Posts Tagged ‘ecommerce’

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Why People Are Failing At Affiliate Marketing

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

This article is about the reasons for failing at Internet marketing. There are many reasons why people fail at Internet marketing and everything else for that matter. Most people who write on this subject will say that the first cause is lack of effort, the second is lack of creativity and the third is lack of focus and I agree that these are the three main reasons for failure, but I want to look at some of the other reasons for failing at Internet marketing

Shortage of helpful content is one of these reasons for failing at Internet marketing. Too many inexpert Internet marketers focus on earning money and they believe that they can best accomplish this by firing a shotgun of web site banners at their visitors.

The secret here is so obvious that nobody is trying to keep it, but, visitors to your web site have not come to admire your banners. They have come to be educated, to amuse themselves or to solve a problem they have. And they want it free, so your banners are the last thing on their minds when they arrive. Particularly if they off subject. You have to have articles that are pertinent to the content of your site.

The more pertinent articles the better. The best kind are totally original and unique to your website, however, some marketers cannot write well and others cannot pay to have them written for them. These people can get articles free of charge from article databases (just Google it).

The main snag about this is that you will need to keep the resource box at the end of the article on your web site. This will allow some of your visitors to leak away, but certainly not all.

I have several such sites and they are doing all right. A website of other writers’ content is very easy to make, so you could have a website up in a day, if you want to swiftly create a website around a merchant’s special offer that does not fit into your existing websites. This can be very useful, especially if you want to build up a portfolio of say, 150-200 websites.

The trick here is to get your visitor to click on your ONE high-paying advert rather than leak out by clicking the link at the foot of the article. You can do this by putting the advert in the right place and prominent. The articles should concentrate on the keywords of the product you are promoting.

Those wishing to be successful Internet marketers must be prepared to keep acquiring knowledge. The Internet changes rapidly and new techniques and media are being devised every month. Twitter has only been around for four years and it just received its 16 billionth tweet. How long have you known about Twitter?

Have you learned how to harness it for marketing yet? Even if Twitter does not appeal to your object audience, you should have learned what is has to provide by now, so that you can make an informed decision.

Maybe, one day you will find a product to market where Twitter can be of assistance. Keep learning and be prepared. This all boils down to hard work, because there is always someone claiming to have come up with the next Myspace or Twitter.

While you are taking a rest from researching your next product or project, or the next social medium, you ought to improve your knowledge of programming or editing so that you can make improvements and adjustments to your web site yourself in order to keep it looking new.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is currently concerned with Affiliate Article Marketing. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at The Best Sales And Marketing Strategy.

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Keyword Selection And Search Engine Optimization Are Vital

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Keyword selection and search engine optimization are vital tools in producing and running a successful website. Before we continue talking about keyword selection and search engine optimization, I want to make sure that we all understand what the terminology is saying.

Keywords are the words chosen by you to define your site. They are the words that you hope to rank well for in Google. So, for example, if you want to have a web site selling ‘fashion’ – ‘fashion, fashionable, high fashion, haute couture’ may become your keywords (more on this later).

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is concerned with presenting your work – the web site and any text associated with it – in such a way that search engines find it simple to crawl and index, which enables people to find you on the Internet.

Let’s use Google as an example of a search engine – after all, it is the largest, most used and so most important. Google wants to supply its users with the best results – that is, most relevant results – that it can for every keyword entered, in order to improve customer satisfaction.

Therefore it has built up an enormous database of which keywords are on which sites. Then ‘all’ has to do is rank the sites by popularity and, in theory, the most relevant websites ought to pop up for each keyword typed in.

Now there is you, or me, with our dreams of a web site on fashion. If you make ‘fashion’ your keyword, you will be taking on the colossal fashion houses and huge department stores with their colossal budgets and gigantic websites head to head. Who do you imagine is going to win?

