Cumino Blog

Have you ever noticed how much everybody talks about Internet marketing? It seems to be one of the hottest topics on the Internet over the past few years.

The funny thing about it is that with all the talk that has been going on very few people actually understand some of the fundamental principles of Internet marketing.

For example, what is the most important aspect of your Internet marketing campaigns? What is the most important area to focus on in order to make your business succeed?

If you answered “getting traffic to my website” then you are not alone. This is one of the most troubling subjects on most webmasters’ minds.

But it is the WRONG answer!

What you should worry about most is “What do you do with the traffic that your website already receives?”

Are you throwing it away? Perhaps you are only really holding onto about 1% of it, maybe even less!

Before even considering what you are going to do to drive more traffic to your website you need to consider this topic first.

For example, let’s say that you are already getting 500 visitors a day (that’s rather healthy). You sell some sort of product that costs $50 and make on average 2 sales a day (not bad at all!).

However, you want to double your sales. There are two ways you can do this. It is obvious that for every 500 visitors you are getting 2 sales. That means that you could increase your traffic by 500 visitors a day in order to obtain your goal. That’s pretty easy math isn’t it?

That’s what most people do! They say: “Well, I’m making $50 a day with 200 visitors, so if I get 400 visitors a day then I can make $100!” Then they go off to spend their money on increasing their traffic. Hey, if they can double their traffic for less than $50, then it’s a good deal!

HOWEVER, there is another way to double your sales. Think about it this way: You are only converting 2 out of every 500 visitors into customers! That’s a 0.4% conversion rate.

What you could do instead is improve your website so that you double your conversion rate. That means that you would get 4 sales for every 500 visitors. And guess what? You are already getting the 500 visitors!

Don’t look at it as if you are making 2 sales a day; look at it as if you are losing 498 sales every day. How much longer do you want to lose 498 sales?

So how do you increase your conversion rate? Well, your website probably can’t get any worse than it is right now, so why not change it?

Here are a few basic things that you can do:

1. Track everything that you do.

If you don’t know the conversion rate of your website, look up your traffic logs and write down the average number of visitors you get every day. Then look up your sales records and find out how many sales you get every day. Write this down.

2. Make small changes to your website.

Don’t change a lot. Maybe clean up your navigation menu a bit. Change the header on your sales letter. Change the background color or image. The key here is to only make small changes.

3. Track what happens next.

Now watch your traffic and sales for the next week or so. Did you notice a difference? Did it get better? Did it get worse? If it got better then keep whatever it is you did. If it got worse, then revert back to your old design.

4. Repeat steps 1 to 3.

Now go back and record how you are doing. Make another small change and see if it makes a difference.

This may sound like a lot of work (and it is), but I guarantee that it will help you to make higher profits on your website, without spending a dime on advertising!

If there is one difference that I have noticed between successful marketers and unsuccessful marketers it is that they test and they track EVERYTHING that they do. If you don’t know how well you are doing, how are you going to improve?

Matthew Glanfield is an Internet marketing veteran of 3 years. Receive his free email course on how to start your own Internet business by visiting http://www.internetbusinessformula.com.

Do you want more traffic and sales to your site?

If so, do you want to know how to take full advantage of the internet to get your sales message out there without having to spend thousands of dollars?

There are thousands of high traffic sites on the Internet where you can market for free. The trick is finding these sites and using them effectively to market your business online.

Your best weapon in finding these sites is Alexa. You can use Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, to search by topic and compare stats on sites, as well as get the traffic ranking of a site.

The point of marketing on high traffic sites is that the more visitors a site has, the more likely you are to be seen. The more you are seen, the more likely someone will click through and visit your site.

Marketing on high traffic sites isn’t enough though. The traffic has to be targeted. By targeting your market, and marketing on high traffic sites, you can quickly multiply your traffic and sales.

To get you started, I’ve included five of the top sites on the internet, with tips on how to market your site effectively so that you can increase your traffic and sales.

1. Yahoo – http://www.yahoo.com
2. MSN – http://www.msn.com
3. Google – http://www.google.com

According to Alexa, these are the top three sites respectively. Although you should make sure that you submit your site to their search engine spiders, which is free, there is a better way to market on these sites.

