10 Tips To Get Repeat Web Traffic
1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.
2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.
3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.
4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.
5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.
6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.
7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.
8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.
9. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.
10. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.
How To Make Your Website Build Credibility For You?
Over the years many clients have come to me asking “how do I make my website generate warm leads that I can put into my sales cycle?” I tell them “make your website do three things: first, it must talk about their problem so that the reader identifies with the pain their problem is causing; second, build credibility for your company, thus building confidence; and third offer something that is virtually impossible for the ideal reader to pass up. In this article, I am going to touch briefly on the second item in my list: build credibility for your company. (Please note: descriptions and solutions outlined here are only a tiny portion of the ways in which you can make your website build credibility for you.)
In order for your website to build credibility for you, it must have some key elements, including:
A biography of yourself/your company (why you believe you are the ‘go-to’ person in your industry, your accomplishments, etc.)
- Company history & forecast
- A winning marketing letter home page
- Past clients’ experiences & testimonials (especially those who are high-profile or well-known)
- An irresistible risk-free or low-risk offer that compels people to take action
- References to anything you have written (articles, books, columns, etc.) and what medium the writing was for (e.g. internet article, newspaper, magazine, etc.)
Your biography is the place where you get to brag about your accomplishments; what makes you stand out from the crowd? What have you achieved that others in your industry have not? Have you gone above and beyond for a client? Have you done any writing about your industry that you were recognized for? Have you won any awards? Are you involved in any notable groups? Your company history and projected goals for the coming year(s) is a good place for you to tell your ideal readers what you have done and what you intend to do over the months and years to come that sets you apart from the crowd. Usually the “About Us” page is a good place to put this type of information, along with links or references to anything you have written (e.g. articles, books, columns, etc.) any reviews, rewards or interviews you may have received.
Your home page is the place you should spend the most time and effort on. Why? Because you only have three seconds to capture your ideal reader’s attention and compel them to take an action. The home page is the place where you take the reader through a review of the problem, get them to feel the pain the problem is causing, and then give them an easy way to try your solution. The home page is where you include the prior clients’ testimonials and irresistible risk-free or low-risk offer that compels people to take action and try your solution.
Alison Silbert is the author of Boost Your Revenues by Turning People Away. When not running her business Passionate Web Creations, she is a mentor, coach, and teacher, supporting individuals in living their dream of having a successful online business. For more details about the book or to learn other ways to use your website, email us; to order copies of the book go from Amazon.com, Barnes & Nobile and from http://idealvisitor.com/idealsite/book-2/
If you are also interested in writing on this website, kindly read our Guest Posting Guidelines.
Landing Page Optimization Methods
Landing page testing:
The primary objective of landing page testing is to predict the behavior of your audience given the specific content on the landing page that they see. You will collect a limited sample of data during your test, summarize and describe it, and predict how people from the same traffic sources will act when interacting with the page. The ultimate goal is to find the best possible version of the landing page among all of the variations that you are testing.
Variable:
The word variable (when used by it) means a page element that you have selected. For example, a variable might be the headline of your landing page, or a whole-page redesign. In multivariate testing, a variable is also commonly referred to as a"factor"
Branching Factor:
The total number of possible values for a discrete variable is called its branching factor. The branching factor must be at least 2 (the original version and one alternative).
Recipe:
A recipe is a unique combination of variable values in your test.
Multivariate Testing:
The purpose of multivariate testing is to simultaneously gather information about multiple variables, and then conduct an analysis of the data to determine which recipe results in the best performance.
Multivariate testing approaches differ on three important dimensions:
- How the test is constructed (deciding what to test)
- How the data is collected
The data can be collected in a full factorial or fractional factorial fashion
- How the data is analyzed
The subsequent analysis can be either parametric or nonparametric.
If you choose an arbitrary test construction, you may not be able to use fractional factorial approaches. Likewise, if you choose fractional factorial data collection and test construction, you automatically lock yourself into a very restricted subset of parametric models for your subsequent data analysis (i.e., non-parametric analysis is impossible if you conduct fractional factorial data collection).
Search Space Size:
The number of unique recipes in your test is your search space size.
The following char summarizes a comparison of some of the testing method possibilities:
Test Construction
When you are deciding how to construct your test, there is an important distinction that must be made: Is your test structured or unstructured?
Unstructured designs are by far the simplest to implement. You simply choose exactly how many variables you want to test, and the branching factor for each one. As long as you are reasonable, you can choose very different numbers of values for each variable. For example, you can pick 7 different headline, 2 button colors, and 9 calls-to-action. This allows you to pay particular attention to the test elements that you think will result in the greatest performance improvements, and devote more of your test sampling to finding the best values for them. The branching factor is simply a function of how many good creative alternatives you want to test for a particular variable. If you choose full factorial data collection, you will enjoy the benefits of unstructured designs.
