Coaching For Success
Posts tagged internet business
Email Marketing Basics for Newbies
Sep 7th
Internet business marketing is a strategy which uses Integrated Marketing Communications. There are number of channels associated with it right from social networks, to blogs, to forums and many more. One of these effective channels is email marketing.
The number of businesses who are now using email as their regular communication tool is quite high. Many good articles have been written on how to do email marketing and are available online, for free just do a search for them. Today’s post covers some simple basics for newbies online.
Email marketing as pull strategy
Traditional selling approaches emphasise on pushing a product or service rather than promoting it in a way that customers will themselves come and make purchases. In the case of email marketing, it is hard to determine whether the product or service is more important than the mailing list.
If we use a bit of insight, we can conclude that a good product or service is a waste if it is has no demand. The demand can be developed by email marketing through mass promotion. Thus, email marketing is more of a pull strategy to reach out to your prospective customers.
Benefits of email marketing
One of the best features of email marketing is that you can personalise this form of marketing where you can easily tailor your promotional message according to the needs of different end customers of your product or service. It also has the advantage of building up your customer database over a period of time which benefits your internet business in the long term.
Apart from that, if you are able to build a large enough mailing list, you can sell other people’s products and profit off of affiliate programs and commissions. You can also profit from selling advertising space to other businesses. When compared to Social Media marketing, the chances of a high ROI are slightly better in the case of Email marketing.
Ezines- a tool for email marketing
Ezines are usually in the format of newsletters through which you can sell your internet business products and service via self promotion. They are simple and easy to use and are delivered directly to a ezine readers email boxes.
The most important thing that you will need for setting up a good email marketing campaign is an auto responder that features broadcast capabilities. Autoresponders are available through companies such as GetResponse.com and aWeber.com whose cost effectiveness makes them popular with many newbie. You can also make the money you pay for your autoresponder back easily by selling advertising space and informative products through your ezine.
Content development for email marketing
Content development for email marketing is a challenging job. The message may be sent in the form of a newsletter or a simple email letter, but it should be able to generate the desire to purchase.
If you are not a writer then you can try to do a few small free online writing course to develop good writing skills over a period of time. However if you have little interest in writing, then you should outsource this job by hiring great writing service providers like applecopywriting.com who can do it for you and you own all of the copyright to the work once you pay the writers for the articles.
You can find writers in a variety of places including: Elance.com, RentACoder.com, GetAFreelancer.com, however if you are in the UK you should think about using a copywriter in the UK because the language differences really do make a difference to your audience and also the spelling.
Additionally, you can find re-publishable articles on sites such as EzineArticles.com. These sites allow you to copy the article and use them in your ezine for free as long as you leave the author’s resource box intact.
Email marketing is personalised promotion, the chances of final conversion to your end customers are high in case of email marketing. Hence, as a newbie internet business owner it is worth your while investigating and using email marketing to its full advantage to grow your business.
Repurposing Your Web Content
Sep 6th
Business Internet marketing is an art form. There are numerous online routes through which you can promote your business and many platforms to which you can post valuable content and redirect Internet traffic to your business website.
One of the hardest thing to do is have good unique content to post to all of these platforms as posting the same content on all them could potentially hurt your ranking efforts, your promotional campaign and will become a mundane activity. This post discusses some tips to help you bring variation to each platform of your content by repurposing it.
Concept of repurposing
The aim of repurposing content is to bring some variation to the way a message in an article is conveyed in different places online. The overall intent of the message may remain the same but it should be presented in different forms so as not to kill the interest of visitors or make search engines see your site or articles as spam.
The variation can be in simple things like textural changes or images. There can also be variations in the message delivery by use of video or audio as well. The objective of repurposing your content is to promotionally market your Internet business to a wider audience area in the hope that it will develop interest among your target audience on those platforms to visit your website and be a part of your business.
Using variations to change your article format
An article can be in the form of text, video, audio or images. Depending upon the media habits of the audience visiting any chosen platform on which you are going to promote an article you can choose the appropriate format to change the article into.
If you are promoting your website on video sites like ‘YouTube’, you should try to do either a short video promoting the article or better still do a video article post where you actually read (naturally of course, this is not the 10 o’clock news) the article and use a bit of ad lib –ing.
This is great as you can record the audio as well and use that later for audio sites. You can also use simple PowerPoint presentations you read over which always work well instead of just displaying simple text on video. You can also post these PowerPoint presentations on websites like ‘scribd.com’ to help your Internet marketing efforts.
