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8 Steps to a Customer Focused Website that Turbo-Charges Sales

By Colette Mason in Featured

For any serious, professional, website investment, the user testing phase has become an integral part of the path to making more money online. Before your site is published, usability testing gathers feedback from the very people it is intended for -, with its main objective to ensure you’re creating a website that has an intuitive and easy to use interface, targeted to all users. But how do you reap the fullest benefits from your user testing sessions?

1. Choosing Your Subjects

The results of your session well depend largely on the people you test it on. Do not get people who may be biased, such as family, friends and workers from your company. People who have prior exposure to your project may yield flawed results and rate your site high in web accessibility when in fact, it is not. Assemble a focus group, people who fit a specific profile, to be the subjects. You can ask a market research firm or a temp agency to source out your participants. Subjects must not know the name of your company or other details to maintain objectivity.

2. Before Starting the Usability Testing Session

The atmosphere of the web usability study session must be as normal as possible. To achieve the best results, participants should be at ease and feel like they are using the site at home or work. Make sure the participants know the exact location of the testing session; if necessary, meet them at local stations. Do not use technical terms such as “usability testing” or “market research’ as these will only cause confusion and create tension. Inform your subjects beforehand of the length of time the testing will take and the type of tasks they are expected to do. When the participants have familiarized themselves with the environment, it is time for the signing of legal documents. Use simple English language that is easy to understand and make your forms as short as possible. Legal papers can add to a subject’s nervousness. Assure him that the tests are completely confidential and you only need his permission to use the information generated during the test as part of the results.

3. Starting the Usability Testing

Acquaint the subjects with their surroundings before going to the main tasks. Tell them the name of the website and the URL and get their initial thoughts, like what they expect from the site or what they would like the site to be. Record the terms or phrases they use; this shows you value their opinions and feedback. These terms may also be used as pointers for future references in functionality and navigation concerns. Next, let them visit the business website they’ll be testing. Find out what their initial reactions are before allowing them to get familiar with the site. Such inputs may give you ideas on how they evaluate a site for web credibility. Assure the subjects that their tasks will not be difficult and, most of all, that they are not the ones being tested.

4. Choosing Tasks

Choose tasks that your potential customers will consider important to their decision of whether to purchase or not. These play a significant role in ensuring the success of your business website. Such tasks are: Buying productsPaying billsContacting the client Encourage the participants to give suggestions of other tasks they want included. You can determine their expectations and requirements from their suggestions and set new functionality and priorities.

5. How to Express Tasks

People respond and perform in more natural way if they are given scenarios instead of instructions. In phrasing the tasks, it is more effective to say “Scenario A has occurred, and you need to ring the company urgently – find the telephone number” rather than “find the contact us section of the site”.

6. Presentation of Tasks

Give participants one task at a time. Simultaneous tasks may intimidate them, or alter their normal approach to the testing. If you require the subjects to use inputs from outside the test (e.g. an email giving them a password to the site), give them these inputs in the form they will be presented. This will provide useful feedback on all elements of the process, rather than simply the site.

7. What Your Behavior Ought To Be During Testing

Always keep in mind that the object being tested is the website, not you or the participant. All input is treated as important; this needs to be clearly pointed out to the participant. If there’s a step or a task that participants struggle with, it’s really important to tell them it’s not their fault. During the test, it’s important not to be “seen or heard”. You must not do the following actions: provide clues, suggest directions or react to what they say or do. These could alter the test results. So keep your actions neutral, even a shaking of your head or huffing is a no-no. The only time participants should hear from you is when they need help in giving an opinion or clarifying a response. Because they have invested much time and money in the project, clients often find it hard to keep quiet during tests. If your client wants to be present, put him in a separate room and provide an audio/video link.

8. When the Usability Testing Is Done

Upon completion of all tasks, gather and document as much information as possible. Ask for overall impressions of the website and detailed feedback on each task. You will be able to measure their experience, whether expectations were met and if their views have changed during the process. Always welcome suggestions- they will be useful in providing insights to improve web usability and accessibility and creates goodwill between you and the participants. Finally, ask the participants what they remember about the site structure and its functions. If they remember these clearly, it is a confirmation that the site is structured logically and this will help identify any labeling issues you may have missed.

10 Business Blogging Tips to Improve Your Blog Performance

By Matt Jackson in Featured

Business blogging is a different kettle of fish to blogging for money and that, in turn, is entirely different to blogging socially. The type of blog you manage will determine the voice, design, and style of your blog as well as the efforts you’re likely to put into promoting it.

A business blog needs to be professional as well as appear it. Regular posting on topics that your readers will genuinely find interesting can promote you as an expert in your field. A blog can keep the line of communication between you and potential customers open. It enables you to post relevant, keyword rich postings that encourage new traffic and help increase your client base.