Structured designs are an artifact of fractional factorial data collection. By assuming a specific underlying model, they force you to have a specific shape to your test. In other words, the number of variables and their branching factors are predefined, and cannot be violated. For example, you might be forced to have one variable with a branching factor of two and seven variables with a branching factor of three. There are a number of standard test constructions to choose from, but you must use one of them.
Data Analysis:
Parametric data analysis in landing page optimization builds a model of how the variables tested (the “independent variables”) impact the conversion rate (the “dependent variable”). For each recipe in your search space, the model will produce a prediction of the expected conversion rate (or other optimization criterion of interest). Unless you happened to have sampled data on the exact recipe predicted by the model as being the best, you do not really know if the prediction will hold up. That is why it is critical to run follow-up A-B split tests between the predicted best challenger recipe and the original baseline recipe for all parametric data analysis methods.
By contrast, non-parametric data analysis does not try to build a model based on the input variables. Non-parametric methods try to identify the best challenger recipe, but without being able to tell anything about why it is the best, or exactly how much better it is than your baseline.
The two approaches are unrelated and are answering different questions. They are both recognition of the fundamental reality that only so much useful information can be extracted from your data collection sample. The only question is what you want to do with the data. You can try to create a general model of the output variable and try to describe it in terms of the input variables, or you can find the best individual recipe and not know why it is the best.
Although there are some difference among these common fractional factorial methods, their basic predictive power, required data sample size, and underlying assumptions are pretty similar. The main difference lies in the test construction and shape of the search spaces that each can be used for. So if you are going to use any of these methods, you should base your decision on your familiarity with each and the number and branching factor of the variables in your test. There is no reason to prefer the Taguchi method over Plackett-Burman, or Latin squares, but since it is gaining currency in landing page testing I will focus on it here.
Conclusion:
There is much more to add in this article and there are certain drawbacks and advantages of each data collection and analysis method. But to conclude my opinion is that Full Factorial Non-parametric Testing methodology is optimum for most of the testing needs. However, there can be other views, and if you have a certain opinion, I will like to hear it on the comments below, thanks.
Measure Success of PR Efforts
Measuring the ROI of SEO efforts is the most intense aspects of the whole Internet Marketing industry, people are always curious to find ways to measure success of their efforts, below is a summary of the steps that can be taken to measure the value of your internet marketing efforts with respect to your competition:
- Monitor competitor social search visibility vs client/company
- Monitor competitor’s optimized news content ranking in various types of search engines where the company/client is not (and probably should be)
- Research a keyword glossary and run a ranking report on those phrases. Show the lack of search visibility for what search audiences are actually looking for, relevant to the business
- Run a test of a few news items, whether they be blog posts, press releases or a digital asset like video. Take a benchmark measurement first and then show progress
- Set keyword ranking goals for news content and estimate the cost to achieve the same goals with PPC advertising over time. Demonstrate the cost of organic search traffic vs PPC traffic
If you can’t get budget approval for an overall search campaign as part of specific PR efforts, then using a competitive example or a small scale test might be enough to demonstrate the value of incorporating SEO with Public Relations.
(This blogpost made possible by inspirations from Internet Marketing Blog)
Website Optimization
Is a far more crucial and technical subject than search engine optimization. Although SEO has it's own technicalities but to get traffic is relatively easy than to convert that traffic in leads and loyal visitors. This section of the site is dedicated to website optimization, processes to improve user experience and maximize ROI.
As with any process continuous improvement and analysis is the key to perfection, remember, "to improve is to change, to perfect is to change often". I strongly believe in continuous monitoring , analysis and improvement of processes.
There are many steps involved in website optimization from conversion optimization to A/B testing, landing page optimization and website usability enhancements. I will keep on adding articles to these and other related topics, so bookmark this page for future reference.
OFF Page SEO And On Page SEO
Before I expalin the process of SEO, it is good to know that SEO is divided in two basics aspects or we can say that a website is made search engine friendly and foundable under two set of factors:
- On-Page SEO
- OFF-Page SEO
On Page Search Engine Optimization:
On-Page SEO is a set of guidelines on how and where to place keywords on a page to maximize
it's chance of ranking for that phrase. It includes ,but not limited to, following major areas of a webpage:
- Title of Web Page (Title Tag)
- Meta Description Tag
- Anchor Text of links to internal pages of site
- Anchor Text of Navigation Links
- Anchor Text of Footer Links
- Anchor Text of In-Context Links
(The details of each part will be mentioned later, for now just grab this check list !)
Off Page Search Engine Optimization:
Off page SEO is the process of attracting and building links to a company's website. In order to rank in the search engines for competitive keyword phrases, search engines evaluate the quantity and quality of links pointing to a page.
(Want to know How to get links to your site ? More Details in advanced section, hang on with us !)
