Signs It’s Time To Redesign Your Website
April 14, 2008 by Rick Smith
Filed under All Posts
Designing your first website is a stressful undertaking. It requires you to dig deep into your business in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of creating a site that looks unique and works well. Plus you’ll end up investing a lot of time, energy and money. And finally, after all that, you’re finished and it’s time for the site to go live. What a relief!
Many business owners go through this same process. By the time the process is finished, many entrepreneurs are very glad that it’s over – and don’t want to do it again any time soon.
Unfortunately, websites don’t last forever. Even if you plan your site to work for the current vision for your business, you can’t accurately account for the entire future of your business.
Eventually you’ll have to make some changes to your website. Some of these changes can be accomplished with simple maintenance, and by making updates to your site. But there’s only so far that patching and revising your current site can go. If your site is particularly outdated, or if it’s not working well for you, it’s probably time to consider a full-scale site redesign.
Some signs that it’s time to redesign your site include:
- Your business has changed or grown. If your business is no longer the same as it was when you designed your site, chances are that you should redesign your website to reflect that. If you’ve only had a few small changes, you might be able to just update your current website. But if you’ve changed your business direction, decided to offer new products or services, or if your company has grown significantly, it will pay off to redesign your site. Reconsider how the changes to your business should be reflected or addressed in the structure, design and strategy behind your website.
- Your site looks like it was designed in 1995. Some signs of an outdated web site include: chunky, slow-loading graphics, old-style “framed” coding, where the site is divided up into panes that load separately, little animated cartoon clip-art throughout the site, and text created as images instead of in HTML. Having any of these on your site could reflect poorly on your business, making you look ‘behind the times’. It can also make you look like you don’t care enough about your business or about technological advances to keep abreast of them. Keeping your company’s website looking modern will increase its credibility.
- The information on your site isn’t user-friendly. If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you regularly get questions on your site text from visitors, re-structuring your copy or rewriting it can help to fix these problems. If you’ve been adding to your site over time and the navigation has become unwieldy or confusing, restructuring your navigation could be another pressing reason to redesign your site. You want visitors to be able to easily find their way around your site and to be able to access all the information you have within a few clicks. Laying out your site to make that possible can make your visitor’s experience on your site a lot easier.
- You apologize for the site when referencing it or handing out your business cards. Your site should be a source of pride. It should offer your clients and prospects an easy way to get a lot of information about your business. And if you have to apologize for out-of-date information, broken images, poor design, difficult navigation or anything else on your site, it makes you look unprepared and unprofessional. Make sure your site is in top shape and looks impressive, so your clients believe your business is in good shape too.
- You’re not getting good results in the Search Engines. Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn’t designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.
- It’s not bringing in inquiries and helping you to make sales. If your site was designed long ago, then there’s a good chance that it was designed as “brochureware”. This means that the site was designed just to act as an online brochure. This was very common a few years ago, when websites were new. But recently businesses have realized that a website can do a lot more than just impersonate your brochure – it can help you close sales, bring in new prospects and make your business easier to run. To bring in more inquiries and make more sales include the following when you redesign your site:
- Calls to action to encourage your visitors to take specific actions – like purchasing something, contacting you, or signing up for a newsletter.
- Forms, scripts, or programs to make your business easier - like contact forms, project estimating tools, and an autoresponder email series that can help you keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Including a shopping cart or Paypal buttons on your site can also help you to make more sales without any additional work.
-Downloadable information packets, articles, questionnaires and white papers can answer a prospect’s questions about your products or services and help them to move closer to buying. And if you require the prospect to enter their email address or other contact information, it can help you to grow your prospect list as well. These are just a few of the functions that your site can perform for your business. To get ideas for other ways that your site can help you increase your business, look at the other sites that you visit and note the functions they perform.
- Your site is costing you a fortune to update. If you’re racking up huge bills because of changes and still have a lot of to go, it might be time to consider a whole site redesign. Make a list of everything that you want to do on your site and to consult a web designer about redesigning your site with those changes in mind. Often, if you have extensive changes to make to your site, it can be less expensive to just start over.
If your site is designed in Flash or coded in such a way that you can’t maintain it yourself redesigning and re-coding your site could allow you to do so. Having the ability to make changes and update your own text will let you make revisions quickly, at no cost. And you can play with your site and make revisions to see what will work best for your business and clients.
