SEO Updates

Got Five Seconds to Ramp Up Your Sales?
By Jen Blanchard

So you’ve found a niche and a blockbuster product, written your salescopy, and built your website…

… Now you’re ready to start counting your money, right?

Not so fast!

Before you do anything else, do this quick five-second test to make sure your site is EASY to use!

Just how important IS website usability?

For an e-commerce site, it’s CRUCIAL. If people can’t follow your navigation scheme, they won’t be able to find your products…

… And if they can’t find your products, how can they BUY them?

In fact, according to market research from the Gartner Group, more than 50% of web sales are LOST because visitors can’t find what they’re looking for!

With results like these, I firmly believe EVERYONE should test their sites for usability.

And with the five-second test I’m about to show you, you can find out key information very quickly:
Your visitors’ first impressions
Major roadblocks in your site navigation
How well your web page communicates its MOST important content
Don’t think five seconds is long enough to learn anything useful?

Well, that’s roughly how long the majority of web surfers spend deciding if YOUR site has what they’re looking for! (The maximum is 10 seconds.)

Here’s what you do…

The Five-Second Usability Test

Step 1: Find several people who fit your target market and ask them to be your focus group.

Step 2: Give your users a focused goal. Let’s say you sell computer software tutorials. The goal you give them might be something like, “Find tutorials relevant to your skills and interests.”

Step 3: Display your homepage for five seconds, then ask your focus group to try to remember everything they see.

Step 4: Once you’ve removed the page, ask your test subjects to write down everything they remember about the page.

Step 5: Ask two relevant questions to see whether your page allowed them to find what they were looking for.

For example, “What kind of tutorials does my site offer?” or “Did you spot a tutorial that fits your current skill level?”

If any of your subjects AREN’T able to recall the most important elements on your page, make adjustments to your layout… then re-test.

That’s it!

(Still in the planning stages of building your site? All the better to find out valuable info BEFORE you invest time and money in it…

… Just do the test using a sketch of your homepage.)

I’d love to hear the results of YOUR Five-Second test when you’re done.

Are you a “do-it-yourselfer?”

By that I mean, are you the kind of person who insists on doing absolutely everything yourself — even if it means learning things from scratch — because you’re sick and tired of having other people tell you what to do?

If so, you’re certainly not alone. Many successful businesspeople share the same trait. In fact, the “do-it-yourself” mindset can be one of your greatest strengths as an entrepreneur.

After all, when you’re forced to be 100% accountable for your results — or lack of results — you become highly motivated to create your own success!

But consider this: Being a “lone wolf” can create a lot of problems for your business, too.

When you hit a roadblock, there’s nobody to turn to for guidance. Problems that once could be solved by a simple phone call to one of your coworkers can turn into days of frustration — and a lot of wasted money — when you’re working alone.

And if you’re just getting started, “going solo” can have additional challenges…

… Maybe you don’t know where to start… you find it difficult to stay motivated… you’re intimidated by all the techie stuff and choices.. you don’t have a good business idea yet… you’re working hard but not seeing ANY results.

Whatever your situation is, an experienced Internet business mentor can help you define your goals and tell exactly what you need to do to reach them — and then make sure your business-growing efforts stay on track.

Now, I can’t say if hiring a mentor is the right decision for YOU. After all, I don’t know you… your level of Internet marketing and business experience… where you’re at today… or what your current finances look like.

But I can say this: having a business mentor has really worked for me!

My mentors guide me down the path of success, pointing out potential road blocks so I can avoid them in the first place.

It’s extremely powerful to have someone watch over you like this, making sure you avoid the pitfalls, showing you easier approaches, motivating you — practically holding your hand and leading you to profits.

How valuable are my mentors to me?

Well, I pay just ONE mentor $36,000 a year, because the advice he gives me helps my company make that investment back a HUNDRED TIMES OVER & every single year!

The money my mentors have helped us save — and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales they’ve helped us generate — have really added up.

In fact, we’ve made MILLIONS from their advice.

If you’re a motivated self-starter who isn’t afraid to learn as you go, then maybe you don’t need an expert looking over your shoulder, giving you advice…

…but if you’re running into roadblocks you just can’t seem to bypass on your own — or if you find yourself drowning in oceans of information, not even knowing where to start — then I strongly suggest you consider hiring a mentor.

Do you panic at the thought of writing your own promotional email?

Here’s something you should know… writing an email is 95% rules — and only 5% creativity –so as long as you stick to the rules, you’ll write an email that’s suitable for sending to your customers every time!

And what are the rules? Glad you asked

>> Hypnotize the reader with compelling benefits — The most effective email promotions grab readers’ attention with compelling benefits that speak directly to the readers’ deepest desires and greatest fears.

