10 Rarely Used Ways To Upgrade Your Ad
1. Tell your potential customers special events your
business has sponsored. It could be charities, fund
raisers, charity auctions, etc.
2. Tell your potential customers about any mergers
or joint ventures with other reputable organizations
or businesses they would recognize.
3. Tell your potential customers some valuable info.
This will create rapport with them. It could be tips,
a how-to excerpt, etc.
4. Tell your potential customers about reviews of
special events your business attended. It could be
trade shows, seminars or conferences.
5. Tell your potential customers stories about your
customer service. It could be how you help a new
customer, an award you won, etc.
6. Tell your potential customers stories about your
employees. It could be about why they like to work
for you, their personal profile, etc.
7. Tell your potential customers about milestones
and goals your business has achieved. It could be
a sales goal, customers served goal, etc.
8. Tell your potential customers about innovations
your business has discovered. It could be inventions,
new technologies, patents, new products, etc.
9. Tell your potential customers the things you have
done to improve your product. It could be lighter,
faster, heavier, slower, etc.
10. Tell your potential customers a little history or
past information about your business. It could be
how it started, how you got the product idea, etc.
Custom Search
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
10 Ways To Maintain Profits In A Slow Economy
10 Ways To Maintain Profits In A Slow Economy
1. Sell more back end products to your existing
customer base. You already created rapport, trust
and proved your credibility to them.
2. Make it a practice to up sell to new and existing
customers. After they decide to buy one product,
offer them another product.
3. Cross promote your products and services with
other businesses that aren't competition. You will
reach a wider audience at less cost.
4. Create joint venture deals with other businesses.
You can expand your product line and target other
profitable markets at a lower cost.
5. Start an affiliate program for your business. You
will be able to spend less profits on risk advertising
and spend more money on guaranteed sales.
6. Trade advertising with other businesses to save
revenue. You could trade e-zine ads, banners ads,
links, print ads, etc.
7. Out source part of your workload. This can save
on employee costs, equipment costs, taxation costs,
expansion costs, etc.
8. Add low cost bonuses to your offer that have a
high perceived value. It could be ebooks, members
only sites, consulting, e-reports, etc.
9. Use viral marketing to promote your business on
the internet. Give away free stuff with your ad copy
include on it so others can give it away.
10. Follow up with all your prospects. You can use
a free e-zine, a follow-up autoresponder, an update
or reminder list, etc.
1. Sell more back end products to your existing
customer base. You already created rapport, trust
and proved your credibility to them.
2. Make it a practice to up sell to new and existing
customers. After they decide to buy one product,
offer them another product.
3. Cross promote your products and services with
other businesses that aren't competition. You will
reach a wider audience at less cost.
4. Create joint venture deals with other businesses.
You can expand your product line and target other
profitable markets at a lower cost.
5. Start an affiliate program for your business. You
will be able to spend less profits on risk advertising
and spend more money on guaranteed sales.
6. Trade advertising with other businesses to save
revenue. You could trade e-zine ads, banners ads,
links, print ads, etc.
7. Out source part of your workload. This can save
on employee costs, equipment costs, taxation costs,
expansion costs, etc.
8. Add low cost bonuses to your offer that have a
high perceived value. It could be ebooks, members
only sites, consulting, e-reports, etc.
9. Use viral marketing to promote your business on
the internet. Give away free stuff with your ad copy
include on it so others can give it away.
10. Follow up with all your prospects. You can use
a free e-zine, a follow-up autoresponder, an update
or reminder list, etc.
Top 10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google
Top 10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google
This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you kicked out of baseball.
That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by "search engine" I mean "Google" – placement.
1. Title tags
Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.
2. Content
The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.
3. Quality Links
Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.
Convert visitors with Google Analytics - free
4. Quantity Links
Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.
5. URL
The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.
6. Spider Food
Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.
7. Site Architecture
There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.
8. Frequently Updated Content
You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
9. Start a Blog
A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.
10. Don't Forget Humans
This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.
This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you kicked out of baseball.
That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by "search engine" I mean "Google" – placement.
1. Title tags
Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.
2. Content
The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.
3. Quality Links
Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.
Convert visitors with Google Analytics - free
4. Quantity Links
Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.
5. URL
The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.
6. Spider Food
Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.
7. Site Architecture
There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.
8. Frequently Updated Content
You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
9. Start a Blog
A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.
10. Don't Forget Humans
This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.
10 Web Site Design And Writing No-No's
10 Web Site Design And Writing No-No's
1. Don't load your web site with a lot of high tech
clutter. Your visitors may miss your whole sales
message.
2. Don't use unnecessary words or phrases on your
site. You only have so much time to get your visitor's
attention and interest; make ever word count.
3. Don't make the mistake that everyone will totally
understand your web site message. Use descriptive
words and examples to get your point across.
4. Don't write your strongest point or benefit only
once. You should repeat it at least 3 times because
some people may miss it.
5. Don't push all your words together on your web
site. People like to skim; use plenty of headings
and sub headings.
6. Don't use site content your target audience isn't
interested in. If people are coming to your site to
find info about fishing don't include soccer content.
7. Don't use 50 different content formats all over
your web site. Use the same fonts, text sizes, text
colors, etc.
8. Don't use words your web site visitors might not
understand. People are not going to stop and look
in a dictionary, they will just go to another site.
9. Don't let selling words and phrases go unnoticed.
Highlight important words and phrases with color,
bolding, italics, underlining, etc.
10. Don't forget to use words that create emotion.
All people have emotions, people will have more
interest when they are emotionally attached.
1. Don't load your web site with a lot of high tech
clutter. Your visitors may miss your whole sales
message.
2. Don't use unnecessary words or phrases on your
site. You only have so much time to get your visitor's
attention and interest; make ever word count.
3. Don't make the mistake that everyone will totally
understand your web site message. Use descriptive
words and examples to get your point across.
4. Don't write your strongest point or benefit only
once. You should repeat it at least 3 times because
some people may miss it.
5. Don't push all your words together on your web
site. People like to skim; use plenty of headings
and sub headings.
6. Don't use site content your target audience isn't
interested in. If people are coming to your site to
find info about fishing don't include soccer content.
7. Don't use 50 different content formats all over
your web site. Use the same fonts, text sizes, text
colors, etc.
8. Don't use words your web site visitors might not
understand. People are not going to stop and look
in a dictionary, they will just go to another site.
9. Don't let selling words and phrases go unnoticed.
Highlight important words and phrases with color,
bolding, italics, underlining, etc.
10. Don't forget to use words that create emotion.
All people have emotions, people will have more
interest when they are emotionally attached.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