If your site has any of the problems mentioned here, it’s time to redesign. The steps needed to update and revise will differ depending on the problems and issues that your site has – you may not have to start from scratch. But, do make sure that you address all of the problems that your site has so that you won’t have to redesign again any time soon!
About this author
Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. Her workbook, “Design a Website That Works”, will walk you through all of the questions that you need to answer in order to create the best possible website. http://www.elf-design.com/http://www.elf-design.com/products-webWorkbook.html
8 Simple Strategies For Affiliate Marketing Success
April 14, 2008 by Rick Smith
Filed under All Posts
It always surprises me how much money you can make by selling other people’s stuff on the Internet. Eight years in and the numbers still shock me. Always.
More than the numbers, what really amazes me the most is the lifestyle one can achieve from online marketing. You can be your own boss, work your own hours, carry out your business from anywhere in the world you want to live. You can create automatic marketing systems that work 24/7/365 days of the year. Earn money even when you’re sleeping, vacationing or out enjoying a gourmet meal at your favorite restaurant. Total freedom.
So is it any wonder then why I am constantly analyzing my whole marketing structure to figure out what is working and what is not working? Finding out just what strategies are giving me the best returns on my efforts and time. And I am constantly trying to discover ways to increase my affiliate sales and online traffic.
It basically means breaking down your online marketing into its core elements and examining each one with close scrutiny. What can be improved? What can be eliminated? What needs to be redesigned? Any serious online marketer must be actively working on these core elements to stay competitive in the affiliate game.
With these thoughts in mind, here are some simple marketing strategies that can affect and contribute to your success for selling affiliate products on the web. Marketing factors that should always be at the back of your mind, influencing your every move.
Quality Content
People use the web to find quality content or information. Always remember this fact and apply it to each step of your marketing plan – give your visitors quality content and you will succeed online. There are no ironclad guarantees, but get this one step right and you will probably make money online.
Design your website and your webpages around quality content. Useful, relevant content will give people a reason to come to your site and also give them a reason to return. Provide good information first and let the sale or selling be secondary. People do not like a pushy salesperson, not in real life and not on the web. Develop a friendly, helpful relationship with your potential customer and you will succeed.
Keyword Driven
The Internet is keyword driven. These are words or phrases people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for on the web. They are also your keys to online success if you’re going the SEO route, picking the right keywords will be your main starting point.
Professional marketers use keyword software like Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite to research and find their profitable keywords, but there are many free tools/sites which you can find online to help you do your keyword research – Seobook.com is a good one. Daily monitoring of your major keywords is also important to keeping them in the top positions. Any movement downwards should spark more link and/or content building immediately.
Keep in mind, Google, which controls 60 percent of the web’s search traffic, is also a great source of information on your keywords. Use Google to search the sites in the top 10 spots for your keywords; also check Google for the Paid Ads related to your keywords and monitor these ads over a period of time to see which ones are profitable. Do your keyword homework and your affiliate marketing will be a lot easier.
Niche Focused
If you’re into affiliate marketing, you must concentrate your efforts on small niche markets where the competition is not too stiff. Choosing the right niche markets is vital to your affiliate success. Demand should be high and/or you’re selling a high-ticket custom item.
Once you have chosen your particular niches, concentrate on dominating these in all the search engines. But don’t forget that the fastest and sometimes the most profitable way to tackle a niche is through PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising – especially if there is little or low bidding on your keywords. Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing, MicroSoft AdCenter… should be explored and tried.
List Building
The power is always in the list. Make sure you collect the contact information of your site’s visitors. Offer free ebooks, guides, special deals or bonuses… to get your prospects to opt-in to your AR follow-up systems. Studies have shown that people usually don’t buy until the six or seventh follow-up.
I like building hundreds of micro-lists for all my major promoted affiliate products. These follow-ups with specialized information and special deals, coupons and bonuses will increase your sales.
Traffic
Obviously, traffic is one of the key elements to earning money online mainly because without traffic you’re dead in the water. You must explore all avenues to generate targeted traffic to your affiliate links. These sources are always changing; blogging and social bookmark sites are very important now. So too are video and audio formats so make sure you use them in your marketing.
