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by Lee Gilbert
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Improving Your Page Conversions
"How good is your page conversion?" This is one of the first questions I ask a new or prospective client. Normally the answer is prefixed by a gentle shrug of the shoulders, "Not sure, I think it's...."

Now most website owners and business people can readily tell you the number of visitors they have (unique or otherwise) and perhaps their monthly sales volume or database growth. But all of this is pure vanity.

The most important metric of any website is Page Conversion.

Forget visitors numbers - what if only 2% of visitors signup for your newsletter or buy a product?

I would much rather than a page conversion of 30% with 100 visitors a week = 30 sales or 30 signups...
 
... than having a page conversion of just 2% (which is very typical for badly executed designs or campaigns) with 1500 visitors a week = 30 signups or 30 sales.
 
Imagine if you used Pay Per Click (Adwords) for 1500 visitors @ £1.50 a visitor, that's £2,250 per week on advertising! Your sales margins had better be good for 30 sales to put you in profit!

Start your campaign and Internet Marketing Strategy with getting your Page Conversion metric right. You shouldn't really pay for marketing or spend time on promoting web pages until you've maximised the Page Conversion. It's your most important number. So test, test, test your Page Conversion with low cost / no cost methods and then carefully manage your marketing spend and time spent efforts to monitor and evaluate it over time.

Anyone who owns a business should always be looking into ways to increase page conversion.

Firstly let us look into the different ways a page can convert visitors to buyers.
 
1) Preselling: when you write articles, reviews etc. you are in fact preselling your visitors through your content. Your article will be so good and interesting to the reader that they will be compelled to click on the link to your sales page and may very well buy your product or service.
 
2) Sales page: this is the page that will show your visitor the benefits of your product or service and persuade them to buy.

3) Home page: This is often an introduction to your website and will let your visitor know what to expect. This page will make your visitor curious to stay at your website and look into what you have to offer.
 
4) Background and Credentials: when a visitor reads this page and knows something about you, they will be more inclined to trust you and look into what you have to offer.
 
These are just a few ways that your pages can convert visitors into buyers. now let us look into these pages a little deeper and see how you can improve them and increase sales conversions.

Preselling: Preselling your visitors through content is a fine art and needs a little thought. In order to make the most of this and increase conversions you should bear a few points in mind:
 
  • Quality of your articles: your articles should be well written with no grammar and spelling mistakes. They should be written in a style that is easy and enjoyable to read. When a visitor enjoys reading an article they will be more inclined to click through to your sales page and be in a mood to buy.
     
  • Subject matter: the topic of your articles should be of interest to the reader and be something your market would like to know about.
     
  • Different articles: Your visitors will enjoy different articles and it is important to provide different ones to appeal to different sectors of your market. Tutorials, reviews and news articles are just a few examples of what you can write to presell your visitors. The more variety you have the better your visitors will like your content and the more inclined they will be to click through to your sales page.


Sales page: You should always try to increase the conversions on your sales page. You can do this by having two sales pages and tweaking one so that you can increase conversions on it. When you have done this you can discard the one that is not pulling as well and leave the one with higher conversions. Classically this is known as A/B testing and the concept can be taken further to A/B test page headlines, emails, adverts and other traffic drivers.

Home page: Your home page should be like an introduction to a book. What makes you read a book? The opening page and contents, your web page is no different. Look at your home page and see whether it excites your curiosity and interest. Would you want to look deeper into your website based on your home page? If not you no that it is time to make some changes and get your readers excited and curious. When you achieve this your visitors will look further into your website and be drawn towards your sales page.

Use of Video: Simply put this can triple if not quadruple your page conversion.

So next time you are thinking about increasing your conversions try to look at each of your web pages and see if they are really helping to convert your visitors into buyers. As you can see from the above points there are quite a few tweaks you can make to your pages to increase your conversions and profits.

 

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posted by: Lee Gilbert
31st Aug 2010
Five Tips for Article Marketing
You might hear a lot about article marketing which leads us to the question; can article marketing really help you to promote your business?
 
If so how can you build an effective article marketing campaign today?

Here are 5 steps to help you ramp up your activity in this area. Basically, if you're not doing Article Marketing, then you'll be missing out on 1000's of visitors to your website each and every month - can you afford to miss that much traffic?
 
Step one: write 10 articles on topics that your market is very interested in. You can get your team or your family to write some for you - or maybe have them ghost written for you - if you are short on time or just do not like writing.
 
What sort of articles should they be? Popular articles include:
 
  • Tutorials: how to do something. People love to learn how to do things that will help them in life as well as their businesses.
     
  • Tips: helpful points to assist the reader in understanding some topic, or how to do something. There are many aspects in every industry that people would like a little help with.
     
  • Reviews: these are especially good for selling products and pre selling affiliate products. Make sure that you have used the product and that you give an unbiased review of the product. This will help you to sound more sincere and people will pay more attention to your article.
     
  • News articles: these articles discuss certain trends and news events in your industry.
     
  • Informative articles: many people like to read information articles. In fact most of your visitors will come to your website looking for information about certain aspects and products in your market.
 
Step two: divide up your articles an see which ones you will use for different aspects of your article marketing campaign. Some ways to use your articles will be:
 
  • Web content: You can use two for your website. it is wise to optimize them if you are using articles for this purpose as the search engines will pick them up more easily and you can get a better position in the search engines.
     
  • Blogs: you can use one for your blog. You can use blogger.com so that the Googlebots will follow your links to your site and index it faster.
     
  • Article distribution: you can create a lot of backlinks to your site by article distribution. It is wise to use one or two for this purpose. You will attract a growing number of people when you do this. Using sites like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and ArticlesBase.com you can get your articles published in well regarded portals and in return they provide you with high quality (page rank) back links
     
  • Newsletter: use one for your newsletter. When you publish a newsletter you will be able to keep in contact with customers and leads. You can also put a couple of offers in the newsletter. It is good to publish your newsletter once a week or at least once every two weeks.
     
  • Mini courses: split up two related articles into a mini course to help you presell your products and bring people to your website.
     
  • Reports: expand two of your articles into a seven or ten page report. You can use this as a free report to build up your list and help you to sell products.

Step three: repeat steps one and two every week. You will not have to write the mini course and free report every week so you can use the extra three articles to write a hub page, squiddo page, and a promotional article for sending to your list, at least once a month. You can link up these extra pages to your website and blogs, so that you can increase traffic to your website and blogs. In this way you will create a network of blogs and social networks. Use pinging and social bookmarking to bring more traffic to your blogs and web pages.
 
Step four: check your stats to see how many backlinks you are accumulating with your article marketing campaign. You can also check how much your traffic and sales conversions are increasing. An excel sheet is a good way to keep your records and understand how you are progressing.
 
Step five: use your article marketing system again and again to increase traffic and sales.

Once you have an article marketing system in place you will be able to run an efficient and profitable article marketing campaign.
 
With these five steps you will be able to promote your website and increase your sales with article marketing. Article marketing done in this way will not cost you anything and will increase your visitors and sales.
 
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posted by: Lee Gilbert
24th Aug 2010
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