Quality sites provide quality content. Quality content helps you retain visitors. Visitors may spread the word about your site and thus attract new visitors.

Adding new high quality content to your site regularly is also beneficial. With more content, you will have more pages indexed by the search engines. More pages indexed means you will have more opportunities for people to find you via search engines.

So how exactly do you get content for your site?

Step 1. Your unique knowledge

Everybody knows something others don’t. Use your own unique insight and knowledge to provide content. Think of what activities you’ve participated in the past. Think of what you’ve learned through past experiences. Any experiences can help, whether at home, school, work, or anywhere else. Of course, providing your own content regularly can be very difficult.

Step 2. Personal stories

Personal stories are the basis of some sites and blogs. Want to connect with your audience and let them know more about you? Use personal stories. However, if you don’t want to be too personal, make sure you inject your personality into your writing. Personality differentiates you from the rest and can keep visitors coming back.

Step 3. How-to guides

People have problems and like to figure out how to solve them. Had some problem you struggled with for a while? Did you eventually solve it? The way you solved it could be written into a how-to guide. Or write a how-to guide about your expert area. For example, if you’re a technical computer whiz, you could write a how-to guide for fixing computers.

Step 4. Do research

Do some research on the web. Use search engines, search directories, and follow links to find relevant sites. Do some research at your local library. Grab some books about your site’s topic and start digging through them. Find local experts, teachers, and professors and ask them questions about your site’s topic. When you research, note down interesting ideas and you’ll undoubtedly learn more. You’ll have more unique knowledge that you can turn into content. You might even discover something earth-shattering!

Step 5. Subscribe to newsletters

Good newsletters are a great way to keep informed about a particular topic. They can keep you informed of offers that you may be able to provide on your own site. As well, they can keep you on top of what’s happening in your area by providing time-sensitive content.

After I had tried several things to pick out good performing keywords, I wrote down this process that should yield profitable, low competition keywords for your Adsense ads. This process is not perfect, but when you analyze it and try it for yourself, you can see that it makes sense. Adsense that is.

Step 1

Research some keywords for your niche that have a high CPC value. To do this, first find your keywords using the Google Adwords keyword tool or another tool that will give you niche specific lists of keywords. Save those keywords into a spreadsheet program as a csv file. Copy and paste those keywords into Google’s Traffic Estimator (you will need an Adwords account). The traffic estimator will give you the estimated clicks per day and the average cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. Copy and paste this information back into your spreadsheet file for later reference.

Step 2

Multiply the average CPC by 30% to get an estimate of your maximum earnings per click. The higher the average CPC, the more likely the CPC for the 2nd – 8th positions are high as well. You want this higher average CPC to start because if the CPC starts to drop off significantly after the 3rd position, your chance of getting high click earnings as an Adsense publisher will be diminished.

Step 3

I use a tool called Adword Accelerator to help with estimating the 1st – 8th position CPC values. This tool will estimate the CPCs for each position and allow you to see how much the CPCs drop off after the first position. This dramatically helps your analysis for picking the most profitable keywords. If the CPC values stay close to the each other and to the value of the first position, then you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

Step 4

Now determine which Adsense ads occupy which positions. You can do this by searching on Google for your keyword and looking to see which Adsense ads are generated in the search results and in which order they are. Another way to estimate this is to use the Adword Accelerator tool. It has a feature whereby Adwords ads are dynamically displayed for a given keyword you input into the tool to check. If the Adwords advertiser has used “Adwords for Content” in his advertising, these ads will be the Adsense ads someone else is displaying on their website.

Step 5

Compare the ads you found in step 4 to the results of using the keyword check function at the website http://www.adsensecheck.com. If the advertisers you find by doing this closely match those you found in step 4, you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

If the advertisers are not he same, then the advertiser is possibly not using the “Adwords for Content” mode of advertising in his campaigns. This means that the keyword may not be the basis for the Adsense ads and may not be profitable.

Step 6

Now you must get the traffic. If you decide to get traffic using the Adwords approach, then just use the keywords in your Adsense ads that scored well from the above evaluation. Then, use lower cost per click keywords in your Adwords ads. The difference between the earnings from the click you get on your Adsense word from the cost of the click you pay on your Adwords word will be your profit.

If you are planning to use search engine optimization techniques to get traffic to the website where your ads are, make sure the keywords you choose have the highest KEI possible. KEI is the ratio of the number of searches for a keyword to the number of competing sites having the keyword. The combination of a high KEI and a high score from the above evaluation will yield the best profit results.

