Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

In my previous post A landing page guide to Affiliate Marketers, I promised to get into more details about increasing landing page conversion for affiliate marketers. As I outlined in my previous post some of the strategies for landing page optimization. Today in this post I am going to say about the main elements which increase you’re landing page conversion by more than 15%-300% if you test it.

Improving your website conversion is continues process to generate better results from your website visitors. Optimizing your landing page also increases your sales and has a great ROI for each penny spend.

Below are some of the main elements which can increase conversion on the landing page after testing it in different ways according to your requirements.

1) Heading of the page: – Each landing page should be structured with a Heading which is very important since it is the first element each visitors see it, So It should be catch and draw the attention of the visitors The heading should be most relevant to the keyword search by the visitors If it is irrelevant the visitor might leave soon and your bounce rate increases which also affects your Quality Score with Google Adwords programs if you are using that as your PPC marketing effort.

2) Call to Action: – The location of the Call to Action makes a big difference on the landing page if you put up your call to action on the page where it is not prominent then it will reduce your conversion of the landing page, because it doesn’t stand out. Don’t confuse the visitors with too many call to action, I would advice to have more than 2 call to action on a landing age to avoid confusion, it can be a phone or a simple RFQ (lead) form. Use a lot of White space around your call to action to offset or highlight the call to action. You call to action can be an image or text but all it need to be prominent in the eyes of the visitor.

3) Copy of the Landing page: – Content is the key for any sales copy including for your landing page. The content of the landing page should have the ability to transforms words into a sale or a lead conversion. Let your copy of the landing page be more detailed in simple word which a layman can understand, with good amount of whitespace and bulleted point to highlight the benefits and features of your product and services. Copyblogger has a nice blog post about 10 tips for writing a ultimate landing page.

4) Graphics impact on landing pages:- Images create a big impact on your landing page conversion rate. The best method is to portrait an image which is relevant to your products or service offers that you re giving to your customers instead of using non-relevant graphics. Also make it a point to add a caption to your images these powerful words under the images can tempt the visitor to click on the image so make sure that the images are clickable and take to the conversion area such as a signup page or what ever action then visitors want to do for you.

5) Optimize your buttons :- Color and the size of the button matters in your conversion rate, Usually Red or Green convert better with a call to action on the button like click here, download or signup these text on the button is key for a better conversion. Also the location of the button is a very important issue because if the buttons are placed where it is not able to notice you are not going to get any click on that button. The size the bigger the better since it stand outs and you are asking the visitors to do some strong action on the landing page where chances are more than 60 % click on those big buttons. Urgency is what makes people to take action on the page so focus on the call to action on the button for high conversion rate.

6) Trustworthy testimonials and security: – People like to believe what other people say about the products and services before they buy. This part of winning of the visitors trust can be achieved by add testimonial on the page and try to make it a trustworthy one which people believe that is a genuine and win your trust and can increase your conversion overdoing the testimonials can hurt as well. Testimonials don’t need to be highlight or stand out; all you need to do is that it is visible on page so that before they do some action they are happy and satisfied that they are buying from a trusted place. Equally important is the privacy policy of your website even though not all visitors won’t read the privacy policy page but still it is good, since some really targeted visitors might go through your privacy policy which should at the footer which is the standard location and every visitor knows about it where it would be located.

7) Pricing:- What most of the affiliate marketers ignore about educating the visitor about the price of the products other related expense occur if they are proceeding with the checkout. Don’t try to hide the price with small fonts and make the visitor to buy the product or service. Make it clear to the visitor on the main landing page that how much it cost and if any additional costs like sales tax or shipping charges. This not only helps you to win the confidence of the visitor as well as increase conversion since the price are prominent next to the call to action either the product image or signup button.

Study shows that most of the online sales are lost on a site due to the lack of implementing the critical element that builds value and trust with your website visitors.

If you are running an affiliate product are you using a landing page? Most of the affiliate marketers don’t know the benefit of having a Landing page to promote their affiliate offers. There are several Reasons why an affiliate marketer should use landing page for affiliate marketing.

What is a landing page?

Landing Page is a page where you send your website visitors through search engine traffic or paid advertisements. This landing page is where you will have your affiliate offer or subscribers mailing opt-in fields. Landing page is a sales man assisting your customers, so the content and the product should be highly relevant to the ad or the link which you made the visitor to come to the landing page as well as high quality relevant content relevant to that particular product or services.

Benefits of a landing page -

The benefits of a having a landing page is it increases conversions rate. Most of the people who buy online products and services do a research online before they buy they look for reviews, scams and other related search on the product, so having a landing page you have a slight edge over the other competitors who promote the same affiliate product of the merchant. Usually if you are to give a better idea of the product to the visitors chances are the visitors will go to the merchant’s pages through your affiliate link, which will in turn get you’re that affiliate commission for a referral to the merchant. Also if you are smart enough using a landing page you can have a opt-in mailing list through any of the email marketing services where you can collect their email address and name and start create a email mailing list. This is possible only if you have a landing page. With the mailing list your can pre-sell lot of related products to the email subscribers. Also if you landing page has good quality content it will start ranking in search engine which will bring you free search engine traffic.

