New Energy Articles Blog

Copyright 2006 Lynn VanDyke

There are a few secrets that I’d like to share with you.  You may have been privy to a few of them before.  Actually you may have heard of all 4, but I can promise that you will finish each article with a fresh perspective.  I will show you how 4 simple secrets can create a powerhouse web business.  This is the first part of the 4 article series.

Before I divulge the vault of successful web business secrets I must warn you of one thing.  All the information in the world will not take the place of determination and persistence.  A web business is just like an offline business.  It takes hard work and resolve to succeed.  However working smart is heads and tails better than plain old working.  These 4 secrets will turn any smart working, dedicated average Joe or Jane into a successful web business owner.

Web Success Secret #1) Content is king.

Heard that before?  I know I have.  The thing I never knew was how to use content to my advantage.  Content is useless unless it is optimized for the search engines.  It must also be optimized for your reader.  You have two customers- readers and search engines.  You must satisfy both with the same exact content.

Content is king only if you have exact and highly specific keywords placed in correct locations.  Unfortunately the hard part is determining what keywords to use.  A keyword can be a single word or a phrase.  It is the term that web surfers use to search for information.  Place yourself in their shoes and try to discover what search terms they use.  You must then evaluate the search term.  How many people search using that term?  How many sites already deliver information on that search term?  Simple demand and supply rules.  The more demand with the less supply equals more profitability.

You have several options for determining keywords and their profit potential.  Search yourself, pay a company to search for you or have your hosting company do a complete keyword search for your niche or web business topic.  If your hosting company does not offer this service I recommend you switch to a plan that does.  This feature alone can make or break your business’ future.  If you would like my recommended hosting plan, please contact me.

Without a proper keyword search and analysis you may as well forget about becoming successful with an Internet business.  Investing in this one secret is literally the start of planning your website.

Your next action step is to plan your site layout based on the 50-175 high-demand and low-supply keywords. Your site should be structured in three tiers.  Tier one is your home page.  Tier two is made of all of your main topics and also constitutes your navigation bar buttons.  Tier three keywords are sub-topics of tier two pages.  Organize your 50-175 keywords into three tiers.  Doing this makes it easier for visitors to navigate through your site and it makes it easier for search engine spiders to find all of your pages.

Search engine spiders do not like to fish around for all of your pages and links.  This is why many sites offer a “site map”.  A site map is one page that contains links to all of the content pages.  This is a fine route to take; however most people agree that pages with a lot of links on it are valued less than content pages that casually link to other content pages.

Using three tiers allows you to go from topic to sub-topic to sub-sub-topic all by natural in-content links.  For example, tier 1 is the homepage on a fitness site.  Tier 2 is a page all about cardio activity and its benefits.  A tier three page off of that tier 2 page is about different treadmill routines.  Do you see how the site visitor would like this structure?  They click on “Cardio” and are given links to more specific pages about cardio topics.  Search engine spiders like the three tier structure too.  It means they do not have to dig through layers and levels of useless links.

There is even more to content than finding profitable keywords and structuring your site into easy-to-navigate tiers.  You must optimize each and every page on your website to perform well and rank high at search engines.  Many people devote their working life to optimization secrets.  A full length article just on optimizing is possible.  Heck, a full length book is possible.  My recommendation is to use a hosting company that automatically teaches you how to optimize web pages for the engines.  Doing that will cause less headache and frustration and it will keep you focused on building content.

A quick education in optimization: place your specific keyword in the file name, title, description and keyword section of your page.  Then sprinkle the keyword throughout the content.  Also provide a link using your specific keyword in the link text.  If all of this has you spinning your head, I recommend going the hosting company I use.  They literally teach you to build a website using blocks.  It’s all simple and easier than you think.

There is one last piece to content.  It must effectively pre-sell your product or service and position you as the expert in your field.  When your website has 50-175 optimized pages for your visitors to read through it will start to position you as the expert.  Your site will become known as the place for information about (insert your niche).

When visitors find your site through search engines they are seeking information about a problem or question they have.  If they land on your site and you try to sell them something right away one thing is sure- they click the back button and find another site that will give them information.  This is why pre-selling your product or service is paramount.  Give your visitors what they want.  Answer their question and in the process let them know about your services and products.

All of the information develops rapport and trust with your site visitor.  It positions you as an expert.  It keeps your visitor on your site longer since they are actually reading content.  Search engines notice this and rank you better.  How well your site can keep visitors is known as “stickiness.”  Your site must attract and keep visitors for as long as possible.