It is a no-brainer. You will never even get to page 20 in Google search results. In short, you will have no business. But what if you used a long-tail keyword (LTKW) and focused your website? Say, use the LTKW ‘fashionable plus size black dresses’ and construct a web site on that. It might be a keyword that no one else has thought of.

This is why keyword selection is important and there are numerous books and articles written about it. It is a precise job, a bit of a slog, but some individuals, like me, actually enjoy it. Or you could automate the task.

So, that is the first stage: finding relevant keywords to your business so that you have a opportunity of being listed on the first page of Google for that keyword. The second stage is making your web site search engine friendly so that Google can crawl it and index it for your keywords.

If you do not do this correctly, Google’s spiders will crawl off onto another web site and it may be a whilst before they come back, which leaves your web site in still water.

This piece is too short to go into this colossal subject in any worthwhile way, but I will strive to give you the most relevant pointers.

Keep your web site focused on a small range of products and define and use keywords for every item, but do not over use them. Do not repeat a keyword phrase simply for the sake of it.

Make your internal links simple to find by using nav bars, menus and sitemaps.

Do not have lots of external links for your visitors to go off to, make your site interesting enough for surfers and spiders to want to remain there.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several subjects, but is now concerned with the SEO Content. If you want to know more, please visit our website at PLR Articles

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Which Affiliate Programs You Should Choose

Saturday, July 9th, 2011

Naturally, the first filter that you should apply to any potential affiliate programs is relevance. While thinking about which affiliate programs you ought to choose, you have to judge how that affiliate program fits into your web site. The reason for this is that visitors to your web site will expect to see something on the topic matter.

If I Google ‘teddy bears’ and when I arrive at the site, there are only ads for rocking horses, Forex and winter cruises, I am not going to be best pleased. The first principle is to offer people what they are searching for – stay focused.

Does the supplier charge anything? Some suppliers may try to charge you a ‘joining fee’, a ‘registration fee’ or ‘handling fee’ – just give them a wide berth. It ought to be free to join an affiliate scheme, you should not have to pay to have the ability to sell someone else’s items.

In a similar vein, what is the minimum payout amount? A lot of firms will not pay out less than $50, some even $100. This is a rip off. It is a factor to help you choose between one supplier and another – a deciding factor. If you are using three or four suppliers on your site, you might have to earn $300-400 before you are paid out!

Do they charge to process your payment too? They should not actually, does your employer make you pay to receive your wages? It is the same principle. And how often do they pay out, weekly, monthly, quarterly?

Do you like their creatives, that is their banners and other adverts? There is a great deal of proof that the regular, old fashioned banner ad of 468×60 is not very effective any more. Look for variety – boxes and skyscrapers. Otherwise, are you able to create your own?

Do they publish statistics on how effective their creatives are? What is the average conversion rate for each banner? That is, how many views does it take to get a hit and how many hits to make a sale?

Do they permit you to make a downline? That is, if someone visits your site and decides to sell orchids too, will you be given a part of the commission on that affiliates sales? You should be.

What is the amount of the average sale and how much pay out will you make on that? Actually, you want to be getting at least a few dollars a sale; a few cents is no use, unless you are receiving thousands of visitors a day.

Create a couple of questions and send them to ‘support’. Do they give satisfactory solutions? Are they quick to respond? And last but not least, would you by anything from the firm? Does their site look professional? Is the sales page convincing?

There is such a great deal of choice when it comes to choosing a supplier that you can afford to have high standards. Take your time, go for the best, and you are less likely to have problems later.

Owen Jones, the autor of this piece, writes on several subjects, but is now involved with the SEO Content. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at PLR pieces

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Why Is Viral Advertising So Powerful?

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

Viral advertising is the art of encouraging other Net users to pass your adverts around the Net free of charge. This is a very efficient, very cheap and yet very fast manner of advertising. For example, you could compose an advertisement, send it to 100 surfers who each send it to 100 (10,000 surfers in a couple of hours), who send it to 10 friends, who send it to 10 friends. That means 1,000,000 surfers can have read your ad in a day.