Breaking Down the New FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Rules in Layman’s Terms

By David Jackson in Featured

Over the last several months, I’ve had numerous individuals e-mail me complaining they didn’t fully understand the new FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Rules, and how it applied to them.

That’s not surprising, since government rules and regulations at both the state and federal level are notorious for not being written in layman’s term.

With that in mind, I decided to write an article about the new FTC rules in language I’m sure everyone can understand. Let’s get started:

On December 1, 2009, new FTC regulations that govern the use of endorsements and testimonials to promote products went into effect.

FTC  regulations now require all endorsements to disclose any “material connection” between the vendor and the advertiser.

For example, suppose you are an affiliate marketer who owns a website that provides reviews of products that you promote. If your reviews about those products are favorable, by law, you must disclose the fact that you are receiving a commission from the sale of those products.

These new rules apply even if you receive a free or complimentary product and are asked to review it. Under the new FTC rules, you not only have to disclose the fact you got the product for free, the onus is on the vendor who provided the product to make a sincere effort to insure you make that disclosure.

In addition, under the new rules, advertisements featuring consumers that give the impression that his or her experience with a particular product or service is “typical” when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the “real” results that consumers can generally expect.

In other words, if you don’t have clinical data to prove or substantiate the type of results you claim consumers will generally achieve with your product, the FTC now offers you two alternatives — either furnish such data or stop using “success story” testimonials altogether.

To be fair, the FTC clearly states, the new rules are administrative interpretations of the law, intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves.

Important Search Engine Optimization Tips

By Ivana Katz in Featured

Search Engine Optimization remains a buzz word in the internet marketing world despite the increase in use of other internet marketing methods. Is your website effectively search engine optimized? How much website traffic do you get? Here are some pointers to help you increase your search engine traffic.

Search Engine Optimization Begins with Keywords

There are a number of aspects to search engine optimization but one of these that is important is keyword research and use. Before you even register your domain name you should have done some basic keyword research to determine what keywords you are going to use and then include these in your domain name, file names as well as throughout your content and in important places on each page.

SEO Secrets – Fighting Against the Domain Age Tide

By Andy Lunt in Featured

So you’ve bought your Dreamweaver, an eternity later worked out how it works, started to build your site which is targeting your chosen niche or promoting your affiliate product and after what seems like forever you have added quality content. You’ve bust a gut to get this far, but this is where the real work begins. You need to get your site seen by as many people as possible. You need to drive as much traffic as you can whether it be through a pay-per-click campaign or via organic traffic.

Let’s say you decide to target organic traffic. You need to get a high ranking in the search engines. During your website construction you have already been using a keyword research tool and a SEO Tool and spending the midnight hours mulling over the chosen keyword phrases your research has indicated you should be targeting on your pages and using in your URL. Your whole site from headings to meta-tags, to meta-descriptions and anchor text are all optimized taking account of semantically related words, keyword density and the long tail.

Next you begin your back link campaign spending hours trying to get quality back links to your site. Social bookmarking takes over your life for days on end, you post on relevant blogs and all relevant forums, you set up your own blog, submit articles to article directories and then submit your entire site to SEO friendly website directories.

Yet more analysis follows, as you now study your competitors’ websites. You investigate what keywords they are targeting and study the links that they have developed and you develop strategies to be better than they are. Slowly but surely your site climbs the rankings. You constantly update your site adding quality content and before you know it your site is fast approaching the first page. A steady trickle of traffic flows on a daily basis. At this rate you should soon be top of the rankings and then… the sky’s the limit!

Unfortunately it doesn’t usually quite work like this. Yes it is true that if you have picked some long tail keywords to target you may be able to get somewhere near the top of the rankings or indeed even to the number one spot. In most instances however the traffic won’t be great and you would need to get each page of your website targeting a different long tail phrase and getting to the top of the rankings for that phrase each time for the total traffic to be lucrative. It’s certainly possible but does require a lot more graft.

For very popular keyword phrases it proves incredibly difficult to dislodge the top sites from their positions, even though in theory you may know that you have better back links and better content. Without the top positions the mass traffic will never be yours. It is just so frustrating as you probably know. I certainly do. So you go away and you research again and you analyze again and you spend days poring over the detail and you
work and you work and you know what, it makes not one jot of difference. You just cannot crack the top spots. Why not? How many times have I asked this of myself?

Now perhaps your tactics aren’t quite right. Perhaps the phrases you are targeting are the wrong ones or perhaps you’re back links are not quality back links. Do you have the quality of content on your site that you think you do? Yes, yes, yes, I hear you say. So what is going on? Well it could be something as simple as the age of your domain.