Provide content that pre-sells your products, positions you as the expert and focuses on highly profitable keywords.  You cannot go wrong with your web business if you do those things.  The secret to content is to satisfy both your visitor and search engines.  Lose one or both and you are doomed.  As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.  Your hosting company should be providing most of these services to you free of charge.  There are a small few that do this, but it is well worth the investigation.  Contact me for further resources and information.  Having a successful web business starts with effective content.  Stay tuned for parts 2-4!

Tags: content, entrepreneur, hosting, how to, internet business, Lynn VanDyke, online business, SBI, SiteSell, Web Business
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According to research 80% of people searching website using search engine, therefore search engine still the best way for you to generate traffic. You need to put your website into search engine.

One of the great advantages of search engine for your internet business, it can bring you a large amount of targeted traffic to your website. Some of them will not cost you a cent, but some of them will cost you a dollar. It is depend on what search engine do you use.

Search engine will become very powerful for your business if you can put your website in the top 50, but it will be useless if your website listed further down. Because people will not see the result more than 50 result.

In this article, I want to explain about 4 different search engines that you can use to generate traffic for your website. They are…
1.    Directory
2.    Crawler search engine
3.    PPC search engine
4.    Meta search engine

Directory sometimes called a category database. This directory will list all website inside category. This kind of search engine will edited by human, it means there are some directory admin will check your submission to this directory. They may accept or reject your website if they feel your website is not appropriate to the category that directory has. 

When you submit your website to directory, you just need to enter your title, description and keywords. Some of directories will not ask you to enter keywords. You also need to select category you want it. The example of directory is yahoo.

Crawler search engine also known as spider or robots. This search engine use small software that will jump between websites called as crawler. This crawler will look for new website 24 hour a day, 7 days a week.

For crawler search engine, you do not need to submit your title, description and keywords. This crawler will index your website automatically. You just need to submit your URL and crawler will come to your site and index every thing they need.

PPC search engine stand for pay per click search engine. This kind of search engine will ask you to pay them to use it. Mostly, they will cost you minimum 1 cent until 5 cent. However PPC search engine will list your website depend on how much you want to pay them in particular keywords. If you want to pay them more than other competitor that use the same keywords, you will be listed on the top.

Before you use PPC search engine, you need to add some deposit. Then your deposit will decrease when someone click on your link.

Meta search engine is search engine that collect result from multiply search engine simultaneously. You don’t need to submit to Meta search engine since they use result of the major search engine.

Meta search engine will rank your website by calculated combination of ranking of all search engines that they use. So the key to have high rank in Meta search engine, you need to ensure that your website listed in all crawler search engine.

Tags: directory, internet business, internet marketing, search engine
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Copyright 2006 Nikki Mhlanga

There are various internet marketing promotional actions which can significantly boost your online business. By taking these steps, grow your list, you retain your customers, increase your sales and build your business.

What are the strategies you can use which can help you to become very successful in internet marketing?

• Care about your customers. If a prospect is very interested in what you are offering and ask you for more information, answer any question they may have as quickly as possible. As soon as you start to show your customers that you care, your online business will start growing as more prospects and customers trust you and buy from you. This will boost your sales and your online business will grow rapidly.

• Quality is very essential. Always over-deliver. It is very important for you to offer high quality products and services, and your online business will simply grow tremendously. Also offer some high quality gifts to your customers when they order. Customers like getting a good bargain – this may be in the form of a low price for the product or some valuable bonuses or gifts you can offer them after purchase.

• Contact your customer and prospects on a regular basis. Your list is your best asset, so it is important that you show your prospects that you care by keeping in touch and also making some good free offers to them. It pays to send some regular ‘non-marketing’ emails that can also be offering some free tips and ideas. By doing this you build trust – and your prospects will soon be your long term customers for your online business. You can also set up and offer a free brainstorming or networking call to your prospects and customers during which you answer any questions about internet marketing or offer some information about your business. By doing this, you create the confidence in your prospects and customers.

• Offer some knowledge or service for free. Success in internet marketing comes to those who offer expertise knowledge or some service related to their online business. It is crucial that you find an aspect of your internet marketing business which you can use to offer your knowledge or any other service. You become an expert, you build a lot of trust and good relationships, and you establish your online presence rapidly. The more involved you become in whatever you will be offering, the quicker you build your online presence and business. Think about how you can offer something. You can start a forum, a directory; offer an e-course or ezine.