And it is free and takes minutes to do, although it will indubitably take longer to plan. So, how can you instigate viral advertising techniques into your promoting? The most common methods of attaining this are by advertising a web site using email and instant messaging.

Viral advertising is virtually free, not completely free because you require an Internet connection and a computer, although you can do it from an Internet cafe anywhere in the world. Viral messages can be quite narrowly focused. How can you accomplish this targeting?

Well, it is quite simple really because ‘birds of a feather flock together’. If you send your message concerning one of the latest games to 100 pensioners, it almost certainly will not reach 1,000 surfers, but if you sent the same message to 100 teenagers, you probably will reach 1,000,000 fairly quickly.

This ability to focus combined with the ease of the click means that the response rate is fairly instant – so fast that the advertisement-message goes out in the morning and people are clicking an hour later, virtually as soon as they receive it. This is instant profits for scarcely any expenditure.

However, because viral advertising is so swift, your marketing material also has to be up to the minute as well. For instance, if a game manufacturer is offering a 20% discount voucher off a game beginning from the 15th, you need to be finished to send out your emails or instant messages as soon as the 15th breaks. You could try the 14th, but you run the risk of your message being deleted or forgotten about and by the 16th someone else will already have sent it out.

So, what form do these viral marketing messages take? I can tell you some of the most common forms, but really, the best ones are inventive, unusual, quirky and unique. You could pass around a good joke or collection of jokes on a theme that matches the subject of your advert. Let’s say gamers or computers, to stick with our example.

Years ago, there were some fantastic examples taken from computer support centres doing the rounds. I wager someone made thousands out of them. You might pass around photos of birds, if you are selling bird seed; racing cars if you are selling tyres.

You could send out a personal recommendation, if enough surfers think that you know what you are talking about and at the bottom of each email that you send out is a link back to your sales page. These messages are normally forwarded en masse without editing, so your link goes around the planet on a tidal wave of viral marketing.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with whether sitemaps give websites a boost. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at PLR Articles

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How To Write A Good Sales Letter

Monday, July 4th, 2011

Have you ever been reading an advertisement and know that you would like to buy the product? Then you step back a bit and wonder why you actually need that thing? Occasionally you come across an advert that is so convincing that you have that credit card in your hand before you know what you are doing. The advertisement has put you in a trance, in a purchasing frenzy. But how did the writer do that to you?

Well, advertisement writing or copywriting is a skill for certain, but it can be learned. Most people can compose a decent ad because there are scientific steps that have been identified in a good sales letter, although what goes into those steps is an art.

The first thing to do is work out who you are going to be talking to. We do this each time we speak; we look at the person and make a judgment how to speak to that person. It is harder when writing because you cannot see who you are talking to, but you still have to attempt to do it. Are they surfers, are they mothers, welders, yachtsmen, car-owners, who?

Work out why anyone ought to purchase your product rather than someone else’s. What makes your product so extraordinary? This is your key selling point. You have to be persuasive. People have heard of all the Net scams are they are very cautious. Who can blame them? So, give all the proof that you are sincere that you can muster.

Tell your prospective customer |about the benefits of your product. What will your product do for the customer how will it change his or her life? Think about the target audience, work out their problems and how you can triumph over them.

For instance, mothers are concerned about not hearing their baby crying in the next room. Answer? Your baby alarm is sensitive to the slightest noise and will relay it to the speaker without fail. A welder is worried that he will develop arc-eye, but your goggles are designed to prevent arc-eye.

Once you have written your sales letter from the point of view of a salesman, re-read it several times, but from the point of view of your target audience. Would your sales letter sell you on the product? If not, alter it and keep altering it. If your sales letter raises any misgivings, it should answer them. Do not give your intended audience a opportunity to vacillate or to say no.

Once you have your prospective customer on your side, you have to persuade them to take the plunge, to act now. You have to to give what is called ‘a call to action’ and you have to give them a reason to act now. So, you tell them to ‘click here now’ and you tell them that if they order today they will get a special bonus of ….

Always give something as a free bonus. People like to think that they have gotten a decent deal and if they are given a bonus, then they have to have gotten a good deal. Treat the bonus as you did your main product. Tell them how much it is worth and why and then say that it is free with your product if they purchase now.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our web site at Sales Force Tools

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Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Popular?

Monday, June 27th, 2011

There are more and more people trying to make money on the Net each day. Many are from the West, but even more are from Third World countries. Some people from the West are scared of the economic downturn and are searching for a backup to their current job and others dream of the millions that the the media likes to say that teenagers are earning on the web.

People from Third World countries can triple their wages by working on line. After all, if the family is earning $1 a day, they should be able to earn three more on line, they think. That is just one affiliate sale a week in lots of cases at the regular rate of 10% of sale cost.

Affiliate marketing is the most common means of attempting to make money on line for a number of reasons. The first reason is because it is the easiest way to get started and the second is that many people are worried about composing – particularly in English, if English is not their first tongue. Creating a web site is not a problem to many surfers who use the Net a lot.

Beginners to the Internet imagine that earning money on line is as simple as copying a couple of affiliate links on to a web page and spamming the world with their URL. This approach does not work, but it is the reason for so much of the junk email in your inbox each day.

There are professional spammers and even criminals on line for sure, but there are also hundreds of millions of optimistic teenagers sending out emails from cyber cafes all around the world.

The problems for these young affiliate marketing hopefuls is basically twofold. The difficulty of not being able to compose a credible page of prose in English, more on which later and a lack of cash and especially an International credit card.

These aspects are concerns, practically insurmountable concerns because being able to compose is indispensable to the best form of marketing and being able to pay by credit card is indispensable to the other best methods of marketing.

The number one all time best method of making affiliate sales is to compose a personal recommendation on a product based on personal experience with that product. So, if you cannot purchase the product and you cannot compose, you have big problems indeed. It is a gaffe that most affiliate marketers make, to think that they have to compose a sales page.

No, no and no, you do not. In most instances the company you are selling for has spent hundreds if not thousands on convincing sales pages written by professionals. You would have to be very hot to beat their efforts. Your work as an affiliate is to pre-sell by writing on your experience with the object and providing a forward link to the sales page.

If you cannot do that, you can try the next best ways: PPC (pay per click) – you pay for each click on your advert whether that leads to a sale or not. Adsense is the number one promoter here. PPI (pay per impression) – you pay each time your advert appears on the publisher’s network, whether it leads to a sale or not. In both cases, you need a credit card.

This is why there is so much spam, there are millions of people who cannot write well enough in English and/or who do not have a credit card to pay for the alternatives.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our website at Sales Force Tools

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SEO Tips For Blogs

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

Blogs, originally known as web logs, were developed for web masters to document changes they made to web sites. However, blogs have evolved into entities, specialized web sites in their own right. Blogs can be used as an on line diary or they can be used for SEO (search engine optimization) reasons to bolster up a web site.

Blogs can either be written by only its owner or members may be able to post entries as well. These external entries can be posted automatically or they can be kept to be scrutinized by an administrator first before being posted. Blogs are well-liked by search engines because they tend to be ‘current’, that is, updated frequently, whereas web sites frequently lay unchanged for months. In other words they are ‘static’.

However, there are a couple of methods that you can give your blog a helping hand to climb in the search engines’ rankings. Let us take a look at some of these SEO pointers below:

A blog ought to be themed. That is it should focus on a target audience, a niche, and not wander off that topic. You want to build up a focused readership of surfers who are interested in one small topic, like flying petrol-powered model aircraft.

