7 Tips to Improve your website

There are some steps you can follow to make sure you are doing everything right to maximize your sales. Look through the list below. If you can say definitively that you have taken all of these steps, then you should see a big increase in your sales. Here you go:
1. Make sure there is a market for what you're selling
By now, you've probably heard a lot about finding your online niche. If you did your research properly, you should have found a market that has a problem that you can provide an answer for. That's probably the most important part of your business.
If you haven't done the proper research yet, get started now. Use a keyword tool like Nichebot or Wordtracker to find what people are searching for online. And visit the forums to see what people are talking about and what problems they need to solve.
Don't skip this step. It's important that internet users are going to want what you're selling or your whole business is lost before it even begins.

2. Make sure that you're selling something that solves their problem
If you've found the right niche, then you should have some idea about what their main problems are. Do some research to find out what they need to solve that problem, then offer it to them. That's the formula in a nutshell. Don't let your product stray from the main topic. Solve their problem, and you'll have success.
3. Make sure you're getting enough traffic
It's difficult to make a good decision about how effective your sales process is if you haven't had enough traffic to your website yet. I recommend waiting until you've had at least 1,000 visitors. Anything less and you won't really have enough data to work with. Be patient.
4. Find out where your traffic is coming from
It's important that you are getting targeted visitors to your website. Make sure that if you're using pay-per-click advertising you're bidding only on words that are right for your market. If you're selling cell phones, you don't want visitors who are searching for land line phones for their office. Remember who your visitor is.
5. Test different headlines
Your headline is the first thing your visitors see on your site. Make sure it's compelling and gets them to keep reading. How do you do that? Simply by testing different headlines and seeing which one works best.
You can do that by rewriting it every now and then and checking your stats, or you can split test your headlines using Google's website optimizer. Website optimizer is part of your Google adwords account. If you don't have an adwords account, you can get one free at a href="http://adwords.google.com">http://adwords.google.com.
6. Make sure your sales copy is effective
The last thing you want to do once you have a visitor reading your sales copy is to distract them with something that isn't leading directly to a sale. In other words, leave out any links to other websites, forget about adsense and banner ads, and don't start talking about things that don't relate to your subject.
Concentrate on your sales message and proof elements, and dispelling any doubts they may have about giving you their money. This includes using testimonials if you have them, a 100% satisfaction guarantee, and good strong sales copy that keeps them interested all the way through to your "buy now" button.

7. Test different price points
It's hard to know what's the right price for your item right off the bat. You may have it at the price you're willing to pay, but that may not be the price everyone is willing to pay. A lot of people will expect to buy something in your market within a certain price range. If your price is too high, they'll shop elsewhere. If your price is too low, yes too low, they might think that what you're offering is of poor quality. You can answer this problem by simply trying out different prices to see what works best.
8. Make sure your order processing works properly and is easy to use
Test all of the links from your "add to cart" buttons all the way through to your "thank you" page. You can normally run a $0 test before you go live with most shopping cart and merchant account systems. Obviously, if your ordering system isn't working right, you're not going to see any sales.
Also, make sure that it's easy to use. Get a friend to run through it for you. It may make perfect sense to you, but that doesn't mean that it will for everyone. Let some other people try it out and see if they get stuck anywhere. Chances are good that if they do, then others will too. If everything isn't as easy as possible to use, then some people will just leave rather than trying to figure it out.
There you go. Eight steps you can follow with your site to make sure that you are maximizing your sales. Just from my own experience, anytime I was able to say that I went through all of the steps above completely, I saw significant improvement, and found good success with my website. I believe that you will, too. Good luck.

SEO ROI & The Conversion Rate Dilemma

What do legitimate search engine optimization firms charge? Like most things involving the Web, prices are all over the place but if the price is extremely low you can be assured that the quality of the service will match the price.
If you do a search for SEO pricing from reliable search engine firms, you will find that although prices vary greatly fees of $2,500 per month on an annual contract ($30,000 per year) are not uncommon. Of course some firms will charge less and others will charge a great deal more depending on where they are located, the size and condition of your website, and exactly what services you want them to provide.