Using a landing page increases conversion-

The whole idea of having a landing page is to generate better results from your web traffic. Increasing conversion is the fastest and the easiest way to increase your sales without paying more money to increase traffic to your website. Some of the best techniques to increase conversion on your landing pages are to use the following points Heading, Content …… Etc

You can further read the rest of the landing page guide for affiliate marketers in the next blog posts. You can subscribe to my future posts through my RSS subscription.

As a blogger what you need most is the traffic and as well as readers. Getting your blog exposed is quite a daunting task. Getting traffic to your blog is a sure indicator about is internet popularity. No traffic means no one is reading your thoughts and ramblings of your blog. Since the whole purpose of your blog is that you’re writing are heard in that particular niche you are operating. If your blog is optimized for search engine it can bring quality traffic and readers to your blog, so understanding of SEO is very vital for a blogger.

There are several e-books available online free as well as paid to master yourself how to optimize your site or blog, but not all of them could bring solution to your traffic problem. Picking the right one is key Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is one of the oldest SEO book as well as several today’s SEO experts where once the readers of this e-book. As you all know Search Engine algorithm changes very often and applying these old techniques won’t work, but Aaron’s SEO book is updated on a regular basis adding the latest trends going on the SEO industry.

Some of the important SEO techniques a new blogger should implement and follow are:-

1) Keyword rich blog posts – Most of the blogger doesn’t utilize the use of keywords in their blog posts. People finding information through Search Engines use key phrases to find information, that is they type in keyword phrases related to their search .Suppose they are looking for pet food they type in like healthy cat food and if you blog posts title and article doesn’t have that particular keyword phrase then it won’t appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs) There are several tool out there online for free as well as paid. My favorite keywords tool still is the Google Keyword tool.

2) Submitting to blog directories – One of the major factors in SEO is links and one of the best way to get link to a blog is submitting to directories which will gain some exposure to your blog as well it helps in getting your blog indexed. If you type in Google for blog directories you can get a tons of blog directories both paid and free ones. Search Engine journal has a good list where you need to submit your blog.

3) Install SEO plug-ins – SEO Plug-in is vital success to your blog to get traffic from search engine. Blogging platform allows you to have different plug-ins which makes blog more user friendly. Among those plug-ins are Simple Tags plugin. which allows you to create unique title, description and meta keywords which is great for SEO.

4) Link popularity – As I said above that links are one of the important factor in search engine algorithm, so you need to build link to your blog from external sites which is relevant to your content.  Interlinking of blog posts is very important too. One of the best strategies to build links to your blog is to write interesting and attractive blog posts which will differently help you get backlinks to your blog. Vanessa Fox from http://www.vanessafoxnude.com  has an interesting article about how to build links.

5) Blog often – Blogging on a regular basis is key to success. If you are posting 3 blog posts a week make it consistence. Since Search Engine bots love fresh content and the whole idea about a blog is to creating fresh content. Also SEO is all about content to be successful online you need to produce more interesting and relevant content on a regular basis, so volume blogging a term I use often in my blog is a very important factor in blogging.

Search Engine Optimization is not a difficult task if done properly you blog can get tons of traffic through search engines.

One of the major money earners for online marketers is pay per click program today. Even though there are several other ways to make money online too. Pay Per Click programs are the best choice for internet marketers since is easy to earn money without any sales. Even though the earning from these programs started diminishing slowly but it is still popular and if done it right you can still make tons of money online.

Here is some of the top popular pay per click affiliate program where you can make money online:

Casale Media – is a popular first tier ads network. You can earn between $.50 to 1.25 on each banner ad you put up on your website or blog. Each publisher is provided with custom web based account where you have complete control over your ad management. Some of the criteria for been accepted in Casale Media is your website should have atleast 10,000 unique per month with English based content. Casale Media offers different ad format to be used on your website. Like skyscrapers and popunders.  Publisher’s payment is done through PayPal or check and the minimum earning need to eligible for payment is $25.00 USD.

AdBrite - is an advertisement service that allows advertisers who visits your website to purchase ads directly from your site. The process is pretty simple you have the right to decide what ad products to offers and how much to charge for that ad space. AdBrite will server your ads and bill the advertiser and make you the payment each month via check. You will get 50% of the revenue from each ad and the other half goes to AdBrite. Payments are done monthly and the Minimum payout is $5.00.

BidVertiser – is an advertisement program where you can sell your ad space on your website or blog for money. BidVertiser will pay for every click on your site. All you need to do is display the BidVertisers text ads on your blog or website. The program works like this the Advertisers will bid each other to get ad space on your website and you will be receiving for the highest earnings per click. Revenue from each click depends on the advertisers bid price. Method of payment is either PayPal or by check on a monthly basis with a minimum payout of $10.00 a month.

