Becoming successful at affiliate marketing requires time, patience, and persistence. It also requires you to know how to scale up campaigns that are already making you money. Effective scaling can take affiliate marketing from your “side hustle” to your career by maximizing current success. Think of any traditional business, for example, a clothing store. Let’s say you’re … [Read more...]
AdWords Tool Is Surprisingly Bad For Keyword Research
I've often found that Google's AdWords Tool seems to provide surprisingly limited results in terms of discovering high volume search words and phrases but i've never been quite able to put my finger on what's going wrong. Now I know. Rand Fishkin brings us the wisdom: As you can see, there's ~50% of the terms not shown in the suggestion list, which is fairly substantive and … [Read more...]
How AdWords Really Works
Advertising on Google is still one of the staples of online marketing: pretty much everyone should know how it works and what it can do for their business. But AdWords can be intimidating, with many hidden features that can affect how well your ad works and how much you have to pay. A new infographic from Wordstream makes sense of it all in a … [Read more...]
Forget Cool: Design Your Homepage to Convert
Homepages often have multiple objectives. Everyone in your organization wants to pile stuff on your homepage: products, partnership announcements, press releases, job opportunities, marketing copy, positioning statements, special offers and welcome messages. But most importantly, it is often the first step a visitor takes on the way to a conversion action. So the single most … [Read more...]
Usability Basics for Landing Page Optimization
We’ve all heard the saying “perception is reality.” And when it comes to website usability, there is no truer statement. Bottom line: if a user cannot find something on your landing page, it might as well not exist at all. Website usability has to do with how information is organized, how much emphasis is assigned to items, and how easy the information is to access for the … [Read more...]
Website Conversions: Closing the Sale
Many people are familiar with the well-known concept of the sales funnel. Conceived over a hundred years ago, it still serves as a useful framework for understanding the decision-making process. The sales funnel is known by the acronym “AIDA” which stands for the stages that a person must pass through before buying something: attention, interest, desire and action. Times have … [Read more...]
What are You “Converting” on Your Website?
Conversion actions are measurable events that move a website visitor toward the mission critical activities that you have identified. Many people view conversions as large-scale or “macro” events, such as product sales or sign-ups for a service. In fact, most conversion actions are incremental micro-events that reduce friction and allow a visitor to continue moving toward your … [Read more...]
Emotional Motivators in Landing Page Optimization
Visitors arrive at your website with their own needs, perspectives, and emotions. How can your landing page influence them to take action when you don’t know what motivates them? Start with this basic truth: people don’t often make rational decisions. In fact, the capacity for abstract rational thought is only a recent evolutionary addition to our brains. We have mainly gotten … [Read more...]
7 Landing Page Fixes that will Skyrocket Conversions
Landing page optimization and testing can have a dramatic impact on your online marketing profitability. But even if you don’t have the staff or resources to do testing you can easily evaluate your landing pages for some of the most common conversion killers. Here are 7 simple landing page fixes that work across a surprisingly wide variety of circumstances and … [Read more...]
Usability Basics for Landing Page Optimization
If a visitor cannot find something on your landing page, it might as well not exist at all. Have you used common sense in the design of your landing page? You probably think so. But there is often a disconnect between how a website designer approaches a site design, and what actual users experience when they visit the site. The point of good usability is to make things easy for … [Read more...]
What is Your Website Worth? The financial impact of conversion rate improvement
Most business websites are developed for a specific purpose. They are focused on achieving a desired outcome from a particular audience. A website conversion happens when a visitor to your site takes the desired action, and likely represents a measurable value to your business. Calculating the value of a conversion can go a long way in justifying an ongoing landing page … [Read more...]
Landing Page Optimization – Testing your way to higher profits
In the online marketing world, a lot of time and resources are spent driving traffic to a website or landing page. Huge budgets are spent on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, e-mail marketing efforts and search engine optimization. You analyze campaign performance with almost religious fervor in order to extract the last penny of revenue and profit possible from each internet … [Read more...]
Consolidate, Optimize and Maximize
You can maximize the performance of your marketing campaigns by consolidating all of them under a single ad platform. This will save time on administrative tasks, offer comprehensive analytics on campaigns across multiple channels and help you optimize them accordingly. Affiliate software is in a unique position to consolidate campaigns from across different channels because it … [Read more...]
Let’s Get Personal
Imagine that you are shopping at a department store and you ask a salesperson for men’s summer sandals and he takes you to the main entrance and drops you off. Your reaction?There’s a good chance you’re frustrated. You probably think less of the store for its poor service. You’re probably going to leave without buying any shoes. You might even tell your … [Read more...]
Overcoming Your SEO Fears
Ask nearly everyone and they'll say that search engine optimization is intimidating. Search engine optimization - SEO for short - should be a familiar term and practice for anyone or any commercial company with a website. SEO is what you do to your website to get a higher ranking on search engines,particularly Google,Yahoo and MSN.The higher you rank the more likely someone … [Read more...]