Benefits build the value you need to drive people to act when presented with your call to action.
>> Choose your tone and transfer ownership — Whenever possible, write your email like you were talking to a friend. Be informal, use contractions, and don’t be afraid to start a sentence with “and” or “but.”

To transfer ownership, you want to make sure your reader can actually picture themselves using your product
>> Use automation to create personalized offers — Nothing is more appealing to people than the ’sound’ of their own names, and nothing grabs someone’s attention faster than something that affects them directly!
>> We don’t recommend you try to get yours subscriber to purchase directly from your email. Instead, you should ask them to “click here now to learn more,” or something similar.
While the content of your email is important, how it LOOKS makes a big impact on readers, too. Here is how to format your email…

>> Width — Be sure to format your email message in a table that is not over 420 pixels wide. If you exceed that, your message may be cut off on the right side of the screen — or at the very least, not print properly
>> Images — Try to avoid using graphics whenever possible. People with slow connections will have trouble downloading them, and people reading your message offline won’t see them at all.
>> Bolding — Use bolding just to emphasize the biggest and best benefits in the offer. You should be able to scan the message and instantly understand the biggest benefits
>> Bullets — Using bulleted points is one of the best ways to break up your copy and make some of your key points really stand out. As will all formatting techniques, make sure to don’t swamp your email with bullet points.
Finally, once you’ve written the letter, give it a final “scan test.” Set it aside for an hour, then return to it with fresh eyes BUT don’t read it word for word. Scan over the letter and see which sections jump out at you. Make sure that those sections contain the key benefits.

Are you wasting too much time working in your business…

… and not enough time working ON it?

One thing I often hear from new Internet marketers is what a drag it is to answer the same customer service questions over and over again.

Not only is it boring, it also wastes time you could be using to research lucrative NEW business opportunities (or ENJOYING the money you’re already bringing in!).

Fortunately, with the right kind of software, you can reduce the tedious hours you spend emailing back and forth with your customers to just a couple of hours a week…

…and improve your overall reputation AND explode your back-end sales at the same time!

Here are a few regular tasks you can start automating right away with software, so you can spend more time focusing on the important stuff!

Increase Sales with Follow-up Offers

Did you know you can use autoresponders to make more sales without lifting a finger?! Here’s how it works:

Say someone signs up for your free newsletter. You automatically send them an email thanking them for their subscription, and offering them a discount on one of your best-selling products.

They decide to order the product, which triggers another email thanking them for purchasing, and then offers them another product that is the perfect companion to the one they just bought. So they order that product, too… which of course triggers another email… and so on.

So you end up making several sales — automatically — just by getting someone to sign up for a free newsletter. And once that series of emails is set to go, you’ll never have to do a thing to keep making these sales, over and over!

Eliminate Repetitive Customer Service Responses

According to a recent survey, 15% of your customers expect a response to their emails in as little as ONE hour! A further 13% expect to hear from you within six hours, and another 45% within 24 hours! Those are pretty high expectations to live up to…

Fortunately, you can set up your site to automatically respond to customer questions INSTANTLY.

Say a visitor arrives at your website and is interested in making a purchase, but they have a question first. So they email you at an email address you’ve set up specifically for this purpose.

Now you know from experience that you get the same five or six questions all the time about your product… so you put together a “frequently asked questions” email that responds to these main questions.

When someone sends an email to that special email address, the FAQ email goes out immediately… and you make the sale because the visitor is SO impressed by how responsive you are to their questions!

Impress Your Visitors with Instant Information

With the right software, not only can you deliver your free newsletter or report the instant someone asks for it, you can deliver your electronic information products right away, too!

When someone orders your eBook, you automatically send them an email that has a link to where they can go to download it, along with the unique username and password they’ll need to open it. You can literally sell and deliver your products while you sleep, turing your website into a 24/7 selling machine!

6 Easy Ways to Drive Paying Customers to Your Site

Quality traffic — it’s the “Holy Grail” of online marketing.

After all, there’s not much point in having a website if your potential customers aren’t able to find it!

This week, we’re going to focus on some of the different ways you can drive quality traffic to your site. (And by “quality,” I mean visitors that are likely to BUY what you sell on your site!)

In this article, I’ll talk about 6 of my favorite ways to attract more customers to your site. (And all of them are cheap or even freeee!)

And in the article below, two very special “guest contributors” are going to give you ANOTHER hot tip — and talk about how you can use one of the ‘Net’s hottest communication tools to drive even MORE qualified traffic to your site!

So let’s get started with my top 6 tips — if you’re not using any of these strategies, the time to get started is today!

Traffic Tip #1: Give away content

This is one of the best traffic strategies out there… Simply write a series of short articles that are packed with useful information and tips, then submit them to online article directories and other free content sites.

