Pow­ered by Max Ban­ner Ads 

This is a con­tin­u­a­tion on the topic of get­ting top rank­ings on Google. In arti­cles posted last week, I touched on the impor­tance of reg­u­larly updat­ing the con­tent on your web­site and how using long tail key­words might be bet­ter when it comes to search engine results pages. Today I talk a bit about Google AdWords for those of you who are con­sid­er­ing this method of promotion.

If you have already worked with Google AdWords, you know that this can be an expen­sive propo­si­tion, espe­cially if you aren’t get­ting the results you expect and you just keep throw­ing money at it. Adwords and other pay-per-click (PPC) cam­paigns can be a tough nut to crack but there are a few sim­ple and inex­pen­sive ways you can improve your suc­cess with your ad campaign.

Split Test­ing

When deter­min­ing the suc­cess of your cam­paign, can you answer these ques­tions? How is your adver­tis­ing work­ing in terms of page rank­ing? Is your PPC cam­paign really dri­ving qual­i­fied traf­fic and upping your posi­tion? For starters, you need to ana­lyze the results of your efforts. But how?

Per­haps the best way to deter­mine what ads are most effec­tive is to set up split test­ing. This refers to duel­ing ads being run simul­ta­ne­ously, each one with slightly dif­fer­ent con­tent. After a month of run­ning these two ads, take a look and see which one resulted in more clicks. Then run a report that shows cost per click for each. A higher num­ber of clicks at a lower cost will bet­ter help your ad rank higher in the paid search. Lose the other ad or rework it to be more effective.

You also need to con­sider your con­ver­sion rate. Sim­ply get­ting clicks is mean­ing­less unless some­one buys some­thing or does what­ever action you are seek­ing. You will also want to fac­tor in your con­ver­sion rate. In future arti­cles I will share some dif­fer­ent ways you can mea­sure your con­ver­sion rate.

Share on Facebook

by Rick Smith
August 6, 2009

In yesterday’s post, I cov­ered one of the key ways to get and keep your web­site at a page one rank­ing — con­sis­tently chang­ing the con­tent on your web­site. That is one of the rea­sons blogs are so great for this. Really sophis­ti­cated word­press tem­plates are avail­able that make your blog look and func­tion like a reg­u­lar web­site. We have set up a few of our sites using Stu­dio­Press tem­plates and they look very pro­fes­sional. They also make adding and updat­ing con­tent really fast and easy. But just chang­ing con­tent isn’t all you should be doing to enhance your rank­ings; it mat­ters what type of con­tent you are adding and that is where key­words come in.

Includ­ing Long Tail Keywords

Another key com­po­nent to get­ting a good rank­ing is to include long tail key­words. Think about the key­words you are using within your site or AdWords cam­paign that you are try­ing to gain high rank­ings for. The most used are also the ones with the most com­pe­ti­tion. For instance, if your videos are on the his­tory of women in base­ball, a search for this very broad term will return over 41,200,000 results. Get­ting to the top of that pile is going to be very difficult.

The long tail key­words, or those located along the right-most side of the bell-shaped curve for key­word pop­u­lar­ity, might present a more achiev­able goal when it comes to search engine results pages. A search engine results page, or SERP, is the list­ing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a key­word query. Now take a look at the num­ber of results you get from inputting “left handed pitch­ers who played in Amer­i­can Girls Pro­fes­sional Base­ball League” – far less. Incor­po­rat­ing this nar­rower term may be a bet­ter option for your website.

I’ll go into more ways you can use these long tail key­words on your web­site and also in paid adver­tis­ing in upcom­ing blog posts. Be sure sub­scribe to my feed for this and other top­ics. I also cover this in my video, Mak­ing Money Sell­ing Your Own Videos avail­able at HowToSellYourVideos.com.

Share on Facebook

By Rick Smith

If you main­tain an e-commerce web­site to sell your videos and other prod­ucts, you want your site to reach the first page of search engine rank­ings. Bet­ter than that is to be in the top three of the organic search rank­ings. Why? Those not only greatly increase your chances of get­ting seen and clicked on, they are free.

I would like to say, and many out there will lead you to believe, that there is some magic fairy dust you can sprin­kle on your com­puter mon­i­tor and get this within min­utes of launch­ing your site. The bit­ter truth is that it takes some work to get there and work to stay there, too.

Page rank is based on many things like the archi­tec­ture of your land­ing page, time it takes to load, design ele­ments, key­word use, link struc­ture, and other fac­tors (some of which are con­fus­ing and seem to con­stantly change) that deter­mine rank­ing for par­tic­u­lar keywords.

Get­ting your site on page one and stay­ing there is almost a con­stant bat­tle due to the vast num­ber of web­sites that are being cre­ated daily. There are a few things you can do, how­ever, to help you get there and main­tain your status.

Change Is Key To Page One Rankings

The first and fore­most impor­tant thing to remem­ber is that where web­sites and their page rank­ings are con­cerned, change is good. Sta­tic con­tent will not increase your rank­ings over the long run.

So the bot­tom line is to make sure that you add new con­tent often. Every time you make a change and update your con­tent, your site gains the atten­tion of search engine bots. If you run a Word­Press blog such as this, your blog posts are auto­mat­i­cally pinged, mak­ing it eas­ier to get to the top and stay there.

I’ll go into more strate­gies in upcom­ing blog posts, so make sure you sub­scribe to our feed.

Share on Facebook

Design­ing your first web­site is a stress­ful under­tak­ing. It requires you to dig deep into your busi­ness in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of cre­at­ing a site that looks unique and works well. Plus you’ll end up invest­ing a lot of time, energy and money. And finally, after all that, you’re fin­ished and it’s time for the site to go live. What a relief!

Many busi­ness own­ers go through this same process. By the time the process is fin­ished, many entre­pre­neurs are very glad that it’s over — and don’t want to do it again any time soon.

Unfor­tu­nately, web­sites don’t last for­ever. Even if you plan your site to work for the cur­rent vision for your busi­ness, you can’t accu­rately account for the entire future of your business.

Even­tu­ally you’ll have to make some changes to your web­site. Some of these changes can be accom­plished with sim­ple main­te­nance, and by mak­ing updates to your site. But there’s only so far that patch­ing and revis­ing your cur­rent site can go. If your site is par­tic­u­larly out­dated, or if it’s not work­ing well for you, it’s prob­a­bly time to con­sider a full-scale site redesign.

Some signs that it’s time to redesign your site include:

- Your busi­ness has changed or grown. If your busi­ness is no longer the same as it was when you designed your site, chances are that you should redesign your web­site to reflect that. If you’ve only had a few small changes, you might be able to just update your cur­rent web­site. But if you’ve changed your busi­ness direc­tion, decided to offer new prod­ucts or ser­vices, or if your com­pany has grown sig­nif­i­cantly, it will pay off to redesign your site. Recon­sider how the changes to your busi­ness should be reflected or addressed in the struc­ture, design and strat­egy behind your website.

- Your site looks like it was designed in 1995. Some signs of an out­dated web site include: chunky, slow-loading graph­ics, old-style “framed” cod­ing, where the site is divided up into panes that load sep­a­rately, lit­tle ani­mated car­toon clip-art through­out the site, and text cre­ated as images instead of in HTML. Hav­ing any of these on your site could reflect poorly on your busi­ness, mak­ing you look ‘behind the times’. It can also make you look like you don’t care enough about your busi­ness or about tech­no­log­i­cal advances to keep abreast of them. Keep­ing your company’s web­site look­ing mod­ern will increase its credibility.

- The infor­ma­tion on your site isn’t user-friendly. If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you reg­u­larly get ques­tions on your site text from vis­i­tors, re-structuring your copy or rewrit­ing it can help to fix these prob­lems. If you’ve been adding to your site over time and the nav­i­ga­tion has become unwieldy or con­fus­ing, restruc­tur­ing your nav­i­ga­tion could be another press­ing rea­son to redesign your site. You want vis­i­tors to be able to eas­ily find their way around your site and to be able to access all the infor­ma­tion you have within a few clicks. Lay­ing out your site to make that pos­si­ble can make your visitor’s expe­ri­ence on your site a lot easier.

- You apol­o­gize for the site when ref­er­enc­ing it or hand­ing out your busi­ness cards. Your site should be a source of pride. It should offer your clients and prospects an easy way to get a lot of infor­ma­tion about your busi­ness. And if you have to apol­o­gize for out-of-date infor­ma­tion, bro­ken images, poor design, dif­fi­cult nav­i­ga­tion or any­thing else on your site, it makes you look unpre­pared and unpro­fes­sional. Make sure your site is in top shape and looks impres­sive, so your clients believe your busi­ness is in good shape too.

- You’re not get­ting good results in the Search Engines. Poor rank­ings in the Search Engines can be a result of not opti­miz­ing your site well. Poor search engine rank­ing can also be a result of bad design choices or cod­ing on your site. Make sure that your site isn’t designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more dif­fi­cult to opti­mize for Search Engines.