If you want to succeed online, you must be prepared to take care of your customers and offer them benefits which they appreciate. In the ling term, your prospects and your customers will gain trust and buy from you, and also bring you repeat business.

Tags: home business opportunity, internet marketing, online profits
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Truly, that is right.  Marketing is a game and it is one that all small business owners need to master if they want to run a successful business.      Have a look around your area.  Are there many businesses who do not advertise who are still in business.

For 8 years I was selling businesses and in all that time there were 2 successful businesses that stood out and why they stood out was because they both spent 10% of their Gross Profit on advertising.  There were the 2 most profitable businesses to come through our books.

It is the old adage, “you have to spend money to make money.”

A marketing campaign has to be one of the most important jobs a small business owner needs to do successfully and consistently. 

 There are 2 essential questions you must know the answers to: 

1.  What is your Unique Selling Point (USP), and 

2.  What do your clients want or need to buy

When times were good we always talked about what your customers want to buy, not what they need  to buy.  With the change in financial status of so many of your clients during 2008, a business owner now needs to think in terms of ‘what your customer needs to buy’.    

There is no doubt that buying trends have changed.  Because of the financial climate around the world, people are not spending the amount of money they used to and are saving more in case of anything going wrong with their financial situation.Customers are now buying what they need rather than what they want.  

So when you can answer the above two questions you can then start deciding what you are going to advertise, you can plan to find the required stock and even negotiate a deal so that you get the stock at a good price, allowing you to still make a healthy profit, even though it is going to be sold at ’sale price’ to your customers. 

During times as we will have during 2009, try never to special anything unless you have been able to purchase it in the first place at a very good price.You want to offer your clients a good deal so go out and find a supplier who will look at making you a good offer. 

Tags: advertising a business, blogging for business, creating a marketing plan, marketing, marketing blog, marketing plan, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing strategies
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Aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners are often misled or misguided on the topic of how to properly conduct market research that uncovers a profitable niche.

The path most unsuspecting entrepreneurs take is by ending up at keyword tool or database to begin their search.

As a keyword research expert and founder of one of the leading keyword research services on the internet, I can say with firsthand experience that keyword databases are not the first place to look nor should be even considered.  Here’s why.

The primary keyword databases that are currently available to the general public only give search counts on a limited amount of data that accounts for 1% - 2% of the actual searches people do around the entire world.  They can only predict (emphasis added) the real majority of searches that are being done on the big five search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com which hold 97%-98% of the keyword data.

Most importantly, keyword research only shows what keyword phrases people are using in the search engines to search for answers, not what people actually buy on the internet.  Just because a group of people search for specific terms or brand names does not mean that’s what they purchase.  That’s a key distinction many entrepreneurs and business owners tend to gloss over.

When looking for a profitable niche marketplace, your primary focus should be looking for proof of a group of hungry and rabid buyers that want to exchange their money for a service or product (information, physical or digital).  Without this crucial qualifier, you may have the greatest product in the world, but you may be lacking a market to sell it to.

This article will present a number of great sources to look at which will give you a running start to uncover a truly, profitable marketplace exists before you go for the gold and put all your resources into a website, product creation or expenditures toward some sort of online property.

Once you establish that you have located a market that contains signs of adequate commerce moving through it, you then have a worthy reason to look further into a keyword research service to find out what keyword phrases people use to find the market you have chosen.

Let’s begin looking at how to identify a profitable market.

MAGAZINES

One of the best ways to find signs of a truly profitable marketplace is looking for a magazine in that industry.  If a publisher has enough money to print and circulate a full color magazine, there are most likely advertisers that support the funding of the magazine’s ability to circulate all the copies which most likely means there are sales being made by those advertisers.

Now, this may bring you to question whether there is too much competition in a marketplace with so many advertisers selling in a magazine.

In fact, it’s a great sign to have competition which means there is an adequate amount of customers to sell to and a portion of a sizable pie to be had in that marketplace.  If there is very little competition, you may (1) not have adequate product being sold in that space; or (2) not have a marketplace to begin with.  The larger the competition is, the larger the piece of revenues you will be able to grab.

Without having to leave your seat, you can hop on over to Magazines.com and looking through the number of different categories to find a profitable topic or industry in which to start an online concern.