Not only will you get some great inbound links pointing to your site, which will help you with the search engines — other people can republish your articles on their own sites, which will help spread the word about your business and build your credibility as an industry expert!

… Want to know more? Click here to visit my blog and discover what my other 5 traffic tips are!

4 Ways to Attract Traffic — With a Blog!
By Rosalind Gardner and Anik Singal

[Note from Derek: One of my readers recently asked me how she could use a blog to drive more traffic to her site. Since my friends Rosalind and Anik are true blog marketing experts, I asked them to provide an answer — and they ended up writing an entire article for me! I hope you enjoy it… D.]

Blogging — both writing blogs AND reading blogs — has gone from being a “fringe” activity to one of the most popular pastimes on the ‘Net. In fact, blogging is now a global phenomenon. There are currently 112.8 million blogs in existence, with 175,000 new ones launching every day.

… But did you know that blogs are also a great way to drive traffic to your site?

Blogs, by design, are built to quickly and easily attract traffic, whether it be from search engines or from a rapid influx of links. The moment you publish a post, your blog goes to work for you letting the world know that you’ve made an update - the search engines come running and you find yourself ranking #1 for keywords in no time.

Here are 4 ways to attract traffic to your site using blogs (and 4 reasons why you NEED to start blogging):

1. Long-Tail Keywords

Instead of using only the most obvious or generic terms related to the topic of your post, focus on more specific words and phrases, i.e., long-tail keywords.

For instance, if you are writing a post about nordic skiing at Sun Peaks Resort near Kamloops, British Columbia, you don’t want to target keywords such as ‘travel’ and ’skiing’ which will put you in direct competition with Expedia.com, SkiNet.com and the like.

Instead, use “cross country skiing at Sun Peaks Resort” and not only will your post show up in a blog search, but it’ll soon rank in the top ten in Google’s organic listings as well.

Blogs are notorious for ranking high and fast for long-tail keywords. Over time with hundreds of these, the traffic is far more valuable than having one “highly competitive” keyword.

2. Bookmark with OnlyWire

Onlywire is a service that allows you to automatically bookmark your post on well over 17 high-traffic sites.

It takes just a few clicks to do this every time you post. You simply click a button on your browser, type in a few keywords and hit “submit.” Yes, the service is absolutely free.

Onlywire is a great way to not only attract visitors but to also get the search engines running in to index your new post.

3. Leave Blog Comments

One of the best ways to get traffic and highly valuable links in the beginning is to leave comments on other high-traffic blogs in your niche.

Finding these blogs is easy — either just search Google or visit Technorati and find the most popular in your topic.

A couple of key techniques to use:

A) Don’t use your name, use something catchy (or a keyword). When they post links to your site, they link the “name field” — so as long as you use something enticing, you’ll get people to click.

Or you can use a keyword and that way you get more search engine recognition for the term you are optimizing for.

B) Don’t abuse this — You can easily find yourself blocked from leaving future comments. Leave a comment that is useful and shows that you read what you’re commenting on. Not only will this make the blogger happy but it’ll get you more traffic and credibility.

4. Involve the Press

Too many people have forgotten how great press releases can be for traffic — mostly because they don’t know the “right” way of using press releases.

The trick is to base your press releases on information that actually MATTERS to people.

The easiest way to generate the valuable content for press releases is to quickly poll your readers (or get another blogger to help generate the results). So long as you can get at least 50 people to respond, you can issue a press release with your new-found data.

The press loves data, readers love data — posts and press releases like this make their way around the Internet very fast.

If you don’t already maintain a blog, you should seriously think about starting one up right away. It’s the easiest way to establish a solid online presence.

Here it is:
Step 1: Find a niche market — Use research tools like Wordtracker to find a niche market of HUNGRY buyers eager for your product or service

Step 2: Write your salescopy — Write compelling copy that leads your visitors smoothly through your sales process

Step 3: Set up your online store — Turn your website into a selling machine using a simple design, easy navigation, and automation

Step 4: Drive buyers to your site — Create “paid search” ads that attract INSTANT traffic (without draining your bank account!) and use free search engines to get your site “front and center”

Step 5: Drive more cheap and FREE traffic — Use strategies like article-sharing and press releases to drive even MORE people to your site

Step 6: Use email to get MORE sales — Build a subscriber list of people who WANT to hear from you, so you can convince them to buy over time

Step 7: Find MORE products for your customers — Offer your customers even more products you know they want to buy

Step 8: Get other people to sell for you — Recruit an army of salespeople to sell your products on their websites (and you won’t have to pay them a dime unless they help you make a sale!)