- It’s not bring­ing in inquiries and help­ing you to make sales. If your site was designed long ago, then there’s a good chance that it was designed as “brochure­ware”. This means that the site was designed just to act as an online brochure. This was very com­mon a few years ago, when web­sites were new. But recently busi­nesses have real­ized that a web­site can do a lot more than just imper­son­ate your brochure — it can help you close sales, bring in new prospects and make your busi­ness eas­ier to run. To bring in more inquiries and make more sales include the fol­low­ing when you redesign your site:

- Calls to action to encour­age your vis­i­tors to take spe­cific actions — like pur­chas­ing some­thing, con­tact­ing you, or sign­ing up for a newsletter.

- Forms, scripts, or pro­grams to make your busi­ness eas­ier - like con­tact forms, project esti­mat­ing tools, and an autore­spon­der email series that can help you keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Includ­ing a shop­ping cart or Pay­pal but­tons on your site can also help you to make more sales with­out any addi­tional work.

–Down­load­able infor­ma­tion pack­ets, arti­cles, ques­tion­naires and white papers can answer a prospect’s ques­tions about your prod­ucts or ser­vices and help them to move closer to buy­ing. And if you require the prospect to enter their email address or other con­tact infor­ma­tion, it can help you to grow your prospect list as well. These are just a few of the func­tions that your site can per­form for your busi­ness. To get ideas for other ways that your site can help you increase your busi­ness, look at the other sites that you visit and note the func­tions they perform.

- Your site is cost­ing you a for­tune to update. If you’re rack­ing up huge bills because of changes and still have a lot of to go, it might be time to con­sider a whole site redesign. Make a list of every­thing that you want to do on your site and to con­sult a web designer about redesign­ing your site with those changes in mind. Often, if you have exten­sive changes to make to your site, it can be less expen­sive to just start over.

If your site is designed in Flash or coded in such a way that you can’t main­tain it your­self redesign­ing and re-coding your site could allow you to do so. Hav­ing the abil­ity to make changes and update your own text will let you make revi­sions quickly, at no cost. And you can play with your site and make revi­sions to see what will work best for your busi­ness and clients.

If your site has any of the prob­lems men­tioned here, it’s time to redesign. The steps needed to update and revise will dif­fer depend­ing on the prob­lems and issues that your site has — you may not have to start from scratch. But, do make sure that you address all of the prob­lems that your site has so that you won’t have to redesign again any time soon!

About this author

Erin Fer­ree is a brand iden­tity designer who cre­ates big vis­i­bil­ity for small busi­nesses. Her work­book, “Design a Web­site That Works”, will walk you through all of the ques­tions that you need to answer in order to cre­ate the best pos­si­ble web­site. http://www.elf-design.com/http://www.elf-design.com/products-webWorkbook.html

Share on Facebook

by Trevor Ganderson

While you are think­ing about using a spe­cific list build­ing tech­nique, make sure that you are gen­uine in your approach. You should never do any such thing that may be taken by the sub­scribers as an abuse of trust.

Essen­tial Ele­ments There are the two essen­tial ele­ments that are the must haves for every list. One, your list must have value. It means that what­ever you offer, it must be valu­able to the sub­scribers. Two, it must be free. This means that besides being use­ful, your offer­ings must also be free for the sub­scribers. Do not try to sell some­thing through such lists. These attempts are not likely to be taken in the right spirit. No mat­ter whichever list build­ing tech­nique you are using, make sure that the list has both these elements.

Write Down The Ben­e­fits Of Join­ing The List While you are using dif­fer­ent tech­niques to build the list, do not for­get to tell your poten­tial sub­scribers the array of ben­e­fits that they can enjoy by becom­ing a part of the list. This descrip­tion must be pre­sented in an impres­sive way. Irre­spec­tive of the list build­ing tech­nique, make sure that you are able to offer the fol­low­ing ben­e­fits for your val­ued subscribers.

The sub­scribers will be able to get news and impor­tant announce­ments right in their inbox in a timely manner.

They can even get work­shop and train­ing videos, free of cost, through email. You may also attract poten­tial sub­scribers by offer­ing them sev­eral dis­counts and spe­cial deals.