One of the things you’ll want to focus in on is the number of subscribers each magazine has and how long the magazine has been in print for stability purposes.

Make a list of magazines you want to look into and then go hunting for them at one of those large dedicated newsstands that covers just about every magazine on every topic.

To get a better look at what people are buying in the online world, you will need to ultimately decide whether you wish to represent physical or digital products.

PHYSICAL PRODUCTS

There are two incredibly huge marketplaces that are massively trafficked, move a lot of product and are great places to find what people are really buying.

Let’s start with the first huge marketplace…

eBay

At eBay, you can look through a list of the most popular products people are buying through auctions or from eBay stores that vendors have setup.  To see a visual path on how to locate the most popular products, please use the reference below to view the extended version of this article.

Amazon.com

Another really big marketplace is Amazon and it’s not just for books.  You can find just about any product and name brand that is a mover and shaker.  Again, look at the most popular products in those categories that catch your attention.

DIGITAL PRODUCTS

If you wish to sell products of the digital nature which does not require inventory and which usually carries high profit margins for affiliates, you’ll want to check out the Clickbank digital marketplace that ranks product sales from highest to lowest sellers in each category.

Just browse through categories at Clickbank.com and you’ll instantly find the top sellers of digital info products, software and subscription services which are located right at the top listings.  See also reference section below for a link to the extended version of this article for visual aids and more detailed guidance.

Once you gather the adequate market research, you can do one of the following:

• Create an online store that ships out physical products and merchandise (requires inventory)
• Sell merchandise through eBay auctions or their online stores (requires inventory)
• Create a site that represents vendors as an affiliate (requires no inventory)
• Create your own product, service or software for a digital product (requires no inventory)

Having used at least two of the four places above, you can be assured that you have conducted proper market research to uncover “proof positive” what people are buying and, thus, a profitable niche market.

You can then quickly build out a non-complex site with a simple product offering, find some low cost keywords to use in a Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click campaign with a minimal spend of $50 to test the market and see if you have a winner.

If the initial test results pan out, meaning that you pulled a profit from your test, you can invest more energies, conduct more extensive keyword research and expend more advertising dollars.  If the test results do not pan out, find another market until something sticks.

I believe this should arm you with enough information to get you moving toward finding a market with bottomless profits.

Tags: conduct online market research, keyword research, market research, profitable niche market, proper market research, uncover a profitable niche
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The most popular question asked by many online marketers is how to drive more traffic to their websites. The answer to this question is easy: "Have your website exposure to as many internet surfers as possible, once people can find your website, there will be traffic flow into your website". But to make your website successfully expose to internet users is not an easy task. Efforts, strategies and techniques need to put in place in order to make it as success. Below are 8 common online marketing techniques used by most online marketers to drive internet traffic to their websites:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Successful search engine optimization will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your website since over 60% of people who are looking for products and services use search engines to locate them. If your website is ranked high in the related keyword search by the search engines, you will get tons of free internet traffic to your website.

One of the ways to optimize your website to be search engines friendly is by generating back links from other websites to your website. When websites provide a link to your site, the search engines deem your site as valuable and this affects your position in the listings.

2. Article Writing & Publishing

Articles are the greatest tool for online marketing. It helps in SEO by generating back links to your website and it also helps in getting exposure for your website through your articles’ hyperlinks.

By writing short articles on the topic related to your website, products or services, you can offer these articles for other website owners or newsletter publishers to use by submitting them to article directories, forums or blogs. When the publishers use your articles in their ezines or websites, they will remain your bio information which contains links to your website at the bottom of your articles, which means that the publishers will contribute their link from their websites to yours. These back links are counted in SEO. When their visitors who read your articles and if they want to know more about your products or services may click the hyperlinks at the bottom of your articles to reach to your website.

3. Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo! and others) where you pay for top placement. Most search engines give top positions to the highest bidder. It is a quick way to have your ad on the first page of the keyword search as listed in the search engines. There is a catch: you have to pay for every click to your web site. Make a budget and stick to it and make sure to monitor your account, those clicks add up fast.

4. Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate program is another way to drive traffic to your web site. Your affiliates are your commissions-based sales people who make money when they sell your products. They drive traffic to your web site in exchange for commissions on sales. If you don’t want to manage your affiliates yourself, you could subscribe to affiliate network such as ClickBank if your products are digital items. ClickBank marketplace is able to exposure your products to thousands of affiliates who are looking for products to sell online.

