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Your client is thrilled with the new blog. It provides a SEO friendly CMS, it’s Social Media friendly, your client loves the opportunity to participate in the conversation, etc, etc.

but

despite how cool their new blog is…. despite the increase in readers, traffic, comments, etc.

at some point,

your client is ultimately going to turn to you and ask

“What about sales?”

Because unless your client is running a CPM model or is really big into branding, at the end of the day; the only thing that really matters to your client is conversions.

Is this blog making me money?

How do you get your Blog traffic to convert? First and foremost, sales tips are worthless if you don’t follow the 10 Golden Rules of Blogging.

But the 10 Golden Rules of Blogging alone won’t get you sales. They’re just table stakes to make it even possible to sell.

1) Follow Jeff Quipp’s tips for Building Authority:
People want to buy from the best. Strive to be an expert in your field. Even if you sell a commodity product where “the best” is really just better marketing, then do that. Build your online authority and you will be perceived as “the best”.

Use your blog to develop a specialty in a particular niche of your industry.

As Jeff says, this is a difficult balancing act. You don’t want the niche to be too narrow that you limit people’s perceptions of your abilities (not unlike type casting to some actors), though too broad and its near impossible to establish yourself as an expert, and less and less likely over time.

Reach out to others in your field. Or as Jeff says, be an uber networker. One great way to do this in your blog writing is to find other industry blogs to link to when writing your posts. Many blog platforms will ping them that you’ve linked to them.

2) Follow the Loop Strategy in your post writing.

The Loop Strategy suggests that we never want to leave the visitor without telling them what the next step is. There are no dead ends because each page leads to another page.

Think about the most logical path for the consumer to take. If I enjoy this content then I’ll probably like that too. Build the next step into your template. Don’t add new content without thinking about what it relates to. Link it to the next step. This will substantially increase your opportunity to convert.

3) Make sure you have an “About Us” section in your Blog

Depending on your product or service, some people will jump right the buy, but others may want to know a little more about you.

Picture this. I found your blog through a long tail keyword search. I read your post about Rugs, Plastic Products, Petroleum, whatever and it really spoke to me because that’s my industry too.

I find myself thinking wow. Why haven’t I heard of these guys before? Who are they? And sadly, I’m left wondering because there is no About Us page. And if you’re afraid to tell me who you are - then I don’t trust you.

4) Use a Landing Page to ask for the sale

If you’ve given your reader really useful content, there is nothing wrong with linking out to a product page if that product is related to your article.

The Weight Loss Industry is really good at this: for example, do a search for “green tea, weight loss” you will find a plethora of helpful informational articles about the benefits of Green Tea for weight loss. Pretty much every one of these articles was written by someone who is trying to sell you Green Tea.

Does this bother me? Not if the article was useful. Make sure you give thought to color, language and placement when designing the landing page.
5) Make sure you have a call to action on the page you link to not in the blog post.

There are many possible ways to do this:

1. Just ask for the sale. Include an order now button beside the product information (The Direct Close method)
2. Use a deadline. For example, “product will be going up in price by July 30th (The Time Driven Close).
3. Make an offer. i.e. order these two products and save 20%. This makes the buyer feel like they’re making a smart choice or saving money (The Concession Close Method).

Whatever method feels right for you, make sure you use persuasive writing techniques like Brian suggests.

Getting you blog traffic to convert is really just a matter of applying successful marketing techniques to your Blog. The trick is knowing what’s appropriate for a Blog and what belongs on a separate page.

Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

Optimizing for top Google rankings includes a number of factors. In Part 1 of 3 we discussed onsite optimization. In Part 2 we will touch on incoming links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools.

LINKS
Links are very important in today’s Google rankings, but just how many links you need will depend on both the competitiveness of your target phrases, and the quality of the incoming links themselves.

Essentially the number one rule of links is to keep it relevant! Topical relevance is very important in order for inbound links to give your site the most value. If the page that links to you is relevant that is good, if the entire site linking to you is relevant, that is better.

First to get an idea of how many links you may need, take a look at the top 10 ranking sites in Google and record how many links Yahoo is noting for each site. (This is because Google does not display anywhere near all the links they have noted). The average of this count is often a good indication of how many links your site may need.