Google places a lot of trust in back links, especially quality back links to your site, but it also places significant trust in sites which have been around for a significant period of time. This is especially true if they are frequently updated. In many cases the top ranked sites are trusted sites as far as Google is concerned because they have an authority status due to their back links, but also due to the length of time they have been operating. If your site is an equal to a competitor’s site in terms of content and back links, but it is a far newer domain, there will be little chance of you dislodging your competitor from the top slot. The site that has been there for five years serving the web community carries a lot of trust with Google.

To dislodge these sites requires tremendous effort to create quality back links and sometimes you may never achieve it. It can be done however, you just need to be aware of what is going on and keep persevering. Some internet marketers have resorted to buying old domains in an attempt to overcome this challenge in building the website around the domain. I’m not entirely sure how Google reacts to this, especially if you are adding new content on a continual basis. Does the domain itself carry an inherent trust because of its age or is it the content that carried the trust from the old website?

Either way it’s worth exploring as one of the tactics along with keyword analysis and building back links that you could adopt in an attempt to get higher rankings and hence higher rates of traffic.

Can You Afford To Miss Out The Twitter Traffic Train?

By Frank Breinling in Featured

Twitter Traffic is an outstanding way to drive targeted traffic to your Website. You shouldn’t forget about other traffic sources but using Twitter is completely free and will definitely get a few more targeted visitors to your Website.

You got me right, I said „free targeted visitors” in the last sentence. A never ending stream of visitors will make your pockets full of money. There are lots of ways for you getting free traffic to your Website. But there is a big difference between free traffic and targeted traffic.

You might have heard about offers sending out thousands of visitors to your Website from several traffic generating Websites. These offers are good to give your traffic stats a push but you won’t actually generate a sale or find a prospect for your product. Visitors sent to you by free traffic Websites will usually leave your Website within seconds.

Targeted visitors instead are interested in the product or information you are offering on your Website, ready to break out their credit card! With my article I show you the Twitter strategy, getting targeted visitors ready to take action. It’s easy to do and is not even time consuming.

First thing you will have to do is to create a twitter account. I recommend not using your personal twitter account. If you have different niche Website create a single twitter account for every niche Website you have. Please don’t leave the default twitter avatar and background, choose an avatar and background image that fits your product or info best, because it will show your followers that you care about your account.

The next thing you will have to do is to deliver content – niche relevant quality content. Most of the content you will provide is created by others and will never include references to your own stuff. This may sound counter productive, but here’s why we will do it.

We want to supply as much quality content as we can to our followers and unless you create lots of crappy content or outsource your content creation you just don’t have the time and money to create all that quality content on your own in a short period of time. You will look like a spammer when you tweet only your own stuff every time. People will stop following you when you act like a spammer. By the way, „The short messages you send out with your Twitter account are called “tweets”.

Second thing of the process is to build a landing page or helpful blog post about your niche. This part will be the most important and you really do need to make sure to provide high quality content. But where do you find your niche relevant content ? Simply google for RSS feeds for your niche content, copy the link of the feed and paste the link of the RSS feed to your landing page or blog post. Make sure to select high quality RSS feed content. That will make your followers trust you. To click your links in the future it’s very important that your visitors trust you. The links you place in your landing page or blog post is the source to monetize the traffic you are getting from Twitter. The MOST IMPORTANT idea behind is that you place links to your products or information you want to share or sell. The text in the displayed link should contain a strong anchor text that will call to action and make them click the link that will lead them to your „money site”. Here you offer your product or information you want to sell or share.

So, the most important thing is to put a link to your money site at the end of your landing page or blog post. Make sure the link contains a strong call to action. The last part of this process will be to collect an email address from your visitors or to get in touch through a contact form or to even make the sale. Because now you are having a targeted visitor on your Website seeking for information. To catch their email address offer a free niche relevant ebook or report through an optin form. Once you have your visitors email address you can add it to your email list and feed them with any information or products of your choice any time you like. Only imagination can make you stop. To automate your info or product emails simply use an autoresponder of your choice. Your email list will be growing and growing.

Every tweet you are posting will be of very high quality and will make your followers to trust you. When people trust you enough they will make your tweets go viral and at this point magic happens.

So, the most important thing is to put a link to your money site at the end of your landing page or blog post. Make sure the link contains a strong call to action.

That pretty much is it. Getting started won’t cost you a dime. Once you get used to the process this shouldn’t take more than about 20 minutes a day. Give it a try, it’s an excellent way to drive targeted traffic to your Website.

