Click here to get a free design quote

Archive for the ‘Tips, Tricks, and Advice’ Category

Is Your Selling Approach Aggressive Enough?

Regardless of whatever you are trying to do online to make money, you are essentially try to sell something. Whether it is through some direct product you have created or through some sort of affiliation, the end goal is to have readers convert on something.

In my years of experience, I have both tried and seen many different selling approaches, and they all usually involve different levels of aggressiveness. That being said, is your selling approach aggressive enough?

Because there are so many different products, niches, and services to sell it is hard to get a good gauge on what the best true level of aggressiveness is; however, I always feel that if you are not annoying some people with your approach then it just is not aggressive enough.

On your sales page, in your newsletters, and even within your ads, there should always be some form of call to action. At the same time, whatever you are pushing should be thrown into the face of potential customers multiple times.

Too many times sellers are scared to take chances. Afraid they might annoy some people and turn them away, but the truth is that if your content is good the “real potential customers” will always be there.

For an example, think of Best Buy. Nowadays, you will walk in and have to navigate your way through product displays in the front of the store, but because most people are interested with what the store actually has in it, they will put up with the displays. Best Buy will sell some of those highlighted products, keep actual interested customers willing to put up with the excessive displays, and lose a few people; however, the rewards are much higher than actually losing those few people. Why? Because they are still selling products, and odds are that the customers they lost were not really customers at all.

The process of analyzing how aggressive your selling approach should be may seem complex, but it is really not. Just remember that if you don’t tell people what they need to do, then odds are they probably won’t do it. It is better to lose a couple leads yet still make sales than pleasing everybody and making no money at all.

Test The Usability Of Your Site

Where People Are Looking

When it comes to designing your site and choosing the best layout, everybody has their own opinion of what looks good. Obviously if we have created the design or selected a theme to use, then we have placed in our minds the reason for creating our choice.

The problem is that what gets filtered through our mind, might not necessarily get passed onto other viewers. There are several ways to test the usability and flow of your site. There are various premium solutions that conduct some research or formulate some plan to determine where eyes lead to, but is there really any way to determine if its right?

The easiest way to test the usability and flow of your site is to simply monitor people actually using your site. Find friends, family, co-workers, or just somebody you can sit in front of a computer screen and let them freely peruse through your site.

  • Take note of the first thing they notice or pay attention to when the site first loads.
  • Are they able to effectively navigate to where they want to go? Can they find what they are looking for?
  • Are they able to understand the point of the site?
  • Are they clicking on ads? If you have some sort of pop-up or obtrusive ad, then are they just closing the window and moving on?

Create a list of questions you may want answers to:

  • Does the color scheme match?
  • Does the site look like spam? Is there definition between content and advertisement?
  • Do they know what the site is about?

Regardless of what your site is about, you are ultimately trying to funnel readers somewhere. Whether you want them to comments, sign-up for newsletter, or purchase your product? The idea is to see if whatever you are highlighting is being focused on by the tester you are using and not just if your site looks good.

Increase Your Adsense Revenue

Adsense has been the go to revenue service for many online web sites, and why not? Sign up is free and easy, and the ads are automatically related to your site. That being said, many people often have trouble making any money with the service.

In theory Adsense should be a killing and an easy way to make money, but the problem is that many just don’t implement the ad structure for the best results. People always think you need tons of traffic, but there are other ways to improve your revenue from Adsense.

If you already have Adsense up and running on your site, then you are probably aware of the loads of different companies advertising through the Google platform. Why not use this to your advantage?

The rules of Adsense clearly states that you cannot promote clicks to your ad; however, there is nothing wrong with improving your chances of clicks.

For those that are unaware, Adsense ads crawl the content on the page and display related ads. Knowing this we need to capitalize on this system. Let me give you a quick example of what I am talking about:

On my investing blog, I have several reviews for various stock brokers. While some have their own affiliate programs, others don’t. So how can I take those brokers that don’t and create my own “affiliate system?” Something is better than nothing, right? I simply fill my review with keywords for that broker. Odds are that they will have some sort of ad campaign running through Google. At the very least, some stock broker will show up.

In relation to my investing blog, I did a review for thinkorswim stock broker, threw in an Adsense 300×250 campaign, and 5 times out of 10 a thinkorswim ad came up. Obviously if somebody is reading a review about a particular product and then see an ad for that or a related product, they are more inclined to click on it.

You’d be surprised to see how much this trick alone will boost your revenue. Better yet, if you are able to get search traffic, conversions will run even higher.

The Easiest Way to Gain Site Traffic

The first couple of months of your site can feel like a complete waste of time. You are probably putting in tons of work, yet seeing very little traffic and even less income. For most new web site owners, the process of properly using social networks and other forms of social marketing can take a while to click. So traffic is probably volatile and usually un-targeted.