There are many different ways to get links to your site including the age old reciprocal link trade, directory links, article based links, and links from press releases.

Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal linking has seen its value drop considerably over the past few years, however, if the site you are trading with is relevant you can still receive value from these links.

Paid Links
Google frowns on paid links, however that is not to say that they don’t work. Often you can find highly reputable and relevant websites which are offering paid advertising spots. If these links are coded to link directly to your website without passing through any tracking redirects, you will in many cases see value in the form of both direct traffic and increased link densities and rankings.

Articles
Writing and distributing industry specific articles is a great way to help increase both your link counts and site traffic; for examples of such content see StepForth’s SEO Blog News articles. Consider writing articles on a regular basis and submitting them to some of the more popular services such as EzineArticles. Be sure to include a link to your site from somewhere within the article, or at the very lest within your bio. Try to use a target phrase as part of the anchor text for additional value.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Google, optimize for google

I always like to write articles that talk about how to make money online and succeed.

After seeing so many people do things that can have a negative impact on their internet business, I have decided that I want to write something about this topic.

If this is the direction that you are in, then you will know what to do.

First step: Don’t allow people to subscribe to your email newsletter on your website

If you really want to make less sales every month from your online work at home business website, then don’t offer your visitors the chance to subscribe to your newsletter. Don’t try collect their name and email directly from your website. Don’t even think about doing this.

Even if you already have an auto responder system up and running, make sure to buy non double opt-in lists from someone else. Keep spamming other people who have never really opted into your personal newsletter. This means that they never gave you their personal permission to email them.

2nd step: Spend all your advertising funds in one place

Take your money that you have and spend it all in one place only. Put all your eggs in one basket. If this ad does not work out for you and you lost all your money, call it quits.

Instead of testing different ads and seeing which ones bring in the best results, do the opposite.

3rd step: You know it all, right?

If you really want to fail, don’t find a role model. When you have the chance to learn from someone who is a guru and wants to help you, don’t listen to them. Just try to do everything in your way and try to “reinvent the wheel” all by yourself.

4th step: Jump from one program to another

Get your internal juices flowing and get excited about a brand new online business. Pay the fee to get started. Work it a few days and when it doesn’t work out like you wanted it to work, quit it. Then start looking for the next great web based business. Join that too, work it a few days and when that program doesn’t work for you, quit that one too. Repeat the same cycle over and over again.

5th step: Don’t write down any goals

One of the best ways to fail online is to never write down any short term or long term goals. If you really want to fail online, don’t even think about writing your goals down.

6th step: Associate with negative people

Another good way to fail on the internet is to take advice from people who have tried to make money online before but failed. If they tell you that you can’t make money online, then listen to them. They know what they are talking about.

If your friends and family tell you that you won’t succeed, then follow their advice too.

Don’t ever listen to a successful online marketer who is trying to teach you the same methods that they have been using to make a nice full time income on the world wide web.

If you follow the steps above, you will reach your goal of online failure. If you really want to succeed with your own internet home based business, then just do the opposite. It is that simple.

Tal Fighel is the owner of The Work At Home Income Directory: http://www.work-at-home-income-directory.com/A-6-Steps-System-To-Online-Business-Failure.html . You can find more of Tal Fighel’s articles here: http://www.work-at-home-income-directory.com

Tags: Website Promotion

Websites have become far more important for an individual or a business as compared to a few years ago. Today, they have become the company’s or the individual’s online presence. Many of your goals and deadlines may depend on the traffic of your website. Here are 5 ways to increase traffic to your website.

Article Marketing: Probably, Article marketing is one of the cheapest ways to propagate your website if you have flair to write along with all the other qualifications and talents you have. Article Marketing simple means that you have to submit original and factual content about your website and product on the various Article Marketing sites with a short link to your website. This type of internet marketing has been known to borne excellent fruits for anyone who does it seriously. These links, called as link backs in the Web 2.0 parlance, will also ensure that your neighborhood increases, thereby working good for any Search Engine Website.

Advertise: For the initial stages, you may have to go into a tie up with the many affiliate marketing options available to you. Of course, with the course of time, you may have no need to go for affiliate marketing, but it is one essential investment that you may have to do to increase traffic to your website.