ShoppingAds – Earlier called AuctionAds after its debacle, ShoppingAds allows publishers to make money online by placing relevant merchant’s ads on their site or blog. When a visitor clicks on the ads you make money on a cost per click or Cost per acquisition basis. It is pretty simple all you need to do is place the relevant keywords of your website or blog while generating the ad. Method of payment is PayPal and a minimum payout of $50.00 a month.

Text-Link-Ads – Very popular among bloggers, recently it got a setback because of Google’s paid link penalization. Text link Ads is a text link broker company where they will intermediate between the publisher and advertiser to place ads. Text-Link-Ads have a huge inventory of advertisers looking for text links on blogs, website, forums etc. This is a real money making program if you have a high Google page rank and Alexa ranking. Text Link Ads will pay your 50% of each sale of text link ads sold off your website through their system. Method of payment is PayPal or check on a monthly basis and minimum payout of $25.00.

AdToll – is an Ad management networks for webmasters to make money selling ad spots on their sites and blogs. Customized text and banner with different sizes can be used in the site. AdToll offers a higher commission of 75% on each sale also their service includes that each publisher is assigned with their own account manager so that they can work closely with. Payment is done monthly with $20.00 a minimum to get paid done via PayPal, wire transfer and checks.

ValueClick – is an Advertising network where you can place quality ads on your blog or website, the earning potential is as high as 65% for all your cost per click and cost per impression ads. Also ValueClick offers revenue for referring other publishers. ValueClick offers different variety of ad format for your website from banner ads to popup and under popups and more. Payment is made monthly with a minimum payout of $25 made via PayPal or check.

ExoClick – is a European based Pay Per click program providing services to publishers. ExoClick offers detailed Ad management statistics to you on real time. It supports in four languages English, French, Spanish and Polish. Earning is paid on weekly basis through PayPal. Publishers can also get 5% on referral bonus if you introduce a publisher.

Google Adsense – The most popular pay per click program where you can earn enormous money because of its advertisers. Adsense can earn you tons of money if you have good search engine traffic to your site. Some of the reason why Google Adsense is a money maker because of the contextual form of advertisement, Adsense ads can be put up on any web page and it will show ads relevant to the content of that website. As of today there are millions of websites where Google Adsense ads are displayed. Signing up for Google Adsense is free Payment is made monthly with a minimum payment of $100.00 via wire transfer or check. International publishers have several options for payment.

YPN – Yahoo publisher network is another pay per click program from yahoo. Right now only US publishers are allowed to join this program. It is promised to be an alternative to Google Adsense but it is far away when compared to Google Adsense. It works on a similar basis like Google Adsense with a Publisher admin area. Minimum payout is $100.00 on a monthly basis and payments are made through check.

Every affiliate marketer faces several challenges today to make money online. I started out my affiliate marketing in the year 2000. But those days promoting other people products you had only a few option there where aren’t much affiliate merchants to promote. But today you can find affiliate merchants in each and every niche. But then why you still find affiliate marketing is a challenge.

In this Blog Post I am going to address this issue each new as well as expert affiliate marketers are facing:

1) Find time for your projects – Finding time for affiliate marketing is one of the biggest challenge each affiliate marketer faces. Weather they are a newbie or a super affiliates finding time is very hard. One of the best solutions for this is outsource. How I solved this problem of finding time for my projects was hiring people for certain tasks. If you are promoting a affiliate products it needs several task like writing, marketing, link building and of-course if you are doing paid marketing then you need the skills of PPC as well. Today you have several channels where you can find people to outsource, some for the source where I find people for my projects are cragislist.org, elance, scriptlance and getafreelancer. These places is an excellent source to find people as well as reliable and economical too.

2) Find the right Network - Most of the affiliate marketers are confused about to join which networks. You will hear several pros and cons about each network. For each affiliate marketer only few of the networks really works for them rest of them won’t work for them. Identified that network is a huge task you must try almost all of them and stick to the work which give you more ROI and gives you affiliate support. I tried almost a ton of networks but some of the most successful networks are neverblueads.com, Shareasale, LinkShare, Hypermedia and CJ. Once you find the right network you need to look for the products which will resonates with you websites or writing skills.

3) Sticking to one Niche – Often Affiliate marketers are greedy they need to get into each every possible niche they can. And they end up earning nothing. Also a huge waste of time and money. Just focusing on one particular product and slowly diversifies or leveraging that strategy to other related offers is want an successful affiliate marketer do. But it doesn’t mean that you need to keep all your eggs in one basket. You can monetize your affiliate site with other related offers one the site. But if you are planning to promote your affiliate products through PPC it is always good to stick to one product on your landing page rather than distracting your visitors.

4) Traffic – Most of the affiliate marketers face the problem of getting traffic. PPC is one of the best way to start off with your online money making venture. You need to spend some money in the beginning. Once you go through the learning curve you will realize that you need to spend money to make money. There are several other ways to get traffic too. Getting relevant traffic which converts as a sale is very hard. Some of the other methods to get traffic is optimizing website for search engines to gain search engine traffic, Social Media marketing to get social media traffic, Email Marketing, Article marketing etc.

5) Manage your time – Most often affiliate marketers doesn’t manage time properly. The productