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10 Ideas to Increase Your eBay Response

07 2008 Monday

By Clint Herman in Featured

So now you have a potential eBay buyer checking out your auction. They’re obviously interested in the item you are selling, or they wouldn’t be checking out your auction. Let’s say they’re on the fence about whether to buy or not. So how can you nudge them and get them to bid or buy? Well, check out the tips below.

Increase your picture quality: It’s been said over and over - a picture is worth a thousand words. If your picture is not good quality then it probably won’t matter what you wrote in your description Maybe you missed something important that a good quality picture would convey. If you have bad lighting or a background that drowns out your item then it will be worth little to nothing to those checking out your auction. Make sure people can see what you’re selling and consider using multiple pictures to show different angles and aspects of your item.

Creating A Successful Online Sales Strategy

07 2008 Monday

By Jerry Bader in Featured

You have a website, and perhaps you’re even a professional salesperson, and as such you know that the best way to sell someone something is face-to-face, but have you seen the price of gas lately?

So whether your customers are local, national, or international, the cost of getting to them is just too darn high to make any money. You could call them on the phone or email them, but with voice mail, spam filters, and all manner of gatekeepers, it is literally impossible to get to people, even when they’re waiting for your call.

It’s never been easy to sell, but in today’s jaded, cynical, frustrated business climate, the job is even harder.

Order-takers are next to useless in the field, so don’t expect the tactic to work any better on your website: you know what I mean by order-takers, the guys and gals that service fully developed territories with clients that already use your wares, and who order what they need no matter whether anybody calls on them or not.

No, what you need is a real sales presentation, one aimed at the customers you don’t have, the ones looking for new ideas and products.

Here’s seven website sales tactics to remember:

1. Use The Web’s Video and Audio Capability

Make better use out of your company’s website by adding some face-to-face ingredient through the use of audio and video. Give your audience someone they can relate to, someone who will connect on an emotional and psychological level.

2. Don’t Fall Into The SEO Trap

Unfortunately, many business owners have fallen into the SEO trap of designing their online presentations for search engine spiders not people. Sure it’s great to drive traffic to a website, but if they leave within seconds of arriving without getting your marketing message, what exactly have you achieved?

3. Technology Is Not The Solution To A People Problem

And of course, you’ve got those websites that are nothing more than a shopping cart and ordering system; a technological solution to a human problem that turns whatever is being sold into a commodity, and we all know commodity sales go to the lowest seller.

4. Be Aware of The Paradox of Choice

Some entrepreneurs think by offering everything but the kitchen sink is how to get customers; but they obviously haven’t heard of the Paradox of Choice, a term coined by psychologist Barry Schwartz, whose book by the same name postulates that the more choice you offer, the less likely people will make any decision at all.

5. What Is Required Is A Performer

The Web with its remote, dislocated nature requires very specific performance criteria that few people, even professional salespeople possess. You may be practiced at making presentations, maybe even immensely effective in front of a live audience or in a boardroom, but selling in person is far more forgiving than selling remotely online.

What is required is a performer, someone who looks, sounds, and acts the apart; someone who also knows how to use verbal and nonverbal techniques to deliver a message. Don’t let your ego get in the way of building your online clientele.

6. The Web Is No Place For Overheads Or Flipcharts

Selling on the Web is about building relationships the same as traditional beat-the-pavement sales, but the arsenal of techniques required is far more challenging from a psychological and performance point-of-view. An online presentation that is nothing more than a series of overhead slides, graphs, and royalty-free photos delivered with a tentative delivery will not be taken seriously from an audience that is one click away from accessing your competitors.

7. Treat Your Website Visitors Like An Audience

So what then are the criteria for creating an online presentation that sells? There are four things your online presentation must be: informative, engaging, entertaining, and memorable.

Why you ask? The thing you have to keep in mind when you want to use your website to connect to people and build a business relationship is that you can’t treat them like customers, you have to treat them like an audience, and once you make that leap of faith, you are on your way to a successful online sales presentation strategy.

Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

About MRPwebmedia

People ask, “What do you do?” You could say we inform, enlighten, innovate, and create; you could also say we deliver our clients’ marketing messages in memorable ways using video, audio, webmedia campaigns and websites; all created in-house from concept to implementation, from graphic and motion design to Web-design, from script writing to video-production to post-production, from music composition to signature sound design.

What do we do? We motivate action by speaking to your audience’s real needs. We tell your story so your brand, your message, embeds in the minds of your clients. We are corporate storytellers.

Wikipedia’s Secret to Google Domination!

07 2008 Monday

By Michael Small in Featured

Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI is the hottest trend in Google today and the secret behind Wikipedia’s runaway success as the top raking site for just about anything you can imagine on Google.

In short, LSI considers the words around your main keyword as “hot topics” that add to the credibility of the page. If I target the term “SEO” I have a much better chance of high ranking if I use the right words around it.

Of course, finding these words would be near impossible without a service like Quintura. But with this magic bullet, it’s easier than ever to get on top of Google and stay there! Here’s how…

Visit http://www.Quintura.com
Enter your keyword and click the search button. A “cloud” shows up on the page with the words you need.
Review all the other words in the cloud but focus on those bolded. These are good, but it gets better.
Hover your mouse over your original keyword and focus on the updated words that show up. These will get you over the top!

Let’s revisit that “SEO” example I just talked about…

My first cloud shows the bolded words “marketing, services, expert, optimization, and “company.” These are good, but they get better.

When hover the mouse hover “SEO” I get “optimization, search engine, expert, services and company.” Even better!

Want a little more punch with a second mention of your keywords? Try combining a couple into a keyword cluster if they fit… For my example it might be “search engine optimization expert” added somewhere near the end of the page text. That’s three keywords in one cluster. Just don’t go too crazy.

The goal is to use these words on your page if they fit naturally. And if you really want to steal a page right out of Wikipedia’s secret playbook, consider creating a separate page for each of the “hot topic” words and linking to and from them within the text of each page. That’s how Wikipedia takes it one step further and wins the top spots on Google almost every time.

Finally, keep inbound linking in mind. This is huge. Without quality inbound links, you can have the best site in the world and Google will ignore it. Continue to build up your inbound links and be sure to check your ranking at least weekly. If you decide to go with a product to do the linking and rank checking for you, I recommend a product called SEO Elite (http://www.SEOeliteWeb.com). It’s $167 and saves most SEO professionals and do it yourselfers at least forty hours up front and twenty hours per month, per site. It’s also good at locating those hard to find “authority sites” so loved by Google.

Well that’s LSI, short and sweet. And the time to start using it could not be better. With Google constantly working more LSI strategies into their algorithms, the time to get on board is definitely now. Good luck.

Mike Small is the founder of the popular SEO blog, SEOpartner.com, which offers the latest SEO tips and expert advice.

Navigating the Social Media Landscape

07 2008 Monday

By Leslie Russell in Featured

You know what Facebook and MySpace are. You’ve heard of people twittering. You read a couple of blogs now and then, and you must admit, you already know that your company’s firewall prevents you from watching YouTube videos at the office. What you don’t know is how these social sites might connect to your marketing plan.

Exploring social media - such as blogs, social networking sites, image hosting sites and social bookmarking sites - is becoming increasingly essential for businesses. Social media marketing (SMM) allows you to build your company’s reputation as an authority in your field while engaging your consumers in an open dialogue. Most importantly, it helps you drive up site traffic, meet conversion goals and bolster search engine marketing results via links and quality content - all while supporting your traditional marketing efforts.

Optimize Your Website and They Will Come

07 2008 Friday

By Susan L Reid in Featured

What’s the big deal about search engine optimization? Isn’t it enough that you’ve put up a website, purchased some Google AdWords, and sent out an email to everyone you know announcing your site? In short, no. There is an art and science to search engine optimization (SEO), and it is critical for web-based businesses to know, understand and utilize if they want to drive quality traffic to their website via the Internet.

Where do you begin, though? How can you possibly know whom to trust or what to do first with so much information out there on SEO? Do you buy links or not? Pay per click or go organic? And what about those SEO companies who are aggressively promising #1 rankings? When it comes to search engine ranking, there are a lot of rumors and myths about what will increase your rankings and what won’t.

Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths

- Pay per click (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)

Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.

- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.

Debunked: While it’s a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.

- Websites are banned if they buy links.

Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren’t counted.

- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.

Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don’t do anything for ranking.

- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.

Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.

- Reciprocal links won’t count.

Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.

- SEO companies can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work.

Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.

According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn’t magic and isn’t a crap-shoot. “SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines.” Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.

Seven Ways to Get Your Website Crawled

It’s better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.
If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.
Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.
Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?
Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.
Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: “keyword phrase” in your browser and check the number count.
Once you have your keyword phrases validated and checked for competitiveness, use them in anchor texts, clickable image alt tags, headlines, body text copy, title tags, and meta descriptions. Meta tags aren’t all that important for crawling.

SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it’s hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it. Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.

Business Coach & Consultant for entrepreneurial women starting up small businesses, Dr. Susan L. Reid is the Award-winning author of “Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success.” For ideas, tips, and support for your business journey, sign up here for our free e-Zine.

Optimize Your Blog Posts!

07 2008 Friday

By Darren Dunner in Featured

SEO blog posts are one of the best ways to get your links out there on the Internet. Search Engines love them and people can follow them easily to your site.

As an example I will link this keyword ”Ghost Writers” here. Notice the link takes you to a site that offers the service related to it. I could have linked any word here but I choose to link one that is relevant and that will help improve keyword traffic.

The big problem for most is how to make the most of their blog. I have found tons of articles about how to seo your blog software, but not much on the topic of optimizing your blog posts.

I will give a few simple things to consider when adding your blog posts:

Post Slugs or Permalinks

Post slugs are how your URL is displayed for each post. In most WordPress Accounts there is a setting for Permalinks. If you login to your admin and click “settings” and then “Permalinks” look for the words “Custom Structure” and put this line of code in:

/%category%/%postname%/

There are many ways to do this, but this way allows the category name and title of your blog appear in your post. If my category was Ghost Writers then the link would be: /ghost-writers/optimize-your-blog-post/

Now, that you have your permalinks in place, click on “write” to add your post now. Depending on your version of WordPress you will either see the words “Post Slug” or “permalink”. Post slug is on the right column and “permalinks” is under the title bar. Either way you can change the way your post URL title will appear.

This is important to follow because some times people use character in their titles like:

How To Optimize Your Blog Posts!

The (!) character will cause your URL to show funny, or if you use (- , “) or any number of characters. So in your post slug or permalink, make sure you remove those characters. Play around with this a bit and see how the URL reads after you change the Permalink or post slug portion.

Keyword linking

This one is simple but very often over looked. Don’t go crazy here with this, but make sure to link 2 or 3 of your keywords to your websites home page and inner pages as well.

The keyword “SEO content” is not very effective if not linked properly. Notice that I linked the word “seo content” to my site. I also added a title tag to the URL for better keyword positioning. In your word press when you highlight a word or phrase you can click on the link icon and it will give you an option for the URL and Title. The title is for your keyword. Since I linked “seo content” I then used that word as my title tag as well. Notice that if you put the mouse over the link a title appears.

Proper Credit where credit is due!

Since many people are not truly inspired writers, many will find content out there and copy and paste it into their WordPress program and revise the words around to make it more original. Though using someone else’s content does not require creative thought, it can help if you convert over 50% of the content around and put them in your own words.

However, it is not professional of you if done without giving credit to the original writer. In your article you don’t have to say this came from some site, etc… You simply choose a keyword in your blog post and link it to the source where you got it from. Don’t be greedy, it looks better anyway when you do this properly and helps with SEO as well. If you are not willing to give up a link, then come up with your own content.

Add a Picture

Very simple, add a photo to your post. Upload a photos, add an alt text and a title tag, it is all provided for you in wordpress. It not only makes your post look more attractive but it again helps with SEO.

Give you photo a file name that is keyword based as well. Download your image, rename it and upload it.

If you hire a ghost writer to write your content, make sure they provide you with the original source and a photo to match the blog content and upload the post yourself or train your writer to do this for you. You will find this is very effective for online marketing.

How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Article Marketing Campaigns

07 2008 Friday

By Bill Platt in Featured

I frequently rant on Internet marketing and some of the gurus who try to bend your ear. Why? Because many of these so-called gurus trash everything that makes sense in this Internet world, especially when they realize that they cannot make money from the techniques being recommended.