Are SEO Costs Worth the Investment?

So what do you get for your $30k ante? Legitimate SEO companies will provide things like target market analysis, keyword analysis, content massaging, code modifications, link implementation strategy, and metric analysis.
And what happens when Google changes their algorithms? Well you guessed it. You have to ante-up again and the addiction continues. Search engine optimization has become the crack-cocaine of Web-based businesses.
Keep in mind search engine optimization's main goal is to increase your visibility and ranking in search engines which assumes more traffic to your website; but the leap from visibility to traffic to sales conversion is higher than you think. The assumption that better search engine visibility and more traffic automatically generates more sales is faulty logic.
Even if increased search engine visibility produces more traffic to your site and even if your website contains genuine content; if the presentation of that content doesn't engage the viewer quickly and if it doesn't hold the visitor's attention for two to three minutes with a compelling and even entertaining presentation, then your chances of converting that visitor to a customer are minimal.

How Much New Traffic Is Needed to Pay for SEO?

Let's say your search engine tactics actually work and they not only increase your search engine ranking but also drive tons of traffic to your site. With realistic conversion rates at about 2-3%, how much traffic do you have to bring in to actually pay for the SEO expertise.
Based on a $30K annual investment in SEO and a 20% Net Profit you must generate $150,000 in new sales just to pay the SEO fees. And at a 3% conversion rate and an average sale amount of $100 per transaction that translates into 50,000 unique new visitors per year to your site just to pay for your SEO strategy, and you still haven't added one cent to your bottom line. You can do the math.

SEO Investment Break-Even Formula
SEO Generated Unique Traffic Break-even = SEO Cost / Conversion Rate x Average Sale x Net Profit Percentage
Determining Your Conversion Rate
Every business has a different Average Sales Amount and generally speaking it is safe to assume the higher the Selling Price the lower the Conversion Rate. In order to figure out what your Conversion Rate is you have to do a little more calculation. Lets say a company brings in a total of $150,000 in Web-Sales and attracts 25,000 Unique Visitors per year and has an Average Sale Price of $395.95; their Conversion Rate would be 1.5%. What's your Conversion Rate?

Conversion Rate = [(Total Web Sales / Unique Web Traffic) / Average Sales Price] x 100

To test the formula, we can check the original example where we have a given Conversion Rate of 3% to see if we arrive at the same rate:

CR = [(150,000/50,000)/100] x 100] Conversion Rate = 3%

The Meaning of It All

After calculating your own numbers, different readers will come to different conclusions. People seem to be mesmerized by complex statistics and bean counter analysis but the hidden meaning behind all the number crunching and mathematical machinations seems clear: if you want to make more money from your website the trick is not where you appear on a search engine or even how many unique visitors you attract to your site, but rather how many of these visitors you convert into customers. If you have a marketing budget, it should be spent on conversions; and conversions are not the primary concern of search engine optimization. What you really want is a strategy that will increase conversions.

How Do You Increase Conversions

MarketingExperiments is a research group lead by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin that studies and analyzes these kinds of Web-related issues. In a recent study entitled "Optimizing Your Landing Pages", they came up with a formula for determining conversion probability. Here's the copyrighted MarketingExperiments formula:
Conversion Probability = 4(Level of Motivational Matching) + 3(Clarity of the Value Proposition) + 2(Effectiveness of the Incentive - Level of Sales Friction) - 2(Conversion Process Anxiety).

I already have a headache, but here's how they explain it in more digestible terms: "... the highest performing Landing Pages are those that match exactly the Motivation of the customer. After Motivation, the clarity with which you express the Value Proposition is the most important factor in determining whether a customer buys from you or not."(c) Copyright 2007 MarketingExperiments, LLC, You can visit the MarketingExperiments website for more details on their research.

