engine giant designed to filter low quality sites from the SERPS. Google spokesman Matt Cutts in on record as saying that the update was “designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites” and in addition he announced that “it will provide better rankings for high quality sites.”

But what, in the eyes of Google constitutes a low quality site and what constitutes a high quality site? As I understand the way that Google went about the process of updating their algorithm, they utilised a test group of humans to look at sample sites and rate them in terms of their quality. Then they started looking for mathematical methods that could be applied via an algorithm that would produce similar results.

Here’s what Amit Singhal, one of the software engineers responsible for quality at Google, had to say about how this is done:

Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site?

Singhal: That’s a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem. We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

www.wired.com

Notice that Amit says that the problem has not been completely solved yet and he calls the business of solving the problem an “evolution.” Now that should be good news for all of us who are committed to providing value. Essentially, if we continue to do that, then our competition will decrease as it is steadily eroded by successive algorithm updates.

In addition, we have an answer from Matt regarding what factors, in Google’s eyes, characterise both high and low quality sites. It may not be a very extensive answer but nevertheless, here it is. The following bullets are distilled from his comments.

1. Low Quality Sites are Characterised by:

  • Low Value Add for Users
  • Copied Content
  • Sites that Not Very Useful

2 . High Quality Sites are Characterised by:

  • Original Content
  • Original Information such as Research
  • In-Depth Reports
  • Thoughtful Analysis

Now, if you were to start asking yourself how you might identify, for example, ‘in-depth’ reporting, you should be able to see why many of the article directories would suffer as a result of this update. You can hardly call a 500 word article ‘in-depth’ for example and yet, that’s probably the average length of an article at the article site frequented by many internet marketers.

Word length will not be the only factor that Google will use to identify quality sites, but I am willing to guess that it will be a factor in the new algorithm along with other measurable characteristics that are common to quality sites. These factors would have been identified manually via the test group and then the algorithm would have been tested against that data.

What all of this means is that many internet marketers who have been utilising questionable techniques for increasing their rankings will not only suffer as a result of the changes, but I would also argue that they will continue to ‘shoot themselves in the foot’ as they attempt to improve their rankings with techniques that have now become unacceptable.

Of course, I have no insider knowledge at all, but I think that you can easily spot those methods that Google would consider to be questionable. Anything that runs counter to the spirit of the web is likely to get you penalised in the long run, even if it works in the short term.

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Posted in Google | Tagged Algorithm, Google, Panda, SERPS | Leave a comment

Making Money: How Not to Do It

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Will Edwards

After several years of fannying around trying all sorts of ways to improve my traffic using the usual sort of tactics frequently spoken about, I have come to the conclusion that my original plan remains the best one. So here is my number #1 tip for success: build a site that people will want to link to!

If you do this one thing, you will attract natural linking, which is exactly what Google wants, your site will steadily rise in the SERPS and you can focus your effort on the task that will deliver the most benefit i.e. creating fresh, original, quality content.

Now I know that there are many people who make a good deal of money by doing what is effectively the reverse, building sites that do not enhance the web overall. And I am not intending to knock anyone’s business model. What people choose to do is entirely their own affair. What I am saying is that such sites do not generally attract natural linking.

On the other hand, if you build a site that serves a community, you may well find people linking to you and thanking you for making good quality information available – all without promotion effort on your part. And if you can also add an affiliate program into the mix, others who want to link to your site primarily because of the quality will be even more likely to do so.

Now I am sure that there will be people who will want to tell you that it will take you a long time to see the fruit of such effort, but that need not be the case. Sure, you should do some initial promotion of your site using traditional methods like article marketing, social bookmarking etc, but for the longer term, think: quality first!

When you are tempted to start a new project, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Does the web need this new site?
  • Can I serve a community with this project?
  • How can I truly add value?

If you follow this little plan and create a site that really serves a community well, I promise that at some stage, natural linking will overtake your own generation of links and thereafter you will reap the amazing rewards.

So why not buck the trend? Chuck away those auto-blogging ideas, fire those $3 article writers and start building a site you can be really proud of.

It has often been said here that 95% of internet marketers fail to make any money at all online. Well, I don’t know how accurate that figure is, but it certainly makes you think doesn’t it? If only 5% are actually making money, then the number making a decent living will be very small; and the people who consistently reach and exceed 7 figures annually are rare animals indeed.

So, as I would like to help and encourage people who are still in the 95%, here is something you should think about very carefully. Let this sink in: if 95% of internet marketers fail to make ANY money online, then 95% are clearly going about the whole business wrong – QED.

What do 95% of internet marketers actually do?

  • Follow the Herd
  • Bombard their lists with low-value emails
  • Promote all the latest fads
  • Continually search for the Golden Key

There are causes and there are effects. Not making money is an effect, some of the causes of which are in that list. If you want to make money, it’s the causes you need to address in order to reap the effects you desire.

Remember that the results of 95% of internet marketers can’t be wrong! The figures speak for themselves. Watch the herd and remember that, all the time, you are constantly being given an object lesson in how NOT to do it!

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Posted in Make Money Tips | Tagged Make Money Online | Comments Off