In Summary

Any internet business will die without traffic stream into their website. If you already get started your website for online business, it’s time for you to work out a marketing plan to flood it with traffic. The above 4 online marketing techniques are time tested & proven methods to drive more traffic to a website.

Scott Bamboo is the author & webmaster for http://www.ultimatearticlemarketer.com.
You can get more information on online home buisiness at http://www.ultimatearticlemarketer.com/articles/dropshipping1.php
and Article Directories List at http://www.ultimatearticlemarketer.com/articles/articledirectories.php

Tags: article directory, articles, internet marketing, online marketing, search engine optimization, SEO
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Internet marketing may have developed a rapid surge for the past few years. As more internet based businesses are being established, you need to develop new marketing skills and knowledge to keep up with the competition and to cope with the changing in Internet business world.

The demand for Internet marketing tips and techniques have grown significantly and new strategies of online marketing has been born, one of them is Opt-in email marketing, also known as permission marketing. Believe it or not, this technique can spread the word about your sites subsistence in a very cost free and effective way.

Opt-in marketing requires the permission of customer before you are allowed to send or promote any marketing materials, usually in newsletters form delivered via e-mail. The more targeted opt-in marketing mail is sent, the more chances there is to generate sales and more sales. To do this, you must build a list of all those who are interested in your niche and wants to subscribe to your opt-in marketing list.

From your list, you will get your targeted customer, this is a good list since they already have shown interest in what you have to show and sell since they have willingly signed in for your list. These are the people who have liked what they have seen in your site and have decided they want to see more and maybe even purchase what ever product or service your site has to offer.

Many people would think that building their lists would take hard work and a lot of time to build and collect names and addresses. This is not so, it takes a bit of patience and some strategies but in doing this list, you open your site and your business to a whole new world of target market. Take the effort to take your business to a new level, if traffic increase and good profits are what you want, an opt-in list will do wonders for your business venture.

There are many sources and articles in the internet available for everyone to read and follow in building a list. Sometimes they may be confusing because there are so many and there different ways. Different groups of people would have different approaches in building an opt-in list, but no matter how diverse many methods are, there are always some crucial things to do to build your list. Here are four of them.

1) Put up a good web form in your site that immediately follows the end of your content. While some may say this is too soon to subscribe for a website visitors application, try to remember that your homepage should provide a quick good impression. If somehow a website visitor finds something that he or she doesn’t like and turns them off, they may just forget about signing up.

A good web form for subscribing to an opt-in list is not hard to do. Just write a simple short statement about how they would like to see more and get updated about the site. Then there should be an area where they could put in their names and e-mail address. This web form will automatically save and send you the data’s inputted. As more people sign in, your list will be growing.

2) As mentioned in the first tip, make your homepage very, very impressive. You need to have well written articles and descriptions of your site. Depending on what your site is all about, you need to capture your website visitor’s fancy. Make your site useful and very easy to use. Do not expect everyone to be tech savvy. Invest in having good programming in your site, make your graphics beautiful but don’t over do it.

Don’t waste your time making the homepage too overly large megabyte wise. Not all people have dedicated T1 connections, the faster your site gets loaded, the better. Go for a look that borders between simplicity and sophisticated knowledge.

3) Provide good service and products. A return customer is more likely to bring in more business. Even then and now, a satisfied customer will recommend a business always. Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than an expensive ad. As your clientele roster grows so shall your list. With more members on the list, the more people will get to know about what you have new to offer.

4) Keep a clean and private list. Never lose the trust your customers have entrusted you. If you provide e-mails to others and they get spammed, many will probably unsubscribe to you. Remember, a good reputation will drive in more traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your customers.

Tags: effendy lie, good web form, internet marketing strategies, online mailing list, promote marketing materials, targeted optin marketing list
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Copyright 2006 Sandra P. Martini

One of the worst moments in a business owner’s life is that silent moment between when you quote your rate to a potential client and his response.  True, that hardly a second goes by, but it can feel like an eternity.

“Will he hire me?”

“Did I go too high?”

And when he says “YOU’RE HIRED!”, a new set of doubts creep over you:

“Should I have gone higher?”

“Did I lowball the price just to get a client?”

You know the feeling.  You’ve got the job, the project, the new client and it almost always turns out to be more work than you thought when you signed up for the task.  Be sure that you know your worth and communicate it to the client up front.