You can also offer free but valu­able con­tent, spe­cially for the opt in subscribers

Make The Ben­e­fits Of Sub­scrib­ing Your Main Sell­ing Points In fact, it is not an exag­ger­a­tion to say that you can even make these ben­e­fits your sell­ing points while you try­ing to develop a list. This way, we can say that the best list build­ing tech­nique is to offer the ben­e­fits in an allur­ing way so that the vis­i­tors are con­vinced to opt in. How­ever, never try to mis­use the trust of the sub­scribers. When a vis­i­tor sub­scribes and per­mits you to send emails, they expect that they will be able to enjoy all the ben­e­fits men­tioned by you. If you do not ful­fill what you promised, you may not be able to make the best use of such lists.

In order to find the best list build­ing tech­nique, it is very impor­tant for you to under­stand the emo­tional aspects asso­ci­ated with such a list. Most of the peo­ple want to be involved with cer­tain top­ics or causes. You can use such emo­tional needs of the vis­i­tors to turn them into your val­ued subscribers.

Trevor Grander­son is a Mar­keter that has been mak­ing a liv­ing online since 2005. Trevor has used the http://www.duvetcash.info/) Duvet Dol­lars sys­tem to make money online. He also owns a mem­ber­ship site that pro­vides online mar­keters how to info from var­i­ous http://www.netpromarketer.com/) inter­net millionaires.

Share on Facebook

Every­thing on the Inter­net starts with a domain name!

I know that may come off as a bit over reach­ing — but its true. From email to news, search, video or any­thing else on the Inter­net — you have to know where you’re going which is only achieved by a domain name.

The ABC’s of domain names, which as a title may come off as a lit­tle corny to you, is an exer­cise that makes you think about your indus­try or busi­ness, what you’re doing in it, and how you go about doing what you do as it relates to domain names. The use of the ABC’s for­mat is to pro­vide a sim­ple, back to basics approach to deliver fun­da­men­tal con­cepts that pro­voke thoughts, ideas and ques­tions on domain names and how they are a part of your world.

So, what­ever all of that means — lets dive into the ABC’s of domain names and find their rel­e­vance in your line or work, per­sonal life, hob­bies, edu­ca­tional back­ground, expe­ri­ence or spe­cial areas of inter­est to see what jumps out and comes nat­u­rally to you:

A: Adver­tis­ing — domain names offer the per­fect venue to adver­tise your prod­uct or ser­vices or to pro­vide poten­tial rev­enue by domain park­ing and/or affil­i­ate programs.

B: Brand­ing — the brand is in the name. Hav­ing a great tar­geted domain name can really build a brand, or can actu­ally be the brand (eg: Google.com)

C: Com­mu­nity — the Inter­net is all about an inter­con­nected com­mu­nity. Through domain names, you cre­ate a real des­ti­na­tion and an iden­tity for what can become a community.

D: Direct Search — hav­ing a generic word based domain name is your best path to direct search traf­fic. Direct Search is here to stay and will likely take an increas­ing share of the over­all search mar­ket­place. Direct search bypasses the likes of yahoo.com and google.com as the user types in the des­ti­na­tion site directly into their browser (ie: www.computers.com).

E: Ecom­merce — want to con­duct busi­ness online — you need to start with one pri­mary thing — a domain name. Ecom­merce is one of the lead­ing uses of the Internet.

F: Friends & Fam­ily — con­nect with your friends and fam­ily with domain names — either by email, your favorite web­sites, or photo shar­ing sites and videos, etc.

G: Global — syn­ony­mous with the Inter­net — domain names (par­tic­u­larly .com) have mass broad appeal on a global basis, with global potential.

H: High Returns — where else can you buy a piece of vir­tual real-estate for $8.00 and sell it within a mat­ter of weeks or months for over $1000? Fund.com just sold for $9.99 Mil­lion in March of 2008.

I: Invest­ment — domain names are appre­ci­at­ing more than any invest­ment for the price. Sim­i­lar to invest­ing in stocks, bonds, real estate or insur­ance — domain names offer what I believe to be sta­ble long last­ing appre­ci­a­tion with the poten­tial to cre­ate aston­ish­ing returns. Want to learn more about domain invest­ing — you can always check out www.domainprofitsbook.com.

J: Jus­tify — Jus­tify your web pres­ence and online busi­ness with a great domain name that demon­strates who you are and what you do.

K: Key­words — domain names can be based upon major key words for your indus­try or tar­get mar­ket. Just the same, the key words you use in your Inter­net mar­ket­ing can be gen­er­ated from the domain name you choose and how it relates to your tar­get industry/product/service/noun/verb.