Define & Monitor Conversion Actions
Define & Monitor Conversion Actions:
These are the actions that should be measured and have a strong relation with your internet marketing strategy. Remember , sales are not the only available goal , when you have a good business plan and well defined internet marketing strategy , you can and should consider the various steps involved in a typical sales cycle and conversion. Brand promotion, visitor loyalty, trust and authority are some of the factors that pay off in long term but only when they are a goal of your website. Following are some of the factors that can be defined as “conversion actions” and are a positive symbol of your lead generation and possible future prospects.
1. Revenue per visitor:
Many people have limited themselves to CTR of pages, sales conversion rate (the percentage of unique visitors who complete a purchase), and their shopping cart abandonment rate, little effort is put in measuring revenue per visitor. I will summarize some points regarding this aspect:
· if you sell multiple products at widely varying prices, you can bias the mix of products that you sell intentionally. This may mean that you choose to lower your sales conversion rate to focus on higher-ticket items. Conversely, you may seemingly raise your sales conversion rate by emphasizing smaller-ticket items. The merit of the trade-offs involved in such situations can be evaluated by focusing on the revenue per visitor metric.
(Remember: If the products that you sell have different profit margins, the revenue per visitor metric can be deceiving. This can happen when you boost your revenues by selling very low margin or even unprofitable loss-leader items.)
· It is possible to boost your revenues while at the same time actually lowering your overall profits. A more sophisticated metric for such situations is the profit per visitor. Instead of assigning the full revenue value to the sale conversion action, you use only the profit margin onthe sale.
Which Online Medium Provides Maximum Conversion ? A Comparison
comScore recently published it's survey for April 2009 and compared the various online medium and there importance in online purchase process, following were the main mediums of research:
- Search Engine Traffic
- Online Coupon Sites
- Comparison Shopping sites
- Auction Sites
- Online Classifieds
It is a nice piece of information for internet advertisers and marketers willing to maximize their marketing ROI.
Understanding Sales Funnels
Anyone interested in analytics always come across a term "Funnel" or sometimes "sales funnels" or "goal funnels", below I will explain in short "What a Funnel is?" and What to measure from it?
This is a typical funnel, below is a short explaination of each part:
Website Visitors -- Website visitors are at the top of the funnel. These are the people you've attracted to your site via channels like your blog, social media and search engine optimization.
Leads -- Leads are the website visitors who express interest in your product by submitting information on a landing page. Maybe they fill out a form in order to download a white paper. Maybe they requested an demo. Whatever it is, these people are potential customers, and you have more information about them than you have about your website visitors.
Customers -- These are the folks who pay you. If you're not already tracking them, you're in trouble.
Here's what you should be measuring in this funnel:
Conversion Rates -- This is the percentage of website visitors that converts to leads and the percentage of leads that converts to customers. This is important to know because you need to understand where in the funnel you can improve. Are you better at converting leads to customers? Or visitors to leads? The answer to that question will help you determine where to focus you energy and how to drive more sales.
Channel-Level Funnel -- This means tracking everything above (the funnel) for each channel. How many website visitors, leads and customers do you get from organic search traffic? How about from your blog? And what are the conversion rates for each? The answers to these questions will help you determine which channels to focus you marketing resources on.
How Taguchi Testing Works – Taguchi Testing In Action
Before you put Taguchi Testing to Work, I will present here some useful resources to fully grasp the concepts. First, I will explain the basic philsophy of Taguchi methadology, then I will show the online tool to practically see Taguchi Testing Methadology in action and then I will present use and implement Taguchi Testing.
Philosophy of the Taguchi Method:
Quality is best achieved by minimizing the deviation from a target. The product should be designed so that it is immune to uncontrollable environmental factors.
Taguchi Method Design of Experiments
The general steps involved in the Taguchi Method are as follows:
1. Define the process objective, or more specifically, a target value for a performance measure of the process.
2. Determine the design parameters affecting the process. Parameters are variables within the process that affect the performance measure.
3. Create orthogonal arrays for the parameter design indicating the number of and conditions for each experiment.
4. Conduct the experiments indicated in the completed array to collect data on the effect on the performance measure.
5. Complete data analysis to determine the effect of the different parameters on the performance measure.
See the practical demostration of Taguchi Method:
Blair Gorman, has created a free tool that explains to you the Taguchi Method and allows you to simultaneously test many aspects of your landing pages and advertisement. Check it out at:
http://www.adcomparator.com/
A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing Resources:
Split testing is simlply testing version A against Version B,Taguchi testing would try to pick several of the best ones and split test them. Multivariate testing would test them all until it found the best combinations.
The best resource for all these testing in my opinion is Google Website Optimizer, however, the following page lists many other resouces as well, check them out:
http://www.alexlcohen.com/internet-marketing-resources/free-ab-and-multi...