I don’t preach marketing concepts solely for the purpose of selling my products and services. (If you happen to buy my products or services, then awesome, but that is not my point when I share information from my SEO and other marketing campaigns.) I preach the concepts that I have used for myself successfully. Either you can trust me and test the things I recommend, or you can listen to the gurus and drown yourself in pity, when you realize you are not finding the success you seek.

10 Tips to Help You Successfully Sell on eBay

07 2008 Thursday

By Clint Herman in Featured

Below you will find 10 simple tips to follow that are good for anyone who wants to sell successfully on eBay.

Tip # 1: Identify your eBay market. Come up with a list of items you are interested in and then take a look at eBay to see what’s selling and what’s not. The market research data you collect will be very useful to you later on. Analyze the market and you’ll start to see those items that always seem to sell for a good price.

Tip # 2: Check out your competition. Before investing money, take a look at what the other sellers in your category are up to. Dig in to get an idea about what their strategies are. Make a special note on anything their auctions are missing, because addressing these flaws in your own auctions is a powerful way to move in and beat them at their own game.

Tip # 3: Find a product: If you’re looking to sell the same item over and over again then get hold of a supplier for what it is you want to sell, and see what the best rates you can get are. Also, shop around to get the best deal. Every penny counts. If the eBay prices you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s then you just might have a winner.

Tip 4: Start small: Don’t start out by throwing tons of money at your idea. Start slowly and see what works and what doesn’t; learn as you go. Remember that it doesn’t cost a lot to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work! Thinking outside the box is a good way to become successful.

Tip 5: Test and repeat. Keep trying different strategies on eBay until you find something that works. Then just keep doing that very same thing over and over again. The chances are that you’ve just found a good niche or a good way to sell.

Tip 6: Create your business plan: A business plan, even on eBay, is a good thing to have. It doesn’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline your market opportunity, your strategy, the strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. A business plan is more for you than it is for anyone else. If you treat your selling on eBay as a business and not like a hobby then this will push you toward success.

Tip 7: Invest and expand: Now is the time to pump money into your eBay business. Get your hands on more product and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal for the number of sales you want each week and increase it over time as you meet your goals.

Tip 8: Make it official: Once you’ve made some money from your eBay sales, you should seriously consider registering yourself as an “official” business. It’s not that expensive or hard to do and registering will go a long way toward credibility. A lawyer is the best person to help you through the process, but you can also get information online or in forums.

Tip 9: Automate: There are a lot of tasks you will find yourself doing over and over, like writing the same emails or auction item descriptions. This is the time to move some of this manual work over to automated software. You can also consider outsourcing these tasks to other people. You can automate a TON of your eBay business tasks.

Tip 10: Never give up: Even when times get bad and you think things won’t work out, don’t stop trying. Push forward until you succeed. If you keep working at it you’ll almost always find you will make a real breakthrough. Countless people give up on their eBay business right before they get their breakthrough. Don’t be one of them.

Clint Herman is a successful eBay seller with over 6 years experience in the industry. He also loves helping people start selling on eBay. He is the author of “How to Get Started Selling on eBay,” which is a beginner’s guide to selling on eBay designed for people who are new to selling on eBay. The guide is available at http://www.beginnersauctionguide.com

Key Elements of an Online Community Strategy

07 2008 Thursday

By Jennifer Osborne in Featured

Your boss just read an article on the benefits of online communities… You know, how online community members visit Web sites nine times as often, stayed five times as long, and represented 65% of sales.

or maybe

how 89% of mid to large sized companies have adopted at least one of six community-building tools, such as blogs, wikis, social networking, or content-tagging.

so now he’s asking

“What about our website? Shouldn’t we have an online community?” (Damm you McKinsey! Now I have to come up with an online community strategy).

Developing an online community strategy is a HUGE endeavor.

All too often businesses think that if they call it a “community” their website will magically transform itself into a community. And when the traffic and sales don’t present themselves, they’re left wondering what went wrong?

so what makes a website a community?

1) The community must satisfy a need

Generally there are three different types of communities:

a) Those that satisfy the need for information (i.e. sphinn, car enthusiast sites, etc.)

b) Those that satisfy the need for support (i.e. weight loss groups, cancer support groups, etc)

c) Those that satisfy both needs for support and information (i.e. when I was pregnant with my first child I joined an expecting club - we supported each other with information about our pregnancies and loving support)

It’s important to identify what kind of need your community is going to fill up front. This is because you will have to build the right community components or infrastructure to support that need.