I prefer an even simpler approach to increasing conversions: feature a website presentation that resonates with the needs of a qualified audience and compels action by providing a solution to those needs. Repurpose that presentation in affordable and no cost venues that drives even more meaningful qualified traffic to your site. Easy to say but hard to do, or is it?

What you need to determine is exactly what needs your audience craves and how best to engage their attention long enough to deliver a story that positions your offering as the missing ingredient required to fulfill their desire and ambition.

The Answer and The Future

The answer to delivering this kind of presentation on your website is video that features professional presenters delivering focused, well-crafted messages that motivate action and embed in your visitors' memory. If done right, these videos will resonate with the emotional and psychological factors that trigger human desire and motivation. Like it or not, it is the future of Web-marketing.
Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines understand that the Web has become a far more sophisticated delivery platform than it used to be. Methods are in place to deliver not only video, audio, and multimedia, but also to index and tag it for relevance. For when all is said and done, search engines are in the relevance business. If they can't deliver relevant, meaningful results they are out of business, and no search engine optimization trick, scheme or formula is going to stand in their way.
Those who truly understand the shifting momentum of this reality are already adapting to this new Web-video paradigm - the question is are you?

About The AuthorJerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com/ and http://www.sonicpersonality.com/. Contact at http://us.f533.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

Targeted Traffic and How To Get It

Targeted Traffic and How To Get It
If you have a website, you know that traffic is essential, especially if you have something to sell. Not just any old traffic, though - you need targeted traffic.
How is targeted traffic defined? It means website visitors who have a specific interest in the topic of the website. For example, someone who is planning to buy a wedding ring would be interested in jewelry websites.
How do I get targeted traffic? Here are some effective techniques:
Forums:
Whatever your topic, there's sure to be at least one forum about it. Subscribe to a couple of forums. Join in the discussions, answer questions, and ask pertinant questions yourself. Become known as an expert in the field. Then with each article reply you write, have a discreet link to your website in the signature file. What can be placed in your signature is often determined by the forum moderators. Do not spam the forum or you will be stopped from posting. You should be able to get a fair amount of traffic from a popular forum, and the people who click your link will already be familiar with your writing style.

Linking from/to other websites:
Look for websites which are similar to yours (but which do not compete directly). Ask the website owner for a reciprocal link. Be sure to pick link partners who match your customer profile. Try using a software program like Arelis to help you find link partners.
E-Zines:
Buy adverts in ezines that target your market. Perform a test to ensure that the return on your investment is enough to cover the cost of the adverts. You may save a considerable amount.
Newsletters:
Offer your visitors something of value, such as an eBook, in exchange for signing up for your newsletter. Write your newsletter so that it's tightly focused on your subject. You should publish your newsletter regularly, preferably once a week.
E-Books:
Write (or have written) a free informational eBook which you can give away to your clients and others. You can place links back to your website in the eBook.
Joint Ventures:
Online marketers are always looking for products to sell. They may have large mailing lists with eager to buy customers. Usually they will be willing to send an email to their list for a cut of the sale price. This works particularly well with informational products. It has several advantages. It can give a large boost to both your mailing list and sales in a short time.

Buy Expired Domain Traffic:
This may be the most expensive in terms of money, but also the cheapest in terms of time. You will usually get a traffic boost within a month. What is it that you're buying? You are buying traffic from a company which has invested in expired domain names.
They are domain names which are still registered on the search engines which get a certain amount of traffic. The previous domain name owners have not renewed the registration for whatever reason. The traffic from the expired domain name is redirected to your website. This is usually high quality traffic as only expired domains with relevant traffic is redirected to you. As always, you should undertake a test run to see if this traffic is suitable.
When you combine these techniques and apply them consistently over time you will find a rich source of targeted traffic coming to your website. This, combined with quality products will ensure the success of your online business.
About the Author: Mike Devoran is the publisher of DJTraffic.com, a website devoted to improving your website traffic.