Archive for the 'Lead, Traffic Generation' Category
Learn about one component you can add to your affiliate marketing campaign that will boost your income by 20% in 24 hours. You will learn the most important factors of this component and exactly how to get sales conversions like crazy.
What is this one strategy? One simple thing… Landing pages. NOT the merchants sales page.
What is landing page? A landing page is a single page on your website that your traffic is sent to upon clicking on your ad or any other sort of contextual link that leads to this sort of page.
The point of this kind of page is to have outgoing links to the merchant web pages through your affiliate links. It’s sole purpose is to promote the respective merchants’ products through your affiliate links to earn a commission.
Landing pages are useful in many ways. Through testing, I have found a simple landing page can boost my sales by conversions 20% or even more. This is because you can use your landing page to take out all of the guess work for the visitor. If you can answer a question for the visitor, without them having to leave your landing page to do more research, you are more likely to convert that person to a sale.
Usually there are two types of landing pages. One being a testimonial type landing page (be very careful with these-new laws in place), the second (and more popular) being a review type landing page.
In this article some of the key components of a review type landing pages that can explode your affiliate sales if optimized correctly.
A good headline is essential on any landing page. A good headline will list a major benefit of the product(s) you are promoting. This gets the attention of the visitor and tells them whether it is worth their time to stay on your page or not. Will it solve their problem.
Headline Example:
‘Discover How You Can Add 30-50 Yards of Laser Guided Precision to Your Golf Stroke’
Through testing I have found that landing pages that target and review 3 to 7 products converted better than promoting 1,2 or more than 7 products. 3 to 7 products keeps your visitor focused. Adding any more products can confuse your visitor causing them to leave your site forever. Less products does not give your visitor enough of a choice and they are more likely to have to do more research (off of your page) to find the best solution.
Brief product descriptions allow you to outline each products pros and cons. If you can Identify a certain con that your visitor is searching for in the products you are promoting, your sales can go crazy.
Some people are visual learners. Giving these visitors a visual representation of your review can drastically increase the click through rate. Also these images are good to break up the monotony of text on your landing pages.
Images should be linked to the merchants sites as prospective buyers often expect these images to take them to the site in which they can obtain the product or service.
Exit points are simply links to the merchants sites that contain your affiliate ID. You should have multiple and blatant exit points so the buyer does not have to search to find the link.
You can include exit points on images, call to action statements, as well as other things on your landing page. The main goal is to make these extremely visible.
A well constructed landing page can drastically improve conversions and boost sales. If you expect to construct an attractive landing page, I suggest either becoming fluent in HTML and/or purchasing an html editor such as Macromedia Dreamweave or outsourcing.
These products are quite expensive, but have a large array of features that you can use to virtually achieve any look or feature on your page.
There’s also a great FREE HTML editor over at NVU. This is nearly as good as anything you could pay for, so if you’re strapped on cash, grab that.
Your landing page need not look like it cost a millions dollars, but rather clean simple and functional. Too many graphics, glitter, animation and obvious sales pushing jargon will send the prospect somewhere else – quickly!
Remember you get 3-5 seconds to catch their attention. So you had better let them know that you have the solution to solve their problem right away.
Want some free web site traffic?
explodes sales and profits – FAST!
business, just as they have done for thousands of other satisfied web site owners.
close the doors to new customers.
Google Makes Facebook Pages a Higher Priority for Businesses
Google Gets Biggest Missing Piece in Real-Time Search Puzzle
Google announced via Twitter this week, that public status updates from Facebook are now included in the search engine’s real-time search feature. That means the largest social network in the world is getting play in Google’s real-time search alongside Twitter, MySpace, and others, and these real-time results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results for the hottest queries.
Apparently only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed, and according to Danny Sullivan, that includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners (not comments made by the fans). Any Facebook update (from regular user profiles) can be shared publicly, so I wonder why these aren’t being pulled. Results from Twitter and other places aren’t only from branded sources.
This seems to indicate that brands should be getting a good amount of play for Facebook appearances in Google’s real-time search results, and possibly in the real-time search results in general (due to Facebook’s huge user-base). Right now, Facebook isn’t dominating the results, but that is bound to change with it being the largest (by far) social network on the web.
A lot of brands who don’t have Facebook pages in place are likely going to consider this a new reason to create one. Here are some tips for making a good one and promoting it.
This should also lead to Facebook Pages getting more fans, due to the increased exposure. Beware, however, that running a promotion on your Facebook Page may cost you ten thousand dollars, because Facebook’s policy guidelines indicate that you must get written approval from a Facebook account rep. In order to get one of those, you must spend that much in advertising, according to Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook.
Now Google’s real-time search results include (as listed by Sullivan) Facebook, MySpace, Twiter, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, TwitArmy, Google News links, Google Blog Search links, new web pages, and freshly updated pages. At this point, Google generally only shows the real-time results for newsy/trending topics.
Can You Be Successful Without a Website?
I don’t think there’s any question that you need a web presence to survive in today’s business climate. But do you still need a traditional website, or has the web moved on in that regard?
First off, let me be perfectly clear in that I’m not advising anybody not to have a website. That said, there are a lot of ways to have a web presence without actually having a site, and let’s face it – maintaining a site (let alone a successful one) takes time, money, and resources.