Some Video Marketing Tips

By Steve Duval in Featured

The majority of online entrepreneurs would love the opportunity to speak with a prospect or client face to face, but it unfortunately is just not possible to do so. It is a proven fact that many web visitors do not read all of the supportive text found on a particular site, so it is necessary to try and capture their attention without requiring them to spend a great deal of time reading. Video marketing allows a marketer to get out their desired message within seconds of the loading of their page, but it must be performed effectively in order to result in success. Individuals interested in incorporating video marketing into their strategy should follow several important tips.

The image portrayed by the video must be completely professional and should be something that a person can be proud of. Nobody is impressed with a stuttering or mumbling approach, and it simply gives an appearance that is something that cannot easily be remedied. It is often said that there are no second chances at first impressions, so an individual needs to understand exactly what the purpose of their video is. The message should be free of offensive material or slang words and appeal to the individuals that will be visiting the website.

A marketer should consider hiring a professional to develop and create their video marketing effort. It is important to realize that no online entrepreneur can be an expert in every aspect of his or her business, and it is necessary to understand when professional assistance or guidance could be helpful. Videos that seem sloppy or put together by amateurs are certainly not going to impress their target, and video marketing that is not properly carried out could actually prove to be detrimental to success in some ways. Using an actor or actress is also not a bad idea when considering the fact that poor diction or dialect can actually cause a consumer to ignore or mute the video.

The length of the video is perhaps one of the most critical elements, and few marketers understand that a person’s attention span is not going to last more than 20-30 seconds at a time. There should be a definitive call to action or an urgent need should be developed throughout the short message delivered to the consumer. Individuals must be lead to either click for more information or proceed with a specific process. Interested targets may be willing to view additional messages or read more information, so it is imperative that a marketer acknowledges the fact that their video’s purpose is simply to snatch the consumer’s interest and entice them into paying attention for a longer period of time.

Internet marketing can very well be the easiest way for a person to reach their financial dreams, but it isn’t necessarily a simple task. Like anything else, success takes time and an online entrepreneur needs to carefully consider all of their efforts. Video marketing can help drive sales and reach more prospects than ever before, but an adequate time must be spent on its development to ensure that it is carried out effectively.

Twitter to Become Your Online GPS

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

This week Twitter announced a new feature for twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com called Twitter Places.

The idea is to allow users to tag their Tweets with their specific location, acting like an online GPS of sorts. The geo-location data is made possible with the help of Twitter partners TomTom (manufacturer of in-car GPS navigation systems) and Localeze (a search marketing firm specializing in local search).

Apart from tweeting your own location, the new feature allows you to click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Users of geo-social networking services Foursquare and Gowalla will be excited, because the new feature now integrates with these services. If you click on a registered Twitter Place, not only will you see standard tweets from that location, but you’ll also see recent check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.

The timing of Twitter’s new feature launch deliberately coincided with the kick off of the World Cup, to encourage people to tweet from and view tweets from World Cup stadiums in South Africa. From the official blog post about the launch:

“When turning to Twitter to keep up with the current game, it helps to know where a Tweet is coming from – is that person watching the game on TV or is he actually in the stadium? To help answer that question, we’re excited to announce Twitter Places”

Unfortunately, Twitter engineers did not account for the popularity of such a feature during a major sporting event and demand actually crashed their own servers for a few hours this week. More about that in another post.

Twitter Places is designed to work with the existing “Tweet with your location” functionality. Instructions for activating Twitter Places using the location function can be found in Twitter’s Help Center.

The new feature will be rolling out to users in 65 countries this week. You’ll know the feature is activated in your country when you see the “Add your location” link below the Tweet box when you’re logged in at Twitter.com

5 Must-Do Strategies for Dominating Social Media Marketing

By D M Gray in Featured

Social media marketing is an essential tool for any business. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are among the most popular sites regularly visited on the internet and can generate large numbers of visitors and new sales leads.

Many businesses are already utilizing social media marketing as part of their ongoing business strategy, but a large percentage of these are not aware of the essentials required to fully maximize social media to its full potential.

Blogging for Money: Are Backlinks the New Keywords?

By Elizabeth Ann West in Featured

You aren’t crazy; search engine optimization keeps getting more and more complicated. Remember the easy days when you could just use meta-tags for your keywords? As with everything, a few bad apples had to use popular but unrelated keywords to drive traffic to their site and ruined it for the rest of us. Search engines – in particular Google, are now focusing on the relationships between websites and the easiest way to calculate this is with backlinks.

Backlinks are links on other websites to your website. This includes a link to your blog in your signature line as a comment on a forum, links on traditional social media sites or any other website out there. Backlinks work like real estate in that most of the value resides in the location. A backlink on a highly reputable website with content related to yours is rated higher by search engines than a link on another personal blog with few readers, for example.