No matter the circumstances, every site can “better its best.”

If a “magic” formula for website success existed, you’d see the big boys like Google and Yahoo using it.

Since no formula exists, they constantly test and tweak for new ways to squeeze more money from their sites, and you should too.

If you operate a website and want to squeeze maximum revenue from it, the following 6 tips will kick-start your efforts.

Step #1 – Test Headlines

Just like a newspaper headline, the headline on your website represents the single most powerful factor in grabbing a reader’s eye and pulling them into your site.

Most websites do not have a headline or, if they do, it’s limp, wimpy, and carries zero “punch.”

Every website should carry a compelling headline to let visitors know exactly what they should expect to get from the site.

I’ve personally seen one headline outperform another by 400% on the exact same website.

Step #2 – Offer Payment Plan

Why do you think pitchmen on TV offer “3-easy payments” of only $19.95 on a $60 product?

Because the technique works for increasing sales!

Often, people either don’t want to or can’t come up with the payment all at once, but can pay over time.

If you sell a product priced at $100 or more, try breaking the price up into smaller payments to increase sales.

Step #3 – Test Guarantee Period

Like it or not, people don’t always trust promises on your website to live up to the realities of your product.

To remove risk for the customer, you should offer a refund or money-back guarantee (not offering one will, in most cases, kill your conversion rate).

However, it’s been said by “experts” that the longer the guarantee period, the lower the refund rate.

My experience does not support that advice. I suggest you test various refund periods to see which nets you the most sales balanced against the least refunds.

Step #4 – Test Audio Instructions

One of the best ways to increase sales is to include an audio button on your site that tells people exactly what to do in order to buy or subscribe.

Telling people in no uncertain terms to “Enter your name and primary email address in the box and click the button” has proven one of the most effective means of getting website visitors to take the actions you want.

Step #5 – Follow Up

Most online businesses totally blow it when it comes to follow-up, especially with existing customers.

Follow up with your customers at least once or twice a month and it will amaze you how easily you can make “back-end” and repeat sales.

Industry news, tips-and-tricks, and helpful hints combined with a low-key, specific offer for another product or service makes an excellent follow-up formula for both prospects and existing customers.

Step #6 – Start a Blog

A blog makes it extremely easy to keep your customers and prospects updated, as well as providing a dynamic means for new people to find you through the search engines and blog directories.

Blogger.com allows you to start a blog even if you don’t operate a website, and WordPress.org makes it easy to add a blog to your existing website.

Copyright 2006 Jim Edwards

Choosing a program: Choose your program wisely, don’t just go for the highest paying product. Check out if the sales page does a good job of selling the product. Does it track correctly and pay on time? Make sure your chances of getting paid as an affiliate are not reduced by the following points:

Does the company have a for life customer policy. This can mean that someone else who sold a product to that person previously will get the affiliate revenue even though you did the marketing etc.

Are there lots of external links on the sales page to lead the customer away from the order page? If there is a sales capture page on entry to claim free report etc this could mean that the vendor may follow up later and make the sale and you won’t receive commission.

Overt links to an affiliate sign up page could mean your customer could become an affiliate and purchase through their own link.

Look out for multiple payment options so that if you’re affiliated through Clickbank and the customer clicks on the Paypal button you won’t get paid.

Finding content for your site: If you don’t want to write it yourself then go to groups.yahoo.com/group/free-reprint- articles/ or to one of the many popular sites with free to print content in your chosen category. Always remember to include the authors details in the article.

Marketing: Create a plan of action and stay focused on it. Find a product that has plenty of resources to help with your marketing efforts. Buy the product and read it or use it thoroughly, you can not promote it successfully if you don’t know it well.

You can get up and running as an affiliate without a website you can post in forums or write an article and submit to the many ezine sites, just type your query into Google or Yahoo for either. Always remember to include your hoplink in your signature box or resource box. Always cloak the link to stop it being diverted to another id. There are several free link cloakers available, Tiny URL is one or AddMe is another.

If using a website to promote the product try and create your own ads as this will make you stand out from the crowd. Try to become a master of one particular advertising method i.e. article writing, forum posts, or PPC.

Mistakes people make: Not evolving, you must keep up with new trends and techniques in marketing or you will be left behind. By joining an affiliate program that has constantly updated resources this should help tremendously.

If you are promoting through your website do not neglect to study your statistics to find out where you visitors are coming from and if they are converting so that you can refocus your efforts should they not be working.