1. Know your worth.

If you charge your clients hourly, how do you know what to charge them?  Did you pick a number out of the air?  What was your rationale?

For those who choose to bill hourly, I recommend the following approach to determining what you charge:

a) Determine what you want your salary to be.  How much will you take out of the company?

b)  Add to that any subcontractor expense that you may have.  This is your “labor total”.

c)  List out and then add all your expenses: advertising, promotion, rent, self-employment tax, supplies, etc.  This is your “non-labor expense total”.

d)  Add your labor total to your non-labor expense total.

e)  Add in any profit goal you may have for your business.

f)  Bullets (d) plus (e) equal your Total Required Revenue.

g)  Divide your “Total Required Revenue” by the number of BILLABLE hours for the year.  Remember that you will not be billing 40 hours/week.  The result will be the amount you need to charge per hour to make your salary goal.

If you bill hourly, take the time to complete the above exercise and, if necessary, increase your rates accordingly.

2. No haggling.

It can be hard when you have few clients or need more money, but whatever you do, do not haggle with your clients/prospective clients over your pricing.

You can haggle at a flea market.  You can haggle for the price of a house.  You can negotiate (a.k.a. “haggle”) for a corporate job salary.  As a self-employed individual, you must not haggle over your pricing.  To do so immediately lowers your perceived worth with that person and will set you up for a relationship of nitpicking over every nickel and dime.

3. Provide a “solution” and not a “service.”

Insure your clients understand the benefits they will receive from hiring you.  You are not providing them a service; you are providing them a solution.

The difference being that people value solutions more than they do services.  Whenever discussing price with a potential client, focus on the benefits, the “solutions” that she will receive as a result of hiring you.

Will she have more free time?  Will her business see an increase in profits or clients?  Know the benefits and speak to them!

4. Be prepared to say “Goodbye”.

Not everyone is going to accept your terms.  Deal with it.  They weren’t meant to be your clients anyway and would have just taken up the time that you could use for a better qualified client.  Save your time and energy for those who recognize your worth – you’ll both be happier and more productive.

Pricing your services is one of the most emotional things you’ll do as a business owner.  Be sure to take the time to review the project at hand before just blurting out a price – doing so will save you a lot of time and frustration down the road.

Tags: business coach, business manager, make money, pricing, Sandra Martini, Virtual Assistant, work from home, work in pjs
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The number one factor that makes or breaks your website is whether or not people can use it.  This is typically referred to as your website’s usability.  It seems simple: if people can’t do what you want them to do (buy things, subscribe to things, request a call, etc.), they won’t do it.  Yet, because websites are so easy to change, several companies just create websites, web applications, e-newsletters, etc., and hope that the changes will help their business. 

What further confuses this is typically a lack of clear insight into your website’s performance.  For example, how well does your website convert visitors into buyers?  What are the key decisions that visitors must make on your website?  Do you give them the information and tools necessary to make those decisions?

This article will help you focus on 3 proven techniques for improving your website’s performance: website analytics, usability testing, and personas.  Exactly how you choose to implement these techniques is obviously up to you.  However, one thing is guaranteed: all three techniques help you get closer to the people who visit your website: their needs, their desires, and their behaviors.  This information is critical if you plan to optimize your website’s usability to achieve your goals.

1. Measure Progress with Website Analytics

Many companies mistakenly install a standard “website statistics” program and only get a group of standard reports.  Typically, these reports do very little to help you judge the true effectiveness of your website. 

Want to get a jumpstart on creating your own website analytics?  Just follow these 3 simple steps:

1.    Begin with the end in mind – start with your objectives.  Define your website marketing strategy objectives (i.e. “Increase the number of qualified prospects coming from web search engines”), and what you want your website visitors to do to reach those objectives (i.e. “See our listing in the top 10 in Google and click on it)
2.    Get in touch with your visitors’ behavior on your website.  Track how many unique visitors you get, and how long they stay on your site (including how many pages they view).  You want all of these numbers to be going up, since that means you’re getting more visitors who are staying on the site longer.  You are maximizing the odds that they will do what you want them to do.  
3.    Develop your conversion rate.  Track how many visitors do the key action you want them to do and compare this number to your total visitors.  This helps you determine your conversion rate.  For example, if 15 out of 100 visitors requested more information from you (and that is one of your objectives), then your conversion rate for information requests is 15%.