L: Local­iza­tion & Loca­tion — tar­get­ing niche audi­ences by loca­tion and a spe­cific geog­ra­phy has proved to be a very strong, iden­ti­fi­able mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­nity for any­body online. Embrac­ing local­iza­tion for your domain invest­ment objec­tives is a great path to consider.

M: Mon­e­ti­za­tion — mak­ing money and cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple sources and streams of income are the cor­ner­stones to the poten­tial and rea­son why peo­ple buy savvy domain names.

N: New Mar­kets to seize — new prod­ucts and ser­vices are always being launched, just as new com­pa­nies and mar­kets are being formed. Find­ing with a good strong domain name to cap­ture the essence of your busi­ness or tar­get mar­ket for your online pres­ence is always a great start­ing point.

O: Orga­ni­za­tion — a domain name is the per­fect way to iden­tify with your orga­ni­za­tion. Whether it’s a prod­uct, ser­vice, or brand — your domain name is your face on the Internet.

P: Prof­its — Domain are a great way to make money and prof­its. Invest wisely and you can find your­self with a great windfall.

Q: Quest — Like any busi­ness ven­ture, you are on a quest to explore, learn and make money.

R: Rev­enue — domain names offer a myr­iad of ways to gen­er­ate rev­enues. There are numer­ous ways and avenues to gen­er­ate rev­enues with domain names, how­ever, in some cases are closely held ideas and resources. Becom­ing edu­cated about domain names and being focused on cre­at­ing a long last­ing busi­ness is a great path towards gen­er­at­ing revenue.

S: Search Engines — Search engines are the gate­way to choices on the Inter­net and essen­tially, a direc­tory of domains clas­si­fied by the type of infor­ma­tion, prod­uct or ser­vice they offer. Search engines are a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing tool and a source of traf­fic for the domain name owner.

T: Tech­nol­ogy — sim­ply, with­out tech­nol­ogy, there are no domains, web­sites, search engines, email or the like. The beauty of domain names is that you really don’t have to under­stand or learn too much tech­nol­ogy to get started, or to make money.

U: Unique Users — peo­ple com­ing to your website/domains gen­er­ate traf­fic. The more unique users that visit your web­site — the more traf­fic they cre­ate. The more traf­fic — the greater the value. The best way to cre­ate long last­ing value with domain names is cre­at­ing a venue where a con­sis­tent and grow­ing base of unique users visit your domain name/website.

V: Vir­tual — Domain names are vir­tual real estate. Some rep­re­sent ocean-front prop­erty while oth­ers can rep­re­sent sky scrap­ers, apart­ments or vacant land in the mid­dle of a bar­ren desert. Build your port­fo­lio of vir­tual real estate for the longer term or flip your domain name for a quick sale and profits.

W: World Wide Web — The world wide web and its begin­ning started with domain names and/or their under­ly­ing numer­i­cal iden­ti­ties. With the advent of the world wide web, email, search engines and the increas­ing con­ver­gence of com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media — busi­ness and indus­try has cre­ated high demand and appre­ci­at­ing val­ues for good domain names.

X: The X Fac­tor — there is a mys­tique and cer­tain unknowns regard­ing the true value of domain names, how to cre­ate rev­enue and prof­its, and what strate­gies are best to cre­ate traf­fic to your domain name or web­site. The more knowl­edge­able and pre­pared you are to dive into the domain name world — the bet­ter off you are in man­ag­ing the X Fac­tor when it rears its head.

Y: You — buy­ing, sell­ing, and own­ing domain names is a reflec­tion upon you, what your goals are, where your inter­ests lie, and how you want to make money with this vir­tual real estate. You need to decide what your objec­tives are and how you are most com­fort­able in approach­ing your invest­ment and ded­i­ca­tion towards mak­ing money with domain names.

Z: Zeal — approach your domain activ­i­ties with pas­sion and enthu­si­asm. The more pos­i­tive your think­ing and focus is with domain names — the bet­ter you will be able to man­age it, be pre­pared, and have an open mind to seize new oppor­tu­ni­ties and make money with your domains.

We hope you enjoyed this arti­cle and find that each time you read it you take away some­thing new and dif­fer­ent that can add value to your world of domain names.

This arti­cle is writ­ten by Chris Kern. Chris has been a ser­ial entre­pre­neur, cor­po­rate finance spe­cial­ist and domainer for the past 13 years and is the author of the author­i­ta­tive resource book on domain name invest­ing “How To Make Money With Domain Names” which can be found online at: http://www.DomainProfitsBook.com. “Every­thing On The Inter­net Starts With A Domain Name” is a Ser­vice Mark of Chris Kern.

Share on Facebook