It’s called Groups.

Yahoo Groups – http://www.yahoogroups.com
MSN Groups – http://groups.msn.com
Google Groups – http://groups.google.com

You’ll find thousands of groups at these sites where you can post your articles, advertise your ezines, and submit free classfieds. You’ll also find discussion groups on just about any topic you can imagine, and unlike forums, you can conveniently read and reply to messages in your email.

You can share information and build relationships with potential customers. The beauty of these sites is that they spider each other. Yahoo also uses RSS, which can give you an opportunity to become syndicated, especially if you write articles.

Your promotions can quickly become viral.

4. Ebay – http://www.ebay.com – If you sell products and services on Ebay, you can use your About Me page to offer a subscription to your ezine, as well as advertise your website.

You need to follow the instructions on Ebay when using this feature. Build a relationship with both your customers and fellow Ebay marketers. If you haven’t considered marketing here, you definitely want to consider marketing it because this site gets over eight million hits a month.

5. Myspace.com – http://www.myspace.com – Although this site considers itself to be noncommercial, and it has strict rules about promoting your products and services, this is an excellent place to network.

You’ll find blogs, groups, free classifieds, and forums. You can send and receive email and private messages. There’s a search function that allows you to find others with your interests.

As long as you take the time to get to know the site and follow the rules, you can effectively promote your business here by networking with others. You’ll need an account, but it’s free. You won’t be allowed to post for the first seven days, but this is to keep spammers out.

In fact, there are currently over 2,800 business groups here, some with thousands of members, and you can post quite a bit of information in your profile.

If you’re on a shoestring marketing budget, you can use these high traffic sites to help you increase traffic and sales to your site.

Want even more high traffic sites to market on? Jinger Jarrett will show you how to market your business online to hundreds of high traffic sites for free. Grab a subscription to her premium ezine for just $5 per month. This is a limited time offer. http://www.smallbusinesshowto.com/Special-Offers.html

When you work with web site traffic, you must have the tools that show you the real picture about this traffic. You must know for sure how targeted your visitors are, what they want, what offers they like more, what offers cut down their motivation to use your product/service.

Only professional URL tracking tools can show you the real picture about your online business. And those who do not want to see real picture, venture their business to a great risk of losing everything.

HOW TRACKING WORKS.

Nothing difficult at all. You create a special link and put it inside your copy, mailing message, autoresponder letter, pop-up window, web page – anywhere you wish. Your URL gets special ‘counter’ that is activated every time someone clicks your link. When you know the statistic information about clicks on any of your links, you see the response that your business gets with clients, subscribers and web site visitors.

A simple example will show how URL tracking can help you to qualify the motivation for your products among subscribers. Let’s say you have 3,000 subscribers in your car driving tips course. Using URL statistics you can see how much clients exactly are ready for special action with your web site.

You write email letter to your subscribers, saying: “bla-bla-bla. You are my subscribers. I have terrific car related offers to you.”

Then you place several trackable links with text:

“…Click this link if you want to get discounts for car wash:
http://www.YourWebSite.com/link1

Click this link if you want to get car insurance:
http://www.YourWebSite.com/link2

Click here if you do not have a car and want to get loan for car purchase:
http://www.YourWebSite.com/link3 …”

This example is simplified, but you can get the idea. People will click on particular links if they like any particular offer. And you just look at the statistics for the number of clicks on each link and know:

1. How many people from your list have a car (link 1 + link 2)

2. How many people from your list do not have a car (link 3)

3. How many people from your list are interested in lower prices car wash services (link 1)

4. How many people from your list need new car insurances (link 2)

5. How many people from your list ignored all your offers (3,000 – link 1 – link 2 – link 3)

This info is very useful. Maybe after such a test you will find out that 2,600 out of “your” 3,000 subscribers did not click any of the links at all. Then you should think it over: maybe you do not have a car targeted traffic.

That was an example of URL tracking aimed at qualifying the subscribers into different groups by their interest. But tracking can give more useful info about your online business.

You can check what type of your ad copy is more effective with a simple URL testing technique. Write two ad copies that will differ in some copywriting elements. Put two different links in these copies. Track both links and you will immediately know what ad copy works better. No hypothetical suggestions, only real facts.