Promotion on social networks like ‘Facebook’ can be effectively done by participating in discussions and posting links of your website. The message can again be conveyed in a more personal way and can also incorporate video, audio text and images. When discussing an article or topic try not to go in guns blazing but get a feel for the people who might be interested the best way is to offer advice for free on the topic or ask a question that will allow you to bring the topic into play.
Text articles are best promoted through various article directories like ‘ezineArticles.com’ remember to either spin or change the wording in these articles so as to have variation. The audio version can be uploaded on sites like ‘BlogTalkRadio’. The important thing to remember is that content on your website should be different from the ones which you post on other forums. Any kind of offer or additional information you want to give free (i.e. an ebook) should always direct prospective customers back to your Internet business website.
Variations possible in the content of message
Apart from changing the format of your article, you also need to look at moulding the message content to suit each different platform. If you are promoting on discussion forums, then you should try to make use of questions and answers to engage people.
Likewise, an article, which is posted on article directories, must be in the form of informational content to help show your expertise in a particular area while the content posted on your webpage must be focused on self-promotion and sales of your Internet business products and services.
One of the easiest ways to repurpose content particularly textural content is to take small snippets, and expand on them by writing around the snippet to generate a whole new mini article which refers to the full article on your site. These snippets can also be posted on social networks like twitter and can be used on forums and places like LinkedIn to start discussions. These discussions can be great as you can use feedback from them and expand on them to create new content for your website, which can allow you to rinse and repeat the process again.
Search engine variations
Search Engine Optimisation is necessary for increasing visibility of your website. You can bring in variation of the SEO parameters as well. The variation can be done in the anchor text that is visible in the search results. Since different search engines have different algorithms for page rankings, you can customise your web content accordingly i.e. for some search engines you must highlight your backlinks; some search engines automatically navigate to your website only on the basis of keywords. These variations can also help with generating traffic to your Internet business website.
Whichever techniques of variation you use for your business Internet marketing, the basic objective of the content remains one and the same, and that is-’generate more traffic to your website’. This process is supposed to help generating interest about your Internet business products and services to prospective customers and hopefully goes on to engage them in a long term relationship.
Optimising Your Site For Even Higher Conversions
Sep 3rd
It is important for every internet business website to get the maximum amount of traffic that it can in order to boost rank and also generate sales. Yesterday we discussed the importance of the call to action function so that visitors will perform some meaningful action, however ongoing testing is needed to ensure you get the maximum conversions you can.
Development and Site Testing Cycle
So today we look at some of the additional things you can do to optimise your site so that it has an even higher conversion rate and also increases traffic flow to help your Internet Business flourish.
If you want a better performing website then it is important that you must optimise it in all respects. Technically, the backend code of a website must be simple and free from extraneous code. Basic Search Engine Optimisation can be utilised through use of meta-tags, header tags, alt tags as well as in the overall content which consists of texts, images or videos.
If you are unsure how to do some of this yourself, try reading up on it or get an internet marketing service or web developer to help you. when you have done all you think is possible with your page the next thing you need to do is use a site optimiser like ‘Google website optimiser’.
In essense what it does is allow you to test between variations of your site to see which is the best for conversions, for example if you had two possible headlines for your homepage you could run an A/B split test in which half of the visitors to your site would be shown Headline A and the other half would see Headline B. You could then see clearly which headline brought you the most orders.
Google Website Optimizer lets you carry out tests like this, the only downside is proper testing can take several weeks before you could see what works and what does not. The real power here though is that it allows you to carry out loads of these tests at the same time.
An example of this muliple testing phase could be the ability to test a headline, a page element/s – such as images, text, prices and even offers, which can all be tested at the same time. Each time someone visits your site they will see a different combination of these elements. Google’s Website Optimizer will then take an average of which of the elements performed the best, you can then use this information to produce a highly converted traffic magnet page.
Many people do use Google Adwords to run split tests, basically they will create two identical ads with different destination URL’s and see which ad does better, however this is really not the same as testing onsite features so really should not be used to optimise your site, however Google Adwords can and should be used for ad optimisation to help drive traffic.
Google Website Optimizer
The biggest problem any site owner has is not knowing what caused a person who has visited your site to exit and testing can help you solve some of the issues but not all. Having other features may help you to see if you can combat some of these loses. Features like Live Chat or a help type pop up may allow you to connect with that person before you lose them, so it is worth considering adding such a feature.