If your community’s need is for information, then an article library may have worked in the old days. Today, that need for information is more likely to be served using a wiki or pligg type type solution.

If your community’s need is for support, then you need to make sure that you build profile functionality combined with easy communication between members like the ability to email or IM your community friends.

If your community’s need is for both information and support then you’ll want to evaluate if one is more important than the other. If they’re equally important then you’ll want to make sure that both types of infrastructure are equally prominent in your community.

2) User participation or interaction

Giving people the ability to comment on your blog is a good start. But a community it does not make. And signing up for your email list does not make me feel like I’ve just “joined your community”. Especially when I’m spammed regularly by your sales offers and incentives afterwards.

One- sided conversation is the most common mistake that I see with Corporate Websites. They are initially built to sell a product and then Community is just a label that’s slapped on as an afterthought with little or no effort given to meeting the needs of your visitors.

User participation can be built into your community in many different ways:

Comments - not just on your blog but elsewhere on the site too.
Forums (think Digital Point)
User Reviews (think Trip Adviser)
Social Networking (think Facebook and LinkedIn; even Stumbleupon)
Content tagging (think Delicious)
Content Aggregation (think Flicker)
Content Aggregation Plus Ratings & Reviews (think Reddit)

Remember to make sure that you build your interaction in a way that solves the particular need of your community (don’t guiding principles make life easy ?)

3) Ability to get to know other community members

It is impossible to build a community based on the visitors’ lone interaction with the site.

A community needs members.

The ability to get to know other community members is a critical element in meeting a need for support.

But companies must think beyond profiles.

In regular life we are defined by our actions not words. Online, our words are our actions. You will learn much more about me by looking at my comments, by the content that I submit to aggregation sites and by my user reviews then you will ever learn through the crap I wrote in my profile.

There are many ways you can build the ability to get to know other community members:

Avatars - people are visual. It’s difficult to make a connection with an alias, handle, or even a name. I can connect with an aviator even if it’s anime or a pair of red shoes.
Allow user feedback through comments. Encourage it through a point type system like SEOmoz. Remember your voice tells me a lot about you… people gravitate towards like-minded people.
Conversation - Social Networking capability like the ability to email or IM members is a great way to allow your community members to get to know each other.
and yes, User Profiles :). Especially where the profile can be further personalized through pictures and videos and free form comments (not just filling out a few profile questions)

4) Have a reason to go back

The most popular communities make you feel like you will miss something important if you don’t go back regularly.

The more stagnant your website the less reason people have to go back to it. The converse is true with a community. The more active your members, the more your visitors will need to go back regularly.

So if new information, conversation, content is the carrot then you must build incentives into the design of your community:

A Visitor Usage Statistics are easy to implement and go a long way. When I first joined Stumbleupon I felt painfully new having less than 100 stumbles. This was incentive for me to become an active user in the Stumble community.
A Community Statistics readerboard can provide incentive as well. This is because being in the top percentile of content contributors, commenter’s or voters can help to position you as an expert in your industry.
The more prominent the stats the more incentive they create (to a point). Focus on the positives or it will be a disincentive if new community members are too obvious.
Points system for contributing where accumulating points gets you additional privileges in the community.
This can be as simple a concept as allowing do follow links after 5 comments or as complicated as allowing access to premium content if a threshold of points is maintained.
The ability to elevate your status in the community (member, gold member, moderator, etc) based on your participation can also provide incentive to be active.

Understanding your visitors needs and staying true to these Guiding Principles of Building an Online Community will help you to successfully transform your website into a vibrant Community.

Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

How Do You Know Your SEO Is Working?

07 2008 Thursday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

How do you know if your SEO is working? Here are five stages outlined below to give you a better idea and measure the results.

It doesn’t matter if you call it Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or any other fancy acronym, what matters are results. Fortunately results are quantitative and measurable so you can deduce which tactics are effective and which are a waste of time.Relevance is a moving target, it is completely molded by the individual referencing the query, which means that positioning relies a great deal on your ability to read the market and forecast trends and buzzwords with traffic attached. Aside from picking keywords, writing content and building links, you need to know which guideposts to assess to determine if your optimization is falling on deaf ears or in fact pulling its own weight.

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