The technique is universal: you can test different variants of texts, offers, products and services and see what works and what not. This technique is called split testing in Internet marketing. You make several variants (i.e. split you offer into several testing variants) and see what variant gets better response. Then you choose that variant that works better and stick with it, do more and more split testing to get a better and better effect from your web site.

Now that you know the benefits of using URL tracking, you should know what features professional URL tracking tools should have.

PROFESSIONAL URL TRACKING TOOL SHOULD HAVE THESE FEATURES:

- you can create and test as many URLs as you wish;

- you can make two types of links: HTML and TXT links;

- you must be able to edit your URLs;

- you must be able to track link statistics to see: when the link was clicked, how many times it was clicked, how many unique clicks were made, etc.

URL tracking does not bring you traffic, but it shows the most truthful picture about what traffic you get to the web site. This is a very important tool: it is always better to dodge troubles in advance then to face problems all of a sudden.

Nickolay Bokhonok – CEO And Owner Of DesktopMoney LTD. Inventor of Internet marketing software and scripts. Successful Internet entrepreneur. Learn more about web site traffic building strategies, tips and tools at Free Traffic System web site.

Free Traffic System – Your Web Site Traffic Doctor.
info@FreeTrafficSystem.com

Have you noticed that your banner ads rarely get clicked on? Banner ads used to be a very effective method of advertising, but the web has become bloated with banner after banner. As a result they’re largely ignored today.

But did you know there is a simple and effective way to get people to click on your banners?

The click-through-rates of text links is roughly 4 times that of banner ads. Text links tend to give a prospective customer more useful information about the link and less hype. And with a text link you avoid the headaches that you get when staring at flashing banners.

Of course the main problem with text links is that most banner exchange programs and sites that sell advertising use banners. So to advertise on most sites you have to have a standard 468 x 60 pixel banner to use in your ad campaigns.

This poses a dilemma for advertisers but there is a simple solution: Make your banners look like text links!

The process of creating banners of this type is a very simple one, but there are several steps involved:

1 – Create a regular text link in HTML. You can use any background color that you wish, but do keep in mind that a white back-ground will blend in with most web sites and your banner will appear more like a regular text link.

Now preview the link in your HTML editor or your web browser.

2 – When the link looks exactly the way you want it to look, simply press the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. This copies the contents of the screen (including your text link) to the Windows clipboard.

3 – Open up the Windows “Paint” program. You’ll find it under “Accessories” on the “Start menu”.

4 – Click “Edit” and then click “Paste”.

5 – You’ll now see the screen shot that you made with the “Print Screen” key. Save this as a JPEG image:

On the “File” menu, click “Save As”. Type a name for the new image in the “File Name” box. In the “Save As Type” drop-down box, select JPEG. Now click “Save”. You now a JPEG image of the screen shot that you took with the text link in it.

6 – Open the image in your favorite photo editor (I use MGI PhotoSuite). Carefully crop the image around the text link until it measures exactly 468 x 60 pixels. If you need other banner sizes (buttons or skyscrapers for instance), simply crop your image to the size needed.

You now have a banner ad that looks like a text link! Use this for your ads and banner exchange campaigns and enjoy a much higher click-through-rate than you would receive with traditional banners!

About The Author

© 2003 Rick Rouse, Tek18.COM Rick Rouse is the owner of Tek18.COM. He has written several articles and ebooks about search engine optimization and web site traffic-building. Visit his web site: http://www.tek18.com

For many months after I put up my new website,
my traffic was low and sales almost
zero.

Then I began researching the internet for secret
strategies that will help fire up my traffics and sales.

I have the pleasure to offer you these 10 sizzling
secret phrases that will ignite your website traffics and
sales:

1. “Bookmark This Web Site Now”

Tell your visitors to bookmark your web site. They may
see your web site listed in their bookmarks and visit
again. You should also give then a good reason to
bookmark your site.

For example tell them you add new content everyday.

2. “Subscribe To Our Free E-zine”

Tell your visitors to subscribe to your e-zine.
When they subscribe you’ll capture their e-mail address.