Step 9: Grow your business BIGGER — Create dozens of new streams of income to multiply your revenues

Step 10: Use hot new tools to create a buzz — Bring visitors back to your site again and again using the hottest new tools and techniques
Of course, this is just a brief overview… Our guaranteed 10-step system includes so many tested and proven strategies you can use to create a highly profitable website, I can’t begin to list them all here.

When you did the keyword research for your website, you probably found a lot of simple words you’re now incorporating into your website. These general terms are things that many people search for, and are not necessarily going to help your business or website to be number one in the search engine for, other than bragging rights.

What you need to find are the long tail keywords. Keywords that are searched for far less, but searched for by people interested in something specific enough you can be pretty sure they’ll buy if you are offering something that remedies the problem.

Are you wondering how to search for long tail keywords? There are a couple ways. The first way is to use a site like NicheBot to find the terms that people are searching for. Good long tail keywords can be three or even four words long. These keyword phrases are things people actually type into the search engine. Think about how you search on Google. Do you just type in one word or do you type in a full phrase? Some people even type in questions, complete with question marks on the end!

The second great way to find long tail keywords is ask people. Start with your friends and family – tell them your niche and then ask them what they would type into Google to search for your product, service, or site. The more people you ask, the closer you will get to understanding how other people (that aren’t as close to your subject as you are) look for what you have. No jargon, no buzzwords, just the real searches. You can use this information to add important keywords to your website.

Many people enjoy using flash on webpages. They feel that moving images and movie-like quality make a website seem more flashy, more professional, and cooler. The problem is that when you use flash Google has no idea what that super-cool movie says.

What does this mean for your SEO? Any keywords you use in your flash graphic or header are worthless – it’s like giving part of your website away for nothing in return. If you’re trying to target keywords for organic search, every keyword counts. Google doesn’t know if that section of your website is relevant or high quality. It just sees it as space, because search engine spiders cannot crawl that area.

Even if you think that flash is amazing and high quality, do a survey of your demographic. The odds are they would feel less overwhelmed finding information if there wasn’t a bunch of moving pictures distracting them from your menu or content.

Making sure your website is simple to navigate and easy to read is a far better alternative for both your website visitor as well as the search engine ranking of your website.

Everything you do for your website should be geared toward your visitor and the search engine. When in doubt, definitely default to the needs of your visitor, because even if Google sends oodles of traffic to your website, it won’t matter if your website usability is nil due to a bunch of flash graphics all over your site.

Keeping it simple can not only save your pocketbook, because flash is not inexpensive to contract, it can also help your conversion rates once you do get visitors to your website.

Pay Per Click consultants and agencies are holding their collective breath…

Yahoo! Is going to use Google for paid search…to see how it’s going to go. According to Marketwatch.com - Microsoft and it’s increasingly aggressive acquisition deal is freaking out at Yahoo! using Google paid search. The head of legal is saying that will bring 90% of all paid search to Google, a possible antitrust problem.

But the ads Yahoo is planning on using will only total 3% of all paid search, and they’re only doing it temporarily.

This is fantastic for those of us doing PPC, because Yahoo needs to find a better way to run the backend of their PPC campaigns.

The Yahoo backend is clunky and confusing, while Google’s MyClientCenter is sleek and easy to use. Yahoo could take many lessons from Google and I hope they do during this possible try-before-you-buy time. If Yahoo could incorporate some of the Google strategies of backend usage as well as not making it darn near impossible to work with Yahoo if you haven’t already spent $1,000 with them would make my life as a PPC consultant so much easier.

Yahoo has the right idea. If your system is broken, look at someone else’s (preferably someone that has paid search in the bag, like Google does) and use the knowledge to improve your own systems.

Or just merge with Google PPC so those of us running campaigns don’t have to spend three times as much time to run the same campaign we do over at Google. It’s just silly.

So you’ve got your page titles, image title tags, and keywords all picked out.

Your copy is amazing and you have everything in order.

What does your navigation structure look like? Do you have pages labeled “About” “Home” and “Services”? Have you researched the keywords you want to use for your page links? If not, you should be doing your Search Engine Optimization due diligence and research the best keywords for your page links.

For regular websites:

• Make sure your page titles are keywords - Instead of “Home” call that link “Name of Company” so the linkback points to the right page with the company name instead of that page just being labeled as “home” by the search engine spiders.
• For the “About” or “About Us” page - Make it a little more interesting and help the search engines love you. If you were an accountant or financial advisor, call the link “About the Accountant” or “About (your first name)” something a little more specific than “About” will help the search engine know what’s behind the link.
• The “Services” page is more neglected than most pages - You could either split your services into categories and label them accordingly (so the page behind the link matches, thus giving it more weight in the search engine.) Or, you could do something as simple as saying “Financial Services” instead of just “Services.” Again, a little can go a long way, as long as you do something beyond doing the bare minimum.