A themed blog will have a high density of keywords that the search engines consider to be related or on-topic. This will help your blog rise in the rankings – it is an organic, that is, not forced, form of SEO.

In common with web site SEO, the blog ought to have a name that reflects what it is about. Resist the temptation to call a blog on cooking cakes after yourself or ‘fat and fruity’ or something silly like that. A blog on cooking cakes should have the words ‘cooking cakes’ in the title or URL.

In order to do this in the right manner, you will require to pay for the blog’s domain name and host it yourself. If you go the cheap option and use a free blogging site like Google’s Blogger, decide on your blog’s name carefully and strive to have it categorized accurately.

The titles of your posts should also be chosen carefully to mirror the content of that article because each piece will almost certainly be a page in the blog, so its title becomes part of its URL

Be certain that your blog pings (that is ‘tells’) the blog registers after every post. This builds links back to your blog and search engines rank blogs and web sites by the number of links pointing back to it.

Acquiring these links or backlinks ought to be your foremost priority after posting an piece a day. Acquiring backlinks is a massive issue all on its own, but two easy methods are to make a signature file (sigfile) with a link to your blog.

Add this sigfile to the foot of every email you send out and join forums and blogs which are on the same topic as your blog. Post to those places and be sure that your sigfile is added to each post.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with whether sitemaps give websites a boost. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at PLR Articles

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Boost Your Sales Over The Short Term

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

There are fairly simple principles to follow if you want to boost sales. In fact, it is so simple that it is scarcely worth mentioning. The way to boost sales is to bring more people to see your product or an advert of your product.

If you can say that 5% of the population want to purchase your product, then to boost sales from 50 to 500, you only have to get ten times as many people to notice you. Easy is it not?

The way the big professional businesses accomplish that increase in viewers is to throw millions or even billions of dollars into an marketing budget and make use of nationwide or even worldwide promoting campaigns.

Assuming that you are not an owner of a firm that can afford to do this, the question is: how can you attract more visitors to your website?

I am assuming here that you already have a web site that converts traffic (in other words visitors) to sales at a certain rate, say 5%. So, how do you boost the number of visitors from 100 per day to 1,000 per day?

There are various ways of achieving this aim, but the exact technique varies depending on what you are selling. If you are selling a subscription or a high-cost service then you can afford to spend a little more up front.

For instance, you could put an advert in the newsagent’s window or in classified ads giving your telephone number and convert the inquisitive into clientele once they ring you.

You will learn how much you need to spend to get a certain number of interested prospective clients and how many of these actually convert into customers. This is precious knowledge because it permits you to judge whether this sort of marketing is right for you and what your ‘bang per buck’ is.

However, this hypothesis goes for all types of promoting and if you are like most Internet sellers, you are working on a shoe string budget. Despite that, stick to first principles and record as many statistics as you can think of. You might not know how to use those numbers yet, but something will occur to you.

As an instance, I record the details of the number of visitors to my web site each day and the number of clicks. That gives me an average: if a thousand visitors come to look, I make 80 sales. I also track the value of the sales and divide it by the clicks.

Then I know that, say, $240 worth of sales from 1,000 visitors equals an average of $3 a sale. Then I track the days of the week and by doing that I know that Saturday is more profitable than Wednesday.

The days can vary by as much as 25%, so if you have an advertising budget of say $100 a week, it is better to go all-in on Saturday than $15 a day over the whole week because the costs are the same but the revenue is not. In short, if you want to make money on line. study the market as you would off line and put your marketing dollars where they matter the most.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with sales force automated software. If you would to know more, please visit our web site at Sales Force Tools

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Increase Your Business Sales By Blogging

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

A business blog, in the right hands, is a very powerful marketing tool. It is flexible, it can be used to express any views you like, it can reach a worldwide audience and it can help you compile a mailing list of people who are interested in your business and its products – all for the sake of composing a couple of articles a week or a month.