Don’t have a web page with lots of products. Keep your page focused on one product, too many different products can be confusing and people will just leave. Try to capture email with an opt in box or page so that you can market to these customers in the future.

Your first website will probably take quite a bit of time to build if you are new to this but afterwards you can start to replicate the processes you have used and build more sites quickly for other niche products. Don’t try to promote too many at once though, make a thorough and concerted effort with each one.

Copyright 2006 Janet Dunmore

To get the search engines to notice you, you need to understand them. The search engines’ whole purpose is to find quality content– that is what the internet is all about. Information. And the more content (related to your site’s most important keywords) that you have, the more that search engines will like you. They like to see sites that grow with quality content at a steady rate. They also like to see a lot of quality links from other sites on the Internet going to your site.

This is where article marketing comes in. Let’s say you have a website that sells cameras. First you would want to expand your site beyond several pages. You could do that by adding lots of related products. Or you could review products. If you don’t want to do that yourself, look for free articles that review products for you. You could add other related free articles, such as how to use the product, where to display your photos, etc. Maybe start a blog on the topic. Blogs are great for promotion because they are constantly updated with fresh material.

Where do you get all this fresh material? From article directories and article list servers. Because of the rapidly growing need for people to find and submit articles, the number of article directories sites are increasing.

You can take advantage of this fact. You could write an article about you website’s subject (or take the material from what you have already written for your website). For example, how to find a quality camera or how to take great photos. Then you submit this article to article directories. I like to personally add my articles to a new directory every day. By doing this, you now have links all over the Internet leading to your site– links from the article directory, as well as links from everyone who publishes your article for free on their website, ezine or blog.

Article marketing is now considered the method of choice for web marketing. It is the best way to get top placement with the search engines and to drive traffic to your site.

It takes some time and effort to find and/or write and submit articles, but it is free. You can also pay a submission service to send your articles out to more directories than you would have time to do yourself. So, start thinking “content” if you want the search engines to notice you.

This article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and the resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.

Step 1: Your Product

The first area to review is the product or service that you are offering. Does a market exist for it? To answer this question you need to find out whether similar products are being sold on the Internet successfully. If not, you may need to rethink your Internet strategy. If others are selling a similar product successfully, then this would tend to confirm that there is a market for your product.

Next, look at the strategy and pricing being adopted by your competitors. How do you compare? Why should your visitors buy from you rather than one of your competitors? Answering these questions will provide you with valuable information you can use to improve your situation and generate more sales.

Also, take a critical look at your product quality. Does it live up to the claims you are making on your web pages? If not, improve your product so that it does or modify your web page to be more truthful about it.

Step 2: Provide Solutions

Your visitors are looking for a solution to a problem. Do you know what problems your visitors are looking for solutions to? Does your web site show how your product will solve your visitor’s problem? You will need to put yourself into your visitor’s shoes to better understand what they are seeking so that you can provide the solution they need.

One way to better understand your visitors is to monitor where your visitors are coming from. If they are coming from the search engines, knowing what search terms they are using can provide some clues. You may find some surprises when you review this information about your site.

Once you understand the problem your visitors want solved, revise your web pages to show that your product will provide the solution they need.

Step 3: Site Design

Your site needs to look like it is a commercial web site rather than an amateur home page. The design needs to be consistent from page to page and it needs to be easy to navigate. Contact details including physical address, phone numbers and email address need to be shown.

Graphics need to be minimized to ensure that your page downloads quickly. Also, ensure that your web host provides a fast connection to the Internet. Most people will not wait for a page that takes a long time to download. They will just move on to your competitor.

Make it easy to order. I recall seeing statistics recently that suggested that a large number of people abandon a web site in the middle of the order process. A common reason for this is that the order process is too time consuming and complicated. Make yours simple and quick and you will lose fewer sales.

Ensure that your web page has a strong headline that grabs your visitors and makes them want to read more. Your headline should in effect say “You have this problem, here is the solution”. Your web site should then demonstrate that you understand the problem and that you can in fact provide the solution.

Step 4: Testimonials and Guarantees

Testimonials and guarantees can have a huge impact on your level of sales. On the web, a key priority is to build credibility. The common methods used are having a privacy statement, publishing a newsletter, publishing testimonials from satisfied customers and providing a strong guarantee.

Take every opportunity to gather comments from your customers about how your product has helped them. Get their permission to publish these comments as testimonials. If need be, provide them with a gift for giving you their permission to publish their comments. A way of getting comments is a customer feedback survey. This can be used for the purpose of gaining testimonials as well as seeking ways to improve your product or develop additional products your customers may need.