Use Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine Optimization is another excellent way of increasing the traffic of your website. More than eighty percent of web users today land up on websites via some search engine or the other, and the rest twenty percent are still to get a respectable browser. Therefore, search engine traffic plays a major role in the over all traffic of any website. To make your website search engine optimized is a bit complex, and may require the help of a qualified search engine optimizer. To make your website search engine friendly, you first have to do away with anything that makes it heavy. Secondly, you should cut away all those parts of your website which are not search engine friendly and cannot be read by the search engine crawlers. This includes Flash and Graphics. If you do insist on using graphics, try to get a description of the graphic into the website.

Index and Sitemap: Everyone likes system, and Search Engine Optimizers actually love any site with a sitemap. Also, having a sitemap makes it simpler for the user to access and move around on your website. This will surely increase your chances of being remembered by the web user who came across your website and play an important part in any change to your web traffic, be it good or bad.

Upgrade and Enhance: Once you have your website ready and launched, be sure to add something or the new to it almost every week or month. Of course, this may pose a problem to many webmasters, but the best way of countering this is by at least keeping something new or making something new for the homepage.

Colin Meunier is a Successful Home Business Coach and Mentor!
To learn how you can use a breakthrough marketing system to become more successful in your home business online visit: MLM Lead Generation Tips

Tags: Website Traffic

Five Powerful Tips for New Webmasters Being a new webmaster can be a challenge. There are a thousand different ways you can go and a thousand different things you can do. Here are five powerful tips to help you gain a good understanding of what you really need to do to make your website a success.

Tip One: Realize that your website is not a website; It is a collection of web pages. And each web page is an individual unit that should stand on its own. This sounds funny but it is very true, and very important, particularly for the new webmaster. The large search engines have made the web one big website. People search for things and will re-search and flip through websites with no concern for website loyalty. They are looking for answers to their questions and the search engines have made it easy to use the whole web as an answer finding tool. You will, over time build visitor loyalty but it will only come once visitors develop confidence in the quality of your website.

Tip Two: People will not click on your advertisements, product banners, or other affiliate sales stuff unless you give them a reason to. No need to put up pages with lots of affiliate links in the hope of making revenue -unless you give them good content that helps them make a decision to buy. If you put up recommended products for them to buy you need to explain to them the benefits, features, and the pros and cons of the product. Web customers come in two different types. The first type is ready to buy. And they will go directly to the big retailers. The second type and this is the type you are looking for, is gathering information that will help them make a good buying decision. Give them good information and give them the tools they need to make an informed buying decision. If they want to buy something they will just go to the big online retailers. Your role as a little webmaster is to enhance their understanding and help them in unique ways to make buying decisions.

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Tags: Webmasters, website design

Last week, it was announced that Yahoo and Google had formed an agreement for Google AdSense ads to run on Yahoo’s US-based search results for a trial period of 2 weeks. Rumors suggested that this was a direct retaliation for Microsoft’s seemingly low bid and veiled “hostile takeover” threat.

Well, the trial has only been running just over a week and according to Marketing Pilgrim, Yahoo and Google are madly in love with the potential of their new relationship. So much so that they’ve stopped the trial earlier than expected. Perhaps they’ve seen enough click-through evidence to prove the whirlwind romance has what it takes to last the distance. Or perhaps Yahoo felt they had made their point to Microsoft.

Has it been enough to make Microsoft so jealous as to increase their offer for Yahoo and knock out their rival in love and ad profits? Time will tell.

If you’re participating in social media, you’re going to want to know how it’s working. But before you even begin to measure your success, you need to know what you’re measuring it against. Define concrete goals for your efforts. Those might be to increase your web-site traffic by a certain amount each month, to increase conversion values, or some other goal. Whatever those goals are, use them as a guide as you’re planning your social-media marketing efforts.

Once you’ve decided what you want from social-media optimization, you can measure the results that you’re gaining from your efforts. The most obvious indicator is web-site traffic. If your traffic begins to climb, it’s a pretty good bet that your social-media efforts are working.

But if you don’t want to rely solely on site traffic as in indication of your success, there are several other elements you can look to in the effort to determine how successful your social-media efforts are.