According to data from Compete, Facebook has become a bigger traffic source than Google for some sites, and for many others, it is right up there with Google as a major traffic source. If it can drive the traffic, then that means the people are already at Facebook. You can be on Facebook without having your own website. Businesses can build a Facebook Page, complete with analytics provided by Facebook itself, and they can spend time making that page a good one. Here are some tips on how to do that. Facebook pages are perfectly capable of being found in search engines. In fact, they are often right on the first results page.
You know what else is often right on the first page? A set of local search results from Google Maps, courtesy of Google’s Universal Search integration. Within those results (which are very often right at the top of the SERP) are links to individual businesses’ “Place Pages”. From here, users can find coupons, reviews, store hours, etc. There is a very good chance users will find this before they find your site anyway.
Google is actually going to great lengths to get people using these Place Pages. They are even sending out stickers with barcodes for stores to hang on their windows. When a user scans this barcode with their mobile phone, they will be taken to the business’ Place Page. Social media profiles can also appear on these pages (although so can website links of course).
I probably don’t have to tell you that the web is rapidly becoming more mobile. Smartphone usage and mobile broadband subscriptions continue to accelerate, and people are using a variety of devices, operating systems, browsers, and apps. Making sure you have a site that looks right across all of these is no easy task. This is not so much of a worry when it comes to Facebook pages, Google Place Pages, and other third-party entities.
In many cases, it seems that small business sites are becoming harder to find through organic search. If you look you can find them, but users want convenience, and they are probably not going to look too hard if they can find what they are looking for on the first search results page (or right within Facebook where they’re already spending their time).
Social profiles show in up in search, and often early. The very nature of social media is viral. If one Facebook user becomes a fan of your Facebook page, that user’s friends are going to see it. Then, maybe a couple of them also become fans. Then maybe a couple of their friends become fans, and that trend can continue on and on. The more people who become fans, and the more exposure that page gets, the more chance that page has of acquiring links, which of course can lead to better search engine rankings, not to mention a larger presence on Facebook itself, where a large percentage of Internet users are already spending a great deal of their time. Your reputation and following within the social networks themselves may do your profile well in the eyes of Google too.
If you sell things online, there are obviously many different options out there without having to sell from your own site. In fact, even Facebook and e-commerce are on the road to becoming more and more closely attached. People can buy/sell physical goods through Facebook.
A great deal of focus has been placed on Facebook in this article for the simple fact that it is the world’s most popular social network. That could all change in time. But that doesn’t mean the points would not sill apply to other services. Google is going to be placing a lot of emphasis on Google Buzz this year, and it’s going to become integrated with more and more Google products. Currently, Google profiles are kind of the central place for a Buzz presence. Users can include any links they wish right into that profile (Facebook page, Twitter account, blog, eBay/Amazon listings, etc.)There’s no telling how big Buzz can be, and there’s always the possibility that something else will come along and take the world by storm. And that is one of the reasons…
Why it Still Pays to Have a Site
Can you be successful without a site? I think so. However, having a site gives you a more stable foundation, and still creates more opportunities than if you didn’t have one. When you have a site, you have control. You don’t have to adhere to the policy guidelines of any third-party platform. If Facebook decides to shut its Pages down (as Yahoo did with GeoCities, for example), you still have your own site that they can’t touch. For that matter, having your own site certainly lends credibility to your brand.
Still, social networks continue to work on making data more freely able to flow among one another via a number of open standards like Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger. “The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle,” says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. “The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format.”
Google itself, even has its own site dedicated to making user data for its various products exportable. That’s just Google, but the web in general appears to be moving more in this direction.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a site, or even that you don’t need one, but I think it’s an interesting discussion. For now, I’m going to say having your own site is still in your best interest, but has a more social Internet with more portable data made a standalone site less critical? Is having a website going to be less important in the future? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Ways to Get Fresh Links to Old Content for Better Search Rankings
Chris Crum | Staff Writer
Google Doesn’t Care if You USED to Get Links
You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don’t count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.
Google’s Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody.
“In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time,” he says. (Emphasis added)
Now, this isn’t exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to the ever-changing ways of SEO), it could be something that really hasn’t resonated. Businesses have always been told about the power of links, but even if you got a lot of significant links a year or two ago, that doesn’t mean your content will continue to perform well based on that. WebProNews has discussed the value of “link velocity” and Google’s need for freshness in the past:
Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we may gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.
But the Web has changed, become more of a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking, embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.
–
Do you think link freshness should play a role in search engine rankings?
Let us know.
So how do you keep getting “fresh” links?
If you want fresh links, there are a number of things you can do. For one, keep putting out content. Write content that has staying power. You can link to your old content when appropriate. Always promote the sharing of your content. Include buttons to make it easy for people to share your content on their social network of choice. You may want to make sure your old content is presented in the same template as your new content so it has the same sharing features. People still may find their way to that old content, and they may want to share it if encouraged.
Go back over old content, and look for stuff that is still relevant. You can update stories with new posts adding a fresher take, linking to the original. Encourage readers to follow the link and read the original article, which they may then link to themselves.
Leave commenting on for ongoing discussion. This can keep an old post relevant. Just because you wrote an article a year ago, does not mean that people will still not add to it, and sometimes people will link to articles based on comments that are left.
Share old posts through social networks if they are still about relevant topics. You don’t want to just start flooding your Twitter account with tweets to all of your old content, but if you have an older article that is relevant to a current discussion, you may share it, as your take on the subject. A follower who has not seen it before, or perhaps has forgotten about it, may find it worth linking to themselves. Can you think of other ways to get more link value out of old content?
–
Do you get fresh links for old content? Why do you think that is?
Share your thoughts.