The difficulty with any web site, and a blog is merely a specialized kind of website, is marketing it. It should not be a problem for any business to come up with pieces and information related to the business and its products. We will come back to advertising your business blog later in this article.

As the number of visitors reading your blog grows, you will have to become aware of what form of information you give them. It is better to be more than less open. You should use your blog to produce customer loyalty and this is most easily gained if people think that they can trust you. You ought to be honest to gain peoples’ trust.

Request feedback on your products and your service. This a great free manner of learning your shortcomings, otherwise you would have to commission a survey. Request of your readers to leave comments and delegate someone to read and reply to each comment

Think of your blog as your company’s booth at the biggest and longest lasting exposition that it will ever appear in. Strive to create every article practical to the reader by supplying some little known details or facts on your products or related items.

For example, if your company makes crampons for climbing, compose an article on the latest mountaineering expeditions. If you sell tropical fish, compose articles about which fish can happily live together.

You will need to tell people that you have a blog. There are several good ways to advertise a web site or a blog. One of the best ways is … composing articles. So, you could compose articles about composing articles like I am doing now, or probably better still, publish the articles that you compose for your blog as independent, stand-alone articles in article directories with your blog URL at the bottom of the article.

These articles will get picked up by web site authors if they are interesting enough. This will give you back links to your website, the number of which Google uses to determine how popular your website is and this determines your rank in their search engine. Because Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world, it is crucial to rank highly in Google.

Add an RSS button to your blog and then people can have your posts delivered to their inbox without having to check whether you have updated your blog. This is useful for the blog because no post will be missed by those who have picked up your RSS feed.

You can learn how to create a business blog by visiting web sites that teach the subject. They are usually free so you do not have much to lose.

If you are keen on using Business Blogging, just go to our website on Blogging For Beginners.

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The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Auction Sales

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Auction sales are useful for all kinds of goods, but there is a need for caution, because you will not have sight of the item itself. This need not be a difficulty if you are purchasing something like bedding or dog’s food, but it can be vital if you are buying collectibles where condition is of prime importance.

For instance, the condition of stamps and coins governs the object’s value within the limits of the year’s or issue’s minimum and maximum catalogue values. However, you only see a picture and it could be of another coin or stamp – what you receive in the post might be a different kettle of fish.

In this piece we will look at the most serious pros and cons of auction sales. First, the advantages:

Auction sales can be traced from the opening auction bid to the end and you can choose how much you are prepared to pay over a fairly long period of time – days or weeks rather than minutes at an off line auction. You still have information at hand like minimum sale cost. This gives you plenty of time to weigh up alternative sales options.

There is a chance that you can purchase objects at well under market value. For example, numerous objects do not have a reserve price, so if the item is not popular among many people, you may buy it really cheaply. Also, if the minimum cost is not met, it is worth getting in touch with the vendor and offering a little more for a private sale.

If you go through a trustworthy on line auction site, you will be covered against fraud. If the item you receive is below par for the description of it on the website, you have a very good chance of getting your money back either from the vendor, the auction site or your credit card company – three layers of protection.

However, there are disadvantages too. These are the ones that most people think are the most serious:

You are purchasing sight-unseen, so there is a greater chance of fraud, but as we said above, the auction site and your credit card company do have a degree of liability, so please check what that is before you go bidding (or even shopping) on line.

Check the postage and packing fees. This is a favourite way of bumping up the minimum charge for an item. For example, a set of batteries may not have a reserve and you may be happy to purchase them for a dollar, but if the postage is ten dollars, you have been had.

Another favourite rip-off is selling copies. You might think that you are bidding for genuine Gucci sunglasses, but for sure the chances are that they will be cheap Chinese copies worth a tenth of what you paid. Would you really know the difference? Honestly?

You can get a bargain on an auction website, but remember that there are a lot of hungry individuals out there who are prepared to lie to earn a couple of dollars and that does not even include the professional liars and thieves.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of subjects, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our web site at Sales Force Tools

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