Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category

5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Amazing Technology and Your Online Marketing Strategy

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

If your online marketing strategy isn’t working, then you might need to introduce some technology to your website.  If you current marketing promotions are going well, then you might be able to improve them even more with some added technology.  Fancy bells and whistles on a website just for fun aren’t the type of technology that will help you increase sales and grow your business.  But technology designed to do some very specific things can make quite a difference.

If you sell products, there are some website enhancements you’ll want to consider in your online marketing strategy. Of course, you must have clear pictures of your products, with more than one picture per product, ideally. You’ll want the customer to be able to click the picture and enlarge it to see the product even more clearly.  There’s no real technology involved with that.  But to give the customer the closest experience possible to actually being able to pick up and examine the product, look into the software that allows you to show 3D images on your website.  The customer can click on the image or on a slider bar and drag to turn the image completely around so they can get a better feel for the object. This online marketing strategy is becoming more popular as companies realize how effective it is.

You could also look into the software that allows a customer to hold the mouse pointer over an image and zoom into it.  This usually also allows the customer to move the mouse and see various parts of the object incredibly up close.  Remember in your online marketing strategy that everything you do to bring the customer closer to the item they want to purchase will increase the likelihood of a sale. You’ll also want to ensure that your shopping cart and checkout system is as absolutely simple and easy as you can make it.  Any slight hangup, delay or problem is just one more reason for the customer not to buy from you.

If you don’t sell products but services or information instead, don’t discount the addition of pictures to your website.  Screen shots are particularly helpful when selling software, for instance.  While adding pictures doesn’t require much technology, you’ll want to give your website more appeal by adding sound and video. When you’re selling a service, for instance, a video of someone explaining the service in a friendly, casual tone can go a long way toward giving a customer a positive impression.  Even audio clips the customer can listen to that break down concepts into simple steps can be an important part of your online marketing strategy.

Video that shows screenshots and still shots as well as a person speaking or demonstrating something can be particularly effective.  Get the software necessary to make these recording.  Don’t forget how annoying it can be to have something suddenly start playing, though, so give the customer the option.  Then add them to your website as part of your technology online marketing strategy.

Multiple Streams of Internet Income: How Ordinary People Make Extraordinary Money Online

Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Overall Rating:
 

Total Customer Reviews: (2)
Seller: Amazon

The E-Code: 33 Internet Superstars Reveal 43 Ways to Make Money Online Almost Instantly – Using Only E-Mail!

Friday, February 26th, 2010
Overall Rating:
 

Total Customer Reviews: (4)
Seller: Amazon

Internet Marketing: How to Get a Website That Works for Your Business

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Overall Rating:
 

Total Customer Reviews: (27)
Seller: Amazon

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Overall Rating:
 

Total Customer Reviews: (20)
Seller: Amazon

Web Design All-in-one for Dummies

Friday, February 19th, 2010
Overall Rating:
 

Total Customer Reviews: (1)
Seller: Amazon

Effectively Using Overture/Yahoo To Get Website Visitors

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoos takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.

To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or companys ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.

Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every companys goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.

Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Googles Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.

For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.

You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit.

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, dont be counted with them.

Why Strategic Marketing Planning Is Critical And Necessary

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Even before the days of the Internet when advertising was done solely through television, billboards, magazines, radio and direct mailing, strategic marketing planning could often make or break a company.  Considering the high cost of all forms of marketing, making a mistake about where to advertise and whom to focus the advertising on could lose a company thousands upon thousands of dollars. While some forms of advertising and promotion are much less costly today, planning your advertising strategy for success is still just as important.

An old saying says that embarking on anything without a plan is a little bit like trying to get to a place you’ve never been without a map. And it is true that people who make plans and write down their goals are more likely to achieve them than those who just have a general idea where they’re going and no real concrete plans about how to do it, and no definite idea about when they should arrive.  Your strategic marketing planning can give you a road map, and even an idea of when you should see results, and how good those results should be.

Let’s continue the idea of the traveler with no map and no real sense of his destination.  What happens when he gets where he wanted to go, and it turns out to not be the place he’d dreamed of.  What then?  Without a plan, he’s got no real recourse except to keep going aimlessly or to go back the way he came.  With strategic marketing planning, once you see your results and they’re not what you’d hoped for, you have a plan in place to deal with it.  You have set measures for how to make changes and improvements to work toward the results you wanted in the beginning.  You’re working toward a goal, not meandering aimlessly and using intuition and guesswork to build your business.

When you’re ready for strategic marketing planning, consider sitting down with the experts and building your plan. You can find a consultant who will just help you with the plan, should you not want to hire someone to handle promotions altogether.  But just having an expert help you with your promotion planning can confirm for you that what you’re doing is sound.  And it can make sure that your goals are achievable, too, so you can avoid the disappointment of setting goals that are too high to reach.

Strategic marketing planning gives you a concrete result to aim for.  You know what you want, now it’s just up to you to take the steps to achieve it.  And as the results come in, you’ll have methods of adjusting your plan to build upon those good results, or steer your promotional activities away from methods that aren’t working.  You’ll know how to adjust certain promotions to make them work better, and how to judge whether a specific type of promotion just isn’t right for your business.  With strategic marketing planning, you’ll always have a step ready for you to take next.