A strong guarantee will provide your visitor with greater confidence to purchase your product. Try to make your guarantee simple and without too many conditions. Always honour your guarantee without question or delay.

Step 5: Conclusion

Getting plenty of hits to your web site is a very positive situation to be in. By implementing some of the hints provided in this article, you can convert these visitors into being your customers.

Build A Winner

Anyone can build a web site. Building a good web site is another story. Web designers can easily avoid some of the most common mistakes by watching out for the following pitfalls:

Step 1. Pop-Ups – Pop-ups can really annoy a visitor as these advertisements that open automatically in a new window can be quite distracting. The visitor might be interested in looking at the content of your site but a pop-up can force the visitor to focus on other things. A better way to annoy visitors is by having pop-ups that spawn more pop-ups when the visitor tries to close the first one.

Step 2. Never Ending Web Pages – Another way to annoy your web site visitors is by putting mass amounts of information on one long continuous page. The visitor will keep scrolling endlessly down the web page only to get lost in web site content unrelated to what he or she was looking for in the first place. Long pages are one of the easiest ways to make a web page look hokey. It is much better to keep web site pages short and sweet so that it is easy for the visitor to get right to the information that is being looked for.

Step 3. Excessive use of Graphics – Some web developers think that by using flashy graphics they can attract visitors to their site. Instead, the visitors are likely to get irritated. Too many graphics will make your web site download very slowly. Due to slow download speeds people might leave your web site before even knowing what your site has to offer. In this fast moving world, nobody has spare time to sit and wait until your web site pages load. This is particularly true for the 42 percent of people still on dial-up.

Step 4. Under Construction Pages – Another way to irritate your web site visitors is by diverting them to a page which reads “under construction”. Most people try to find content oriented web sites and if they come across your web page that reads “under construction,” the visitor is likely to be annoyed, having spent time getting there with no positive result.

Step 5. Plug-Ins – Some web sites use plug-ins that visitors have to install before they can view the web site. This is one of the easiest way to really annoy your web site visitors. Some people feel that if they like a particular program then others should like it as well. A web developer might like a good-looking icon program which needs to be installed before his or her web site can be viewed. If the program is obscure and not used by most people, this will only be a source of discontent when things do not work properly on the site. Don’t make people download software to see your site. Never ever make them take extra steps to do something.

Step 6. Lack of Content – Most people like content oriented web sites that give information on specific topics. Even search engines love content-based web sites and will rank content heavy sites higher in search results. Usually people visit a web site to see what benefit the site can offer them. Lack of proper content results in annoyed visitors leaving the web site.

Step 7. Music – A few years back music was quite common on the web and many web sites had music that automatically played. Gradually people have realized that music creates a lot of distraction and is a nuisance to a lot of people. If you really want music then a choice should be given to the visitor to switch it on or off. Remember, may people surf the web with music playing already or while sitting in their office. When a web site automatically plays music, it will aggravate them to no end.

Step 8. Inconsistent Page Design – Some sites are designed in such a way that after moving from one page to another the visitor feels as if he or she has come to a totally different web site. There should be some uniformity in page design or else visitors will feel lost and disoriented.

By paying close attention to factors that can annoy web site visitors, web site owners and designers can keep their visitors happy. Following, or rather not following, these eight web site annoyances, webmasters can make the most of each web visitor.

Step 1: What is Tagging?

Tagging is basically assigning keywords or tags to web content such as photos, web pages or blog posts. When a web user talks about tagging, he is simply referring to how he summarizes what his web page, picture or blog is all about.

With tagging, a user determines what the content is about and tag or labels it. This tag, maybe one or more words, provides a short description of the content or the category it conforms to. It is somewhat similar to bookmarking a web page on a user’s own computer sans the systematic categorizing methods like folders. Also, instead of the entry being saved on his personal computer, it is saved on publicly available sites or social bookmarking sites that anyone can use to tag web content. Web surfers tag the content they find significant and these appear on the bookmarking sites. Other Internet users interested in the same subjects can then find real content or resources other users found useful.

Step 2: Why Tag?

Tagging helps web page owners to know what users are searching for. They then create web content that is relevant and easy to find. In the process, these contents will gain in popularity as well.