Every time they read your e-zine, it will remind them
to return to your site.

3. “Participate On Our Discussion Board”

Ask your visitors to participate on your online
discussion board.

By participating they will meet other people. By
meeting other people, they will revisit your web site
on a regular basis to stay in contact with them.

4. “Sign Our Guestbook”

Ask your visitors to sign your guest book. When people
sign your guestbook you may get valuable feedback or
constructive criticism on how to improve your web site.
This may help you increase traffic to your web site.

5. “Use Our Free Content On Your Site Or In Your
E-zine”

Allow your visitors to use your articles on
their own web site or in their e-zine. Just ask them to
include your resource box. This will spread your
advertising all over the internet.

6. “Refer This Our Web Site To A Friend”

Ask your visitors to refer your web site to a friend(s).

They may know someone that would benefit from
visiting your web site.

7. “Fill Out Our Online Survey”

Ask visitors to fill out your online survey or questionnaire.
You could use it to get valuable feedback on ways to
improve your web site to increase traffic.

8. “Enter Our Contests”

Ask your visitors to enter your online contest or sweepstakes.

People love to win stuff, and they will visit your web site to try.

9. “Give Away Our Freebie To Your Visitors”

Allow your visitors to give away your online freebies to
People that visit your web site. Include your ad on the freebie
and those freebies will multiply your traffic.

10. “Join Our Affiliate Program”

Allow your visitors to make money selling your products
or services. This will increase your traffic because they will
link to your web site.

May these website traffics secrets help you to make a lot of money.

Warmly,

I-key Benney, CEO

I-key, a Millionaire CEO from New York City is the creator of “Mscsrrr: Millionaire Secret Cash System”,(investing online) program, which has helped thousands of ordinary people from all over the world to attain financial security and shining success during the past 2 yrs.

Mscsrrr Millionaire Cash System helps you to generate $1,500+/Week for life, from home or office, part time or full time. No large investment or hassles. Win $1000-$2000 free “cash”.

If you are reading this article, more likely than not you own a website that you would like to see be a success. To achieve that level, you need traffic to your site. But where does traffic come from?

One of the better ways to get traffic for your site is to submit your site to the many directories that exist online. Online directories are similar to your phone book yellow pages: These directories are categorized (education, entertainment, health, etc.), and when you submit your website, you suggest a category for your website. Often, you will even be able to submit to a sub-category within a major category. For example, suppose your website is about aromatherapy.

In your submission request, you would suggest “Health” as your main category, “Alternative Medicine” as your sub-category, and “Aromatherapy” as a further sub-category.

Some of the leading online directories are Yahoo!, MSN Small Business, and the DMOZ directory. Unlike search engines, however, listings in online directories are usually not free. As of this writing, you can submit for free to the Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com), but there is not guarantee on how quickly your website will be reviewed for listing. If you need your site reviewed faster, you can pay Yahoo! $299 US for “expedited” service and they will review your site within seven days. However, this fee is a yearly recurring fee. Your website is subject to a yearly review, and is guaranteed neither initial inclusion or to remain listed year after year.

The MSN service is $49 US, and it functions more like a search engine submit service. Their submission service includes inclusion in their own small business directory. DMOZ, on the other hand, is free, but because it is operated by volunteers, it could be awhile before your site is included. Your best options are to submit to DMOZ and pay for the MSN and Yahoo! services.

But why should you spend money? Can’t you just optimize your site for the search engines? You can, but not everyone goes to a search engine for what they are looking for. For example, if someone is searching for gourmet dog treats, they may not use a search engine. Instead, they might go to one of the online directories and look at the listings, much like someone would use the yellow pages in their phone book. Your investment in gaining inclusion in the online directories will pay off for you in a multitude of ways.

1. You will increase traffic to your site. Your site will be included in the online directories, as well as the search engines, and this will help you gain traffic as people search directory listings and find your website.

2. You will increase the number of backlinks to your site. If the directory pages are listed in search engines, the link they provide for your site will be listed in the search engines. This benefits you by creating more ways for people to find your site. Ultimately, this will provide more traffic for you.

