Web Design And Marketing

Over the past 10 years, Web site promotion has grown from a small niche segment, to an explosive marketing channel that packs a severe ROI punch. There are many Internet marketing and Website promotion techniques, ranging from search engine marketing to viral marketing. A web site looking to establish effective promotions has a lot of techniques to consider. This article provides a brief overview of what I consider to be the 3 Internet marketing fundamentals that every web site promotion should include.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO has been around as long as the search engines. SEO has grown from a couple of programming tricks (which are now a huge No-No) into a legitimate industry that focuses on increasing a web site’s visibility.

SEO focuses on generating “organic” or natural results in a search engine. Visitors form organic search results do not eat into your web site promotion budget. Therefore a well thought out SEO campaign can reap large. According to MarketingSherpa (Search Marketing Benchmark Survey August 2005) SEO campaigns provide an average conversion rate of 4.2% versus 3.6% for Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns Depending on a web site owner’s skill set, SEO can be done in house or outsourced. Any upfront SEO cost are usually made back fairly quickly. A SEO strategy is a must for anyone running a Web site.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC consists of running a text ad targeted to specific keywords. Advertiser’s only pay when some clicks on the ad. This is a very different model than a typical cost per impression model where costs can run high without any measurable results.

PPC is a great avenue for web site promotion when a web site first launches or adds a major new category /product. This is because PPC offers instant visibility (versus SEO which can take months). PPC campaigns can start as low as 2-5 cents a click, or it can go as high as $25 per click (or even higher ) depending on the keyword. Depending on the cost per click, PPC can be very affordable.

However be sure to do your homework, as a simple PPC campaign can get out of hand very quickly and end up running quite a tab in just 1 day.

PPC is expected to generate more than $14 billion dollars in 2006 according to a January 3, 2006 Piper Jaffray “industry Note” by Safa Rashtchy . That is an increase of 41%! Estimates for revenue in 2010 is for more than $33 billion. Why is Pay Per Click exploding this way? The answer is simple, it works and the results are easily measured (which is not always the case in advertising/marketing)

Article Publishing / Syndication

This is the least expensive Internet Marketing technique, and is very effective. Article syndication doesn’t cost you any money, however it does take some of your time. The concept is simple:

1. Write an article about a topic that is relevant to your Web site and your customers.
   Create a tag line that describes your Web site and that links to it.
2. Place it on any free article syndication Web site (for example EzineArticles) . Once there, other web site owners will copy and paste it into their web site.
3. This is a great way to reach your target audience through other web site’s that share similar audiences. It is also a great way to generate traffic to your web site.

No matter which way your Web promotion strategy takes you, including these 3 fundamentals will ensure that you have the basics covered.

Filed by admin at 4:37 pm under Marketing & Promotion
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OK, so how can you increase your conversion rate? Here is one example of how I was able to increase conversion rates by .5% (this was a 50% increase in sales for this particular website) with this simple test method.

AS an FYI, I always take Monday morning’s to evaluate conversion rates. I do this because any significant decreases will now be my priority for the week to fix. If you can, try and set aside an hour every Monday AM (first thing) to evaluate your web sites metrics. Things like visits, visitor paths, referrers , conversion rates, etc. This one habit helped increase my success rate significantly because it provided the focus that I need. Ok that being said, try this simple and easy tip.

In this example, our client was using a graphic button that stated “Buy” (this is quite common) for customers to add products to shopping carts. We changed the “buy” button to state “Add to Cart”. If you use a graphic on your website for customers to use to buy things, this is a really easy test to implement. In this case, we just changed the “Buy” graphic to state “Add to Cart”, and then tracked the results. That’s all we did! We just swapped graphic. And guess what, our conversion rate increased by .5%!

Here is the testing (always test and track!) implementation that I recommend (more…)

Filed by admin at 11:09 am under Conversion Rates
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What is conversion rate optimization? In a nutshell, it means tweaking and testing your web site to see what techniques improve your conversion rate.

This of course, means that you know your web sites conversion rate. If you don’t then you need to take action immediately. Without understanding your current conversion rate, then it will be hard to tell what web marketing efforts will help increase sales. If you don’t know your conversion rate, then install an analytical package (aka. Web site stats) that can track this. Google Analytics is free and can provide this information.

Believe it or not, web site traffic is not the same as your conversion rate. Many business owners just track their web site traffic and daily/monthly sales and then use these 2 figures to estimate their conversion rate. (more…)

Filed by admin at 1:58 pm under Conversion Rates
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