There are many good web analytics packages that will track what the most popular content on your site is. I think that Google Analytics is one of the best analytics solutions out there, and as its free, its well worth a look at. With this software you can see where your site visitors are coming from and how long they’re spending on your page. This information will help you determine which of your content is most successful and who is sending the most traffic to your blog, so that you can capitalize on that.

Next, you can monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content by checking your guest book, forums, or comment capabilities. Guest books aren’t nearly as popular as they once were, but if you’re participating in a social network and you don’t have forums or comment capabilities on your blog, you’re missing a large part of the value of social media.

Also pay attention to how often you’re added to social booking sites. Sites like del.icio.us and StumbledUpon are a couple of the social bookmarking sites that can help boost your site traffic. The easiest way to monitor your site in social bookmarking networks is to create an account with them and then use the account to search for your URLs. In other words, who is actually adding your site/article/blog posts to sites.

Measure how many readers are actually subscribing to your RSS feeds. The number of subscribers you have on your RSS feeds will be a good indicator of how well you’re doing in your SMO efforts. The more subscribers you have, the more popular your site is.

Another way to measure your success with social bookmarking is to watch who is linking to you. If you have a good analytics program, it will probably provide you with a report that shows where incoming links originated. If your analytics program doesn’t provide this information, you can figure out who’s linking to you using that old standby, a web search. To find out who is linking to your site use the following search string, replacing your website with the actual URL of the pages you want to
track: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com.

One last way to monitor your success in the social-media space is to monitor how many people are connected to you. In MySpace and FaceBook, that might mean how many friends you have. In LinkedIn, it would be how many colleagues you are connected to, and on Digg the measurement you’re looking for is the number of times your content is tagged.

All of these are indications that you’re being followed by someone. And the more people with whom you can build a relationship, obviously the better your success will be. And that’s probably the most important rule of all to remember about social-media networking and social-media optimization: build the relationship first and the rest falls into place.

Guest post by Andy MacDonald, author of The SEO & Marketing Tips for Webmasters Blog.

Tags: social media, Web 2.0

Deep links are an important strategy in SEO. Ratios, such as the number of deep links to non optimized links are a fundamental mathematical equations that determine the percentage of inbound links from other sites to pages other than your homepage.

Using deep links both internally to link to relevant content from a topical page and externally by link building or controlling inbound link anchor text in the proper context is important to define or produce relevance for your website.Everything in nature leaves a trail and similarly each form and function can be reduced to its mathematical equation. But how does this apply to SEO?

Traffic is based on two things, “links from other sites and links from other sites”. Sounds pretty straight forward right? An advertisement whether it is pay per click, a press release or an image banner is a link, a search result is a link, we navigate from page to page or site to site with links, the underlying conclusion denotes that by mastering the context of frequency, consistency, structure, site architecture and the prevalence of continuity, we can send a clear signal to search engines and humans alike about the content of our pages.

One way to do this is through building multiple links to pages other than your home page (known as deep linking or deep links). Through using deep links, you are passing on vital ranking potential to the site, which eventually transcends where the link is directed and flows link weight back to the home page.

This is why it is increasingly important to only have links that are targeted to share this vital link juice from the homepage with other areas that are an oasis for pages you wish to make pivotal in your site architectures framework.

Now for the exercise, the deep link / internal link audit.

1) determine which pages have the most link weight
2) determine which of your pages are optimized (with the appropriate anchor text)
3) consolidate internal links that are congruent with page theme
4) use deep links to give them traction in search engines for a higher relevance score

Deep links send a clear message to humans and search engines, that each page of your site is important, when harnessed properly, deep links are one of the most effective off page factors aside from anchor text relevance.

So, how do you determine what Google deems as the most relevant page for your keywords in your site when building links? Not sure, just ask with a simple link command.

site:sitedomain.com keyword or key phrase (just replace the sitedomain with your own and the keywords with the keywords you want to emphasize).

The page at the top of this search result represents the most worthy page to build links to strategically to emphasize that page as a potential landing page.

To take it one step further, you could log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account, look at the internal links tab and assess the link distribution framework of your site architecture and determine if you need to salvage some pages from starvation (orphaned pages) or use your power house link magnets (the pages with massive quantities of internal links) in a more optimized and refined manner. Personally with strong internal links right under your nose, the first thing you should do is perform a link audit.