Once you have these key website analytics in place, you can start to evolve your tracking and look for trends to optimize for.  Here are two examples:

•    Let’s say you notice higher conversion rates on weekends.  Then you might want to spend more on online advertising on weekends and reduce your spending during the week. 
•    Let’s say you need more visitors and embark on a search engine optimization project to improve your rankings.  Then you can track the increase or decrease in visitor flow from your project’s activities.

Regardless of what you want to achieve, getting to website usability first starts with solid website analytics.  Why?  Because website analytics force you to identify those areas that matter most, and identify how well or poorly you are doing in them.  Once you know this, you are armed with key data that can help you focus your efforts and determine where things like usability testing can help the most.

2. Leverage Usability Testing

Usability testing is where you take people who would use your website, and actually watch them using it.  Typically, you ask the person to do things on the site, and you watch either over their shoulder, behind a one-way mirror, or via a second computer where you can see what’s being recorded on the test computer. 

It’s amazing how many things you can make better on your website just by watching people use it.  Yet, as you get into it, you may find that hiring a usability professional for a testing project can be unnecessarily expensive.  Usability professionals are helpful, since they typically have substantial expertise in planning and conducting tests, as well as interpreting test results.  However, usability testing does not have to be fancy or formal: people are going to give you their opinion whether you’re sitting in a research company or at Starbucks.  So be careful when hiring a professional that seems to make the testing process complicated or costly.  When someone does this, it’s usually only for their own financial gain. 

To successfully conduct a usability test, just follow these 5 steps:

1.    Define your objectives.  Begin with the end in mind.  What do you want to accomplish with this usability test?  Do you have specific areas of your website that you want to improve?  If so, this is a great way to get ideas on how to make those areas better.  Are you planning on rolling out a new area of your website?  A usability test is a great way to do a “trial run” before the big launch.
2.    Recruit the participants.  This will take the most time, and can be the most frustrating part of the test process.  You have to find people to participate (which can be tough, particularly if you need to match specific demographic profiles), and then you need to schedule them.  Then, some will cancel, some won’t show, and some will be great test participants.  The best way to get a feel for the person is to talk to them directly more than once over the phone.  TIP: Be sure to call the person the day of the test to remind them about it. 
3.    Script the test.  You’ll want to have an intro script, the test script, and a post-test survey.  The intro script serves as a checklist of things you want to be sure to cover with the person before you start the test.  TIP: During the part, try to focus on making the person feel comfortable giving their opinion, and reiterate that any feedback is good feedback.  The next part, the test script, is a checklist of the actual things you want the person to do.  This is followed by the post-test survey, which allows you to ask the person questions, and later compare those answers to what they said during the test.
4.    Conduct the test.  This is the fun part!  You sit down with the person, and walk them through the test scenario.  Some tests benefit from close “hand holding,” while others benefit from letting the person do whatever they think is right.  It completely depends on the objectives, and they information you want to collect.  In either case, the best thing to do is to record both the person and what they do on the computer.  TIP: Be sure to compensate the person for their time.
5.    Report the results.  The best way to report the results is two-fold:  First, do a quick, one-page or less recap of each session immediately after the test.  That way, the information is still fresh in your mind.  TIP: Include a picture of the user in your recap, since it will help make that person’s feedback “come alive.”  Next, take the information collected during testing, and create 1 to 4 “personas” – user profiles that explain the type of person, what they need from the website, what issues they encounter frequently on the site, and what can be changed to help them.  This will help you explain the results to others, and you can reuse these personas later when you are adding or updating areas of your website.

How many people should I test? 
For most usability tests, you can learn the maximum amount by only testing ten people.  Too many more and you’ll start to see too many recurring patterns.  If you go less than ten, you might miss things or not see enough of a pattern. 

3. Develop Personas

Let’s face it - no one reads a 20-page usability report from cover to cover. It just doesn’t happen. Usually, key decision makers ask for “recap” presentations, and then “latch on” to one or two key points from the study, quoting that point over and over again.

This presents a great opportunity: why not give those key decision makers something memorable?  Enter personas. 