While you don’t necessarily need tons of traffic to covert any type of sale or conversion, it definitely doesn’t hurt. Make sure to check out my article on how to covert sales with little traffic. Believe or not there are easy and fast ways to rank high in the search engines regardless of your page rank.

On the other hand, not everybody is trying to covert sales, maybe you want more publicity, or maybe you are just trying to create some sort of following. Whatever the reason is we would all love our sites filled with users and commentators. The number one easiet and fastest way to quickly gain site traffic is to guest post on the authority sites in your niche.

Most of the time these sites are more than welcome to have you contribute. Obviously it means less work for them, but don’t think they will just post any random article. These authority sites usually receive dozens of request a day, but they can’t post all of them. Your articles for a guest post should be some of the best or most interesting pieces you have written. You should try to attack a unique concept that will draw more visitors from the authority site to yours.

What makes a good guest post site?

The ideal site to guest post on would be one that averages some number of commentators on every post. It is hard enough to get people to comment, if they have commentators on everyone, then odds are they are experiencing a pretty significant amount of activity to their site. Also if these users took the time to comment, then there is a good chance they will probably take the time to at least visit your site.

Often times you will come across authority sites, but their traffic is derived more through search traffic. There is nothing wrong with guest posting for them, but the traffic will not be as immediate as you will like.

Once you get the visitors to your site, the ball is in your court. Before your guest post is ever published, your site should be optimized to capture these new leads. Trust me, if a visitor from the guest post site comes to your site and does not like it, then he or she will NOT come back.

Kill two birds with one stone.

Besides just gaining more exposure, your guest post will also give you some great link juice because this authority site is linking back to you, so there are multiple pros for going on a guest post tour.

Spring Clean Your Online Presence

We just turned the clocks one hour forward. Now it is time to spruce up your online garage. We need to start cleaning, organizing, and restructuring the way we do some things. When it comes to handling various online entities and projects, it is very easy to forget to do the “little things.”

There are steps for spring cleaning everything from your basement, closet, and to your computer, but what about your “virtual world?”

Before we get started with the clean up, there are a couple things to note:

  • Look to consolidate.
  • Look where you can improve.
  • Think carefully before deciding to throw away or not.

When sprucing up your online entities, we must check your files on your actual hard drive and what is on your hosting. Just because we may have loads of available hosting space, that doesn’t mean we need to unnecessarily fill it up.

Step 1 of any type of computer/soft copy clean up is to back up everything!

  • Back-up your wordpress files.
  • Download your themes to your computer.

Create a folder and stuff it all on in there. Once we finish with our cleaning and make sure everything works, we can just throw away or burn it on some disk.

Update to latest versions of all resources (i.e. WordPress, plugins).

  • Start from the biggest and work your way out. With WordPress 2.7+ everything should be as simple as one click per update.

Check over all updated sites – Do not wait until you finish everything to see if everything works properly; otherwise, the only way to figure out what the problem is will probably be to reload your backups.

Delete unused and unnecessary files.

  • Delete unused themes, unused images, and projects that just never panned out.

Before deleting anything go through a quick analysis, and think what will be the effect if I don’t have this necessary file anymore. Worst comes to worse, you have all the back-ups, so if you decide down the road that you actually needed those files, then you can just reload them again.

Go through you Cpanel (or whatever your hosting uses).

  • Delete unused email and ftp accounts.
  • Check the status of any domains (or even sites). Are they being used? Can you sell them?
  • Check what new scripts or services are being offered.

Delete, restructure, and consolidate.

We have pretty much taken care of the files on your hosting, but now we need to see what is being stored on your computer.

I always like to have a somewhat copy of what is on my hosting on my hard drive, and I always update those files first and then upload them over the holds ones on my hosting.

  • Delete the files you deleted in your hosting.
  • Delete dead projects or restructure how you can get them done.

Don’t get new folder crazy. The idea is the consolidate these into an efficient and organized structure.

Turn your inbox inside out.

How many times have we just archived an email we thought we need later, but never looked at it. Do you even delete emails?

  • Delete emails you don’t need.
  • Move emails into its respective folder.
  • Make sure you have all the info about your contacts.
  • Can you shrink down the number of inboxes?

The goal should be to have an empty inbox when it is all said and done.

Clear the cobwebs from your site.

We have pretty much taken care of all the physical aspects, but now it is time to clean up our actual site(s).

  • Check blogroll for dead links, sites you don’t want anymore, and partners who stopped linking back.
  • Create new ads, photos, head shots, and any other media you use. Gives your site a quick face lift, and gives readers something new to look at.
  • See what ads are working and what not, and make necessary changes.

Updates your social network profiles.

  • Change your photo, update your profile, and deal with any pending requests.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy a tip-top shape online presence.

Don’t get recycle bin crazy. You don’t want to have a blank site when it is all done. Just get rid of things you do not need or have no real benefit, and update what needs updating.

Any other spring cleaning tips?

« Older Entries Newer Entries »