3. Submitting to directories is a quick way to gain links. Optimizing your site for the search engines is very difficult and time-consuming.
It can take a lot of time to learn how to write for the search engines. In the meantime, any links you can get will help you with the search engines, and submitting to directories will get you links.

4. Submitting to directories is relatively inexpensive, and a good investment. As stated earlier, you can submit to Yahoo! and MSN for less than $350. DMOZ is free. If you run a search for online directories, you will find many more where you could submit inexpensively, or even for free.

In short, submitting to online directories is one of the best ways for you to build traffic to your website. In the end, you need traffic to survive online. So get started!

Adrian Lawrence is the webmaster of a leading internet directory called www.indexplex.com Please feel free to re-publish this article provided this resource box remains intact together with a working hyperlink.

Every home business owner should know that your WEBSITE TRAFFICS will determine the life span of your work at home online business. As suggested by many motivation expert, your best bet to be successful in ANYTHING you do will be to study and learn from those WHO are already successful.

What are these online experts doing to attract the necessary traffics to their work at home online business?

What online strategy are they using and what can you learn from them?

One of the most frequently used online strategy is writing and submitting free articles to ezine. Over the years, as I read over many website marketing strategy, it seems that article writing remains the TOP method that webmaster has been using for many years. The only problem is that there are so many free articles floating around these days that you need to build a solid reputation before you can GAIN any reasonable click through to your site via your free articles.

Reciprocal links is another popular method which you can used to gain traffics to your home business website. Before starting your reciprocal links strategy, make sure you determine the keywords you want to used for your main index page. During the link exchange make sure you put your KEYWORDS in your hyper text link. Search Engine will recognize them as your site keywords. Remember also to include them in your title and the first 80-120 words of the index content page. Please do not just reciprocal links, SEO experts recommend that you should add at least 60-70 pages of contents in your NEW site so that your site will not just be a LINKS only website which score a LOW RANK in the algorithm of Search Engine.

Finally, have you noticed that successful online master also make used of discussion forum wisely. Discussion forum are a great online marketing tools that you should not ignore. It can bring IMMEDIATELY an increase in your website TRAFFICS which can result in increase revenue for you. Forums allows you to create your own signature file which you can write a few lines of
your own business information including your URL. Each posting you made will automatically include your signature file. However, you have to show your expert knowledge when answering questions as people who read your postings will associate it with you. Frequent forums that get lots of online traffics so that each posting by you will get the maximum exposure.

In whatever business, the initial learning may be tough, but if you believe in yourself and persist in LEARNING and taking the necessary ACTION to apply what you learn, one day, you too will become an Online Expert and SUCCESS will follow YOU.

Wishing you success in running a Successful Work At Home Online Business.

Copyright @ Arthur
www.online-internet-home-business-opportunity.com
Most Financially Successful individuals Grow Rich by starting their own business. Application of Knowledge is the line between those who succeed or failed in an Internet Home Business Opportunity.

To improve our website ranking and internet presence we need to exchange links with other websites. Some search engines won’t even spider websites that do not have links pointing to them. But to improve the page ranking you have to make sure that big majority of links you exchange are relevant to the content of your website. For example there is no need to exchange links with travel website if your website is about food. You can still have some links to the website of not relevant content, but you should try to limit them.

So why should I bother having any non-relevant links?
Well you need many links pointing to you to build a good internet presence. If you try tools such as Marketleap’s link popularity check which can give you a detailed report on number of links to your website found in all major search engines, you’ll see that quantity of links does matter in terms of internet presence.

Page ranking goes up with number of links, but if the liks come from the websites with relevant content that page rank goes up higher.

So how do I build a good, relevant link directory?
Building a link directory is relatively easy but unless your server supports server side programming like PHP or ASP, maintaining it can be very time consuming. If your server has PHP support there are many link exchange scripts can be downloaded for free. Try searching hotscripts.com or scripts.com.

Some of the free scripts may be hard to install or customize, but if you have some programming knowledge it may be easy to do. There are also very affordable scripts out there like BeSeen – Automated Link Exchange which automates the whole link exchange process and also includes install file and detailed instructions on how to customize it.

Find out what approach to link exchange works best for you, because link exchange does affect our internet presence and page ranking and it will continue to do so for a while.

bewebmaster.com