Web analytics package are great tools to help you see what is being clicked on your site. At the most basic level, the ‘site overlay’ function tells you where people click, where they don’t and also where they are leave your site from. This can help you improve the pages not being clicked or remove them and add to or improve those that are.
Usability testing is probably the easiest testing you can perform and can really be virtually free as you can ask anyone you know to go to your site and test it to see how easy, it is to navigate, find information etc and feedback that information to you so you can improve those features. Make sure when doing your usability tests that you look at fixing all the things that are ‘broken’ do this first as these are probabily the fastest improvements to do and quickly seen.
Marketing strategies is always an issue and can always be improved, to do this start by identify from your usabilty tests where your marketing tatics on and off page are weakest. Look at everything from initial marketing of your site right through to closing a sale, make sure you look closely at your ads, homepage, product or services pages and the all important checkout page and confirmation of order page.
If your usabilty testing has shown any issues on these pages fix those first before testing your marketing and retest the usabilty of your site with a new group of people once changes have been implemented.
Running a successful website is not a one-off time/ effort deal you need a lot of creativity and constant monitoring if any success is to be had in generating an income. Being able to anaylse traffic on your internet business website goes a long way in developing more targetted high volume traffic and gaining new customers.
Encouraging Call-To-Action In Your Business Website
Sep 2nd
These are examples of the most commonly used colours for 'Call to Action' buttons
Internet business marketing is an effective but time consuming technique for online business promotion. Constant monitoring and improvement is required in your online promotional campaigns in order to ensure maximisation of your efforts and naturally you want to have a good return on your efforts and investments.
This can sometimes be easier said than done, however it is possible to achieve if you are able to convince your target audience to take some positive action following your ad campaign in Google, landing page promotion, or web squeeze promotion tactics on your main site. Today’s post discusses the importance of a ‘Call-to-Action’ function in your website to help you get results from your internet traffic.
Call-to-Action on your website
A good internet business website should have a clear objective and strategy for attracting prospective customers. All of the content should definitively be written and promoted with the intent of bringing customers to an end goal on your website.
Consider this, if you have spend time or money (in most case both) to obtain traffic and if you are able to drive traffic to your website, then you must want those visitors to take some action which not only will benefit them but you also.
It is amazing how such a small point can become such a major problem to many internet business online, who simple forget that a website in itself does not bring sales, nor does all the traffic generation in the world. Instead it is that definitive, quietly understated, subliminal call to action message embedded on your site that turns a website into an internet business website that does real business sales.
The action does not have to be drastic or flashy, it can be simply subscribing to your website, signing up, purchase via a button or it can just be the wording of your webcopy, in any case these things need to be your irrestible voice to a potential client. Your call to action should woo your potential customers by appealling to their personality, pain/ problem.
It should not be sales patter or business speak necessarily as many people find that off putting, but if it can get them identifying with your product or services as well as feeling an overwhelming need to take some action then you know you have done a good job.
Call to actions should always have a proper function for both your own business and that of your end purchaser, it is therefore important that each individual page of your site have a clear call to action function set out from the beginning.
How to approach call to action in content development
You should always atempt to boost any advertising you do with supporting content call to actions, even if you do not use ads you should ensure your web copy for each page uses them. This is a key mistake many companies make and it cost them dearly in lost revuenue.
Your homepage should be optimised to a single set of call to actions, do not try to have call to actions for lots of different products or services as this will only serve to negatively impact your efforts. Once you have decided what these are you need to write your webcopy from the perspective of your typical customer.
Do not assume anything in the copy, do not do a sales pitch allow the copy to be a thread with a sharp concise opening to capture attention and then unfold. Each paragraph should make a call to action statement toward the end goal and the final paragraph should be where you make your invisible close – call to action.
The keywords which a user will look for must be incorporated throughout the content on the page. Basic rules for Search Engine Optimisation should be used. If you have not researched your keywords properly then try Google’s keyword tool to help you.
You should also structure the information given on the website by strategically using navigation links from your homepage to redirect visitors to the page which is relevant to them. This redirect is indirectly a call to action as it is making your visitor get involved with your site by compelling them to click the link to get the right information. A call to action really only works if the potential customer is interacting with your internet business site and each page should have an objective which prompts users for further action.