Personas are a way to get everyone involved thinking about the actual people who visit your website.
What Personas are:

Fake people based on real data

A practical tool to maintain focus on your target customers

A way to make your data come alive and be more memorable

What Personas are not:

Every possible customer profile

“Made up”; they are created from real data, like usability test results

A replacement for existing ways we design and build our web site

Reporting user tests as personas is a great way to:

1. Get key decision makers on board with the persona concept
2. Communicate web site issues in the context of the people actually using your site

Creating personas from usability testing data is time-consuming, but very valuable.  Just look across the data for key trends: what common roles, goals, and actions do you see?  Can you group the feedback along those things?  You’ll quickly start to evolve a handful of personas which can be refined over time.  Add a name and a few pictures of that “person” and you’ll be on your way to creating a more user-focused website experience.

Again, exactly how you choose to implement these techniques is obviously up to you.  Even small steps can make a big impact.  You don’t have to have super-sophisticated website analytics, test your website with 100 users, or develop extremely detailed personas.  Every step you take in these three areas, no matter how big or how small, will help you get more from your website, and your website marketing strategy.

Tags: personas, usability testing, website analytics
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Do you know that 95% of the people starting out in their internet businesses fail? In the middle of all the noise and hype on the internet today, not many people realize that all the ideas and techniques you can find are useless if you don’t first understand what your business model is or how are you going to make money on the internet. Even the most remarkable internet marketing technique will not work if you don’t understand how to apply it to your business.

The 3 most popular business models are:

1) Affiliate Marketing

Perhaps the most popular one out there, affiliate marketing provides a good start for newbies. Almost anyone can sign-up for an affiliate program for free and start promoting the chosen product or service. Commissions start coming in if someone will buy or participate in the programs promoted. Affiliate marketers don’t carry any risk, since they do not pay for the creation of the product, they do not handle customer service, they need not know the innards of internet transactions, like merchant accounts, autoresponder (what is that?), reciprocal linking, etc. It’s also possible to be an affiliate even without a website.

Some affiliate marketing programs you may participate in require little up-front investment. Some are free. It’s no surprise therefore that almost everyone and their neighbor promotes an affiliate program or another. In fact, if there is a single reason why the Internet today is so proliferated with ads and banners, it’s because of affiliate programs.

With the millions out there involve in affiliate marketing, only 5% ever make any money and only 1% makes really big money. The “Super Affiliates,” so they are called, do it very differently from the rest, therefore they earn the big checks.

2) Writing an eBook or other type of information product, recording an information CD.

This is a great strategy because there are thousands of possibilities for the type of product that you can create. There are so many niche markets that you can write about. It could be a course on Japanese gardens, how to start your own babysitting business, how to sell your artwork, taking care of your dog’s ears … there are endless topics and still many that have not yet been explored by online marketers. You don’t have to write the information yourself, you can get a ghost writer or hire someone to produce the CD.

EBook authors need to invest more than affiliates do. While affiliates can get something for nothing, the same is not true for the eBook type of business. EBook authors need to learn a lot more than affiliates are required to. They need to spend some amount of money getting the business up and running. However, when done right, the payoff in this online business model is much more rewarding.

These marketers make more money because they have very, very low production and maintenance costs. Once the product is produced, it doesn’t cost a cent to reproduce thousands of copies. Start-up costs can be covered by selling just a few copies of very high-margin eBooks. You can even recruit hordes of affiliates to do the selling for you.

3) Adsense

This has taken the internet by storm. There are tons of testimonials from people making outrageous income from adsense.

Adsense is Google’s advertising program wherein webmasters display ads from Google’s extensive list of advertisers. Unobtrusive text-based ads are served in member sites, who then earn a commission every time someone clicks on the advertisers’ links.

Google Adsense uses a technology to deliver ads that are highly relevant to the content of a page. Google’s engine will scan through the content of the page to determine its topic, and will then serve ads that are relevant to the page’s content. Running Google Adsense is quite simple. First build a website full of content of your desired niche or topic, and then register in Google’s adsense program. Once approved, you then paste a code in your page, and the ads start appearing immediately after you upload the changes to your server.

Google is silent on how it shares the revenue per click with their partners, but how much you will earn per click depends on the topic and the product being advertised. Products with profit margins of $10 for the advertiser will most likely give you a smaller pay per click than a product with a $100 margin. Similarly, ads with high conversion rates will normally give you higher payouts than less effective ads, since they can afford to pay more dollars per click, with a portion of that money going to you.

These are the top 3 most popular online business models today. No matter which model you choose, make sure you understand the basics. Stop buying courses or information not applicable to your business. Information overload can stop you before you even get started.

Tags: internet business, internet home based business, making money on the internet
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