Article marketing has worked extremely well for me and it is, along with search traffic, the main reason I can earn income online. A simple marketing technique that still works because articles will bring targeted traffic to your site or sites.
Conversion Rates Are Crucial
In affiliate marketing or in any kind of marketing, your conversion rates are crucial to your success. You can get all the targeted traffic you want but if you can’t turn those visitors into a sale, it’s game over.
Your sales pages or content must convert into a sale in order for you to succeed. With affiliate marketing it is a little trickier because not only do your pages have to “pre-sell” the affiliate product but the landing page/site where you send that traffic must also convert into a sale.
However, I have discovered one of the keys to high conversion rates has nothing to do with landing pages, sales pitches, etc., but has to do mainly with which products that you decide to promote. You must thoroughly research your affiliate products and ONLY promote the top quality brands in your niche and you will have much better success. Also choosing products that are only available online will increase your conversion numbers; so too will promoting products that offer special discount coupons and deals.
Multiple Streams & Residual Income
Any serious online marketer will leverage their traffic and marketing by promoting many different products and services. They will develop different sources of income from their sites with affiliate links, Google Adsense, paid advertising, partnerships… are all used to develop multiple streams of income. It one should dry up, there are countless others still producing income.
I have found the major third-party affiliate networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, Shareasale, Affiliate Window, Amazon are really good for finding and promoting products online. These sites will handle all the record keeping and sales stats for you. Plus, they send your monthly checks to you like clockwork. All you have to worry about is providing quality traffic to your affiliate links.
However, like any professional marketer, I save my special promotions and efforts to affiliate products or services that will give me a high return on my marketing efforts. Mainly, I only promote high-ticket items or products that will give me residual income. Make one sale; get paid time and time again. I also like forming partnerships with companies so that I get a percentage of the sales for the life of any client I refer. Those arrangements have special priority for the obvious reason they give me long-term residual income.
Testing Will Show You The Money
Perhaps, like in those multiple-choice exams, there is one sticking point. You can check-off “None of the above” if you don’t apply one thing for all of the “success strategies” listed above.
You Must TEST Everything.
You must constantly test and track what is working and what is not? Which traffic is converting? Which keywords are converting? Which products are converting? Which niches are profitable… you simply must TEST and KNOW which factors are working in your online marketing structure? Unless you test and track everything you will be marketing blind, and that’s no way to run an online business.
I have found Google Analytics to be extremely helpful for testing and improving your conversion rates. I am also a firm believer in the daily reading of your traffic logs and stats… these places will show you where the real money is hiding. Use this information to improve your traffic and sales.
Like any endeavor, the more knowledge you have, the more successful you will be in reaching your goals. This is especially true for affiliate marketing on the web. And always remember, affiliate marketing does take some work and time to set-up, but the rewards are extremely rewarding. I hope you will use some of the marketing tips I have given you so you can experience these rewards for yourself.
Copyright (c) 2008 Titus Hoskins
About this author
The author is a full-time web marketer who owns and runs numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. He contributes his online affiliate success to using the best Internet Marketing Tools: http://www.bizwaremagic.com and his proven strategies at List Building: http://www.bizwaremagic.com/opt-in.htm 2008 Titus Hoskins.
The Power of The Press
April 1, 2008 by Rick Smith
Filed under All Posts, Marketing
Last weekend a small daily newspaper in southern Florida ran an article on a partner of ours with whom we produced a DVD. Check it out at The Villages Daily Sun. I don’t know how long it will be online.
He was there on a speaking engagement and, being a smart marketer, made an appointment with a reporter. In the article they announced that he had a DVD available at his website ButchHarrison.com.On Saturday, the orders started coming in. And because we sell more than just that DVD (see what I have to say about cross promotion) we had customers buying other products. And now they have discovered our site as place to purchase books and DVDs that they hadn’t come across before.
As a result of this article, web visitors quadrupled and traffic has been above the previous normal ever since. And this from a local newspaper with a readership between 50,000 and 60,000. Now this reporter found Butch’s visit newsworthy and you may ask, how does this relate to my business? It is an excellent example of how a little free press can boost your business, sometimes permanently.
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