If a web page operator made a web page for an in-demand tag that everybody is searching for, he will definitely get highly targetted traffic. Other users who found the content of the web page of good quality will bookmark the page making it rise in popularity. As it becomes more popular, more and more users will bookmark it paving the way for more traffic. By tagging content, it gets to be evaluated by users who decide if the content is useful. If it is useful, free traffic will follow. Another thing with tagging is that a web owner can select several tags for each page in his site. This means a chance to rank high for many tags in the highly-trafficked bookmarking sites that use tags to organize information.

In a nutshell, tagging gives a web owner another avenue for getting his site noticed by buyers without having to resort to advertising. It can also lead to other possibilities. More traffic can stimulate increase in sales, produce adsense income, and earn affiliate commissions. Other users can also subscribe to the web owner’s list. Web users know for a fact that in the web, it is all about traffic. Tagging can help generate a steady flow of traffic which ultimately leads to a solid business.

So, are you tagged?

To conduct a successful online business, you may want to be guided by available research on customers. Research has long established that, positive and timely responses are important ingredients that visitors use to judge how friendly websites are and how they would want to interact with them. And you may want to know that visitors are more likely to establish relationships with sites that provide excellent feedback and timely responses.

Auto responders therefore positively answer the call of website owners seeking automated interaction with customers at all facets of their customer relations.

An email autoresponder can securely perform 5 principal business boosting roles for every website which needs to get a high rating in customer relations and therefore enhance customer loyalty.

Acknowledgement:
Autoresponders can let people know you have received their emails and that you will soon respond to their enquiry. Even when you are not available to reply immediately, you will do so at some later time. You see, buyers are predominantly in a state of anxiety and it is a good marketing strategy to allay such anxieties.

People buy with several reasons; one of their being an urgent need to do something. So acknowledging their emails sets their minds at ease and then they are confident that a reply will be forth coming on their enquiry. If you have one thousand emails a day, there is no way you can efficiently reply to all these manually and that is where an auto responder comes in.

Notices:
Assuming you were out of the office for two days and a customer interested in bringing you a hundred thousand Dollar deal writes to you with the hope of receiving a response so business is transacted. It will be quite discouraging for him to wait and wait for no answer to come forth. If you have an email autoresponder installed, some preliminary email marketing messages can be sent to the sender; at least informing him of products/services available or explain your absence and when you will be back. If the sender wishes to wait, you can come back to respond appropriately and get the deal finalized.

Confirmation:
In this age of scam and fraud on the net, every buyer will want a confirmation of his purchase. An autoresponder confirmation serves two purposes – it assures the buyer that the goods will be forthcoming and it relieves him of the thoughts that he had transacted with a fraudster. An auto responder performing this function will make your customers happy and buy from you always.

Appreciation:
Buyers do businesses a great favor by buying. Although you are giving away a product or service in return, customers need to be appreciated for buying from you. At least they had other several options but they chose to buy from you because they like you or how you conducted your business. You can use an email auto responder to send follow up messages to customers thanking them for their business and assuring them of continued support.

Every business must make it a point to rely on an email auto responder to generate customer satisfaction and loyalty. Modern online businesses cannot afford to lose this part of everyday web-based transactions. There are many auto responders on the market available for free or a fee but the most versatile that can effectively perform the vital duties mentioned above can be found at http://www.aceresponse.com/

Step 1: Product. What is your site’s product or service? Are you selling services, tangible goods or both? Are you giving out free service to turn your customers to buy your products? or vice versa. Are you giving both free service and products to drive visitors which will drive your advertising revenue? Whatever you do, it is crucial to know your products so that you won’t forget why you do all the promotion.

Step 2: Place. This is the distribution channel of your products or services. If you are giving out free contents, make sure you distribute it well. If you merely post your content on your site, you are not using maximum distribution. Furthermore, if you are using unrelated forum or submission service to distribute your content, then you are wasting time. For example if you are distributing content about how to choose a credit card, you should be submitting your content to article submission service that specializes in finance first before distributing it elsewhere. This way, you will get a bunch of interested viewers instead of casual visitors.

Step 3: Promotion. One way I can think of is to pay a text-ad at another website to describe the superiority of your product or service. Promotion normally involves spending money. Again, you need to focus your promotion on your core audience instead of blindly spending money on general audience.

Step 4: Price. This is the pricing strategy of your product or service. The pricing strategy is very dependent on the other P of online marketing. If you are establishing yourself as a high-end mortgage lenders from the way you describe, distribute and promote your products, then your price should reflect that.

In online marketing, the ‘place’ aspect costs little or no money. This amazes me. For example, to create awareness of your website, you can list it to hundreds to thousands of free web directories. For content distribution, you can sign up and submit your article for free at various article submission service.