For example, if I have a sub folder or sub page that has 1000 internal links referencing it from other parts of the site and less fortunate pages only have 7 internal links (and that is a page I want to rank in search engines) then I need to map out the flow of link weight to be more conducive to accomplish this.

The other point is, with only 7 internal links linking to an internal page, it may rank for an “exact match” phrase, but only for something on the bottom of the barrel compared to any potential keyword combination enter in a boolean search query.

To rank for a competitive term or key phrase you need two things (1) strong internal links focused on quality and relevance from related pages (think Wikipedia who has an extremely high deep link ratio) and (2) enough external links (using those same keywords) from relevant sources.

Internally (to increase relevance) just find your strongest pages or determine which pages are linking to that page, by cutting and pasting the full URL in Yahoo Site Explorer for example. Select the only from this URL drop down menu and look at the pages that link to it.

After taking note, go through those pages and determine the positioning and relevance of the outbound link and determine if you are effectively employing the most appropriate anchor text (for every link on that page).

Once you edit or audit the page (by use the main root phrase of the target page as anchor text) then go through all of the pages from the list and tidy up your internal links.

Something as simple as this can increase your internal links distribution of link weight and relevance and have multiples pages making their debut in search engines to drive even more relevant traffic to your pages.

Now you can consider that stage one in honing internal link weight, but in order to “flip the switch”, you will need to do the same using external links from other pages. However that is another topic in its entirety.

On page factors are often overlooked for their ability to impact just how visible your site is or how it impacts your hang time for competitive phrases. Through leveraging deep links (both internally and externally) you elevate your content, the pages and the site to another level, which will become painfully obvious to your competition over time.

In closing, finding the appropriate deep link ratio for your pages, ensuring that the informational structure of your content has a blueprint and that you are not simply partaking in random practices that diffuse continuity are the foundation of advanced SEO.

Reducing complex algorithms to their root functions to reverse engineer relevance falls into this category, but sometimes all you need is common sense, directive and a penchant for research to shed light on why your #20 instead of #1 for a competitive phrase.

Deep links most definitely hold a key to unlocking your websites latent ranking potential and when coupled with basic LSI (latent semantic indexing) and word stemming, it is possible to optimize a site for an entire market segment, not just a few high vertical keywords.

Just remember it’s not about who has the biggest link, it is about who distributes the link juice better than the competition. It is a competitive marketplace out there, and there is a reason there are only 10 spots at the top for the creme of the crop. Optimizing ones internal link structure and mapping the appropriate balance of external link ratios is one area of search engine optimization that any website can benefit from.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

Tags: Deep Links and Anchor Text, Optimized Site Architecture, Structured Internal Linking, The Power of Deep Links

In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.

In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.

The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly. If you are interested in reading more please see Keyword Research for Organic SEO.

Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still offer a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.

Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word “hotel” would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to “Victoria BC hotel” you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.

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Tags: Google, optimize

I love to write once and repurpose the articles I write into as many marketing opportunities as a I can that will reach the greatest number of people. While podcasting has always intrigued me, I never wanted to take the time to create additional content for an audience who prefers to listen to their information rather than read it. Then it occurred to me that I could create podcasts from my articles by simply reading them (with some feeling and inflection) and integrate that into my weekly article marketing plan.

Podcasting is the process of creating audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online so that users can automatically download the files to listen whenever they want. Many will listen to the file via their computer, but since the file is portable, the listener can also download the file to the mp3 player, much in the same way they would download and listen to music.

Here’s my 7 step process to creating podcasts from my articles:

1. Write article. Yes, you have to begin here, as without content, you have no podcast.

2. Create introduction. There are actually 3 parts to your introduction. In the first part, give your podcast a name and create an introduction to who you are and what you do. Here’s an example:

“Hi and welcome to the (your name here) podcast. I’m (your name and title and description). What I do at (my company name) is….(your 10 second audio commercial).”

In the second part of the introduction, I create a short sponsor message. Instead of finding paying sponsors, which is a very viable option, I create sponsors by buying domain names for affiliate products that I routinely recommend and then use that domain name and description of my product as my sponsor. In this way I leverage the information I already have at hand (recommendations of trusted products and services for which I’m an affiliate) without the hassle of seeking out paying sponsorships.

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Tags: podcast, podcasts