Search engine techniques for Call-to-Action
An ‘action’ can be generated right from when a potential customer clicks a url and follows your webpage from a search engine result. The ‘description tag’ which describes your page in search engine results can be used to encourage click-throughs by using popular keywords in the description.
You can also put your special offers and unique selling proposition (USP) in your site page description tag which can be used to prompt potential customers to go for instant subscription or purchases that you may have discounted for example. If you use WordPress for your site this can also be done by using the excerpt displayed on the category pages.
Promotional tools and call-to-action
If you are doing article marketing you can get targeted traffic visits for your website. You can use a compelling call to action that directly relates to the individual article you have posted. The other option is to link to an internal (specific) page on your website that the reader would be most interested in related to the article (use a backlink) once back at your site on the specific page a full blown call to action can ensue on that landing page.
Call-to-Action in ‘Newsletters’ or ‘Email’ refers to the response which you wring from your potential target audience. Their response can be in the form of feedback, an RSVP to any event or similar actions. The content in the message must explicitly mention what action you expect them to take i.e. ‘click here for your FREE report’.
As you can see from the above tips call to action’s are very important and should be an integral part of your internet business strategy. Online promotions follow a pull strategy by attracting customers to your products and inducing their desire to make a purchase. Desire is no good if it is not converted into action. A ‘Call-to-Action’ function is an explicit way of converting the desire of customers into final action and hence achieving the ultimate objective of generating sales for your internet business.
Show The World Who You Are With Video Marketing
Aug 30th
Video marketing is now one of the quickest and fastest ways to let potential clients and customers know who you are and what your business is about. It is also very cheap to produce and easy to upload to the web and in most cases has virtually an immediate impact on your websites traffic.
Did you know that up to 75% of Internet users prefer watching videos online to reading articles? In other words, all they need to know about you and your business can be summed up in a video presentation that gives your internet business all the jump-start it needs to keep them coming back for more. People talk about video marketing as an effective means to conveying your marketing personality and brand.
Videos work better more often than text because more people tend to respond better to visual representations. If you think about ads on your TV even though you may go and make a cup of tea through them the fact is 65 – 80% of people have full recall of an ad. The reason for this is simple – people’s attention spans are short, so are the ads. Generally speaking a TV ad is 30 secs – thats all the time any advertiser has to make an impression and get people to recall their product or service, this is all the time they have to turn a potential customer into a paying customer.
You as an internet business owner should be thinking the same, your video marketing campaigns should be , short, sharp and to the point if you want it to be remembered. if you cannot say it in a minute then you need to rethink your ad. On the internet a video can make the difference between being good and being great, being visible and being invisible.
Some internet business owners have beautiful text based sites which bring in customers no problem, others have not so good looking web sites that have video which bring in even more customers this is because the video made the difference. Search engines love videos and generally videos show higher in search engine results and online, visibility is everything.
Statistics Clearly Show A Rise in Internet Video Viewing - Image Courtesy of eMarketer.com
If a picture can tell a thousand words! Imagine how much more a video marketing your product or service can do for you. You can have spoken content in your video conveying your product or service, there can be inviting music in the background to give listeners a mood lift, you can showing your expertise in your field to selling your brand and most importantly you can use footage of your clients’ experience savouring your products or services. All this with just a one minute video clip!
A site that is text based relies on visitor’s attention being caught by visual images or by reading the text, which is no problem if you can get them to stop long enough. Any good internet marketer or internet consultant will tell you you have approximately three to five seconds to make an impact on your site opening or people will leave.
Now most business owners believe that putting a video online is difficult or has to be some work of art but this is really not the case and should not hinder any small business from using video, I mean it’s no big deal to grab your camcorder and film scenes of your business’ day to day natural life. This creates a wonderful effect of being right there, where all the action is taking place, just by viewing a presentation video.
How do you publish the video? – Simple! – There are many huge sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Livestream and Google Video where your infomercial can really stand out. You can use theme to your advantage by publishing your videos on multiple platforms which is a common strategy, as it increases your exposure seven-fold so you become highly visible and not only that!
People are attracted to video it is natural for most people to be pulled by things that stimulate the senses, in the case of video marketing it is sight , sound, and mental perception. Video marketing can keep your customers informed and ensures potential customers see you in a better light.
Only you can make your internet business a marketing success, you need to add video marketing to your arsenal and get your company more visible to grab those clients. Are You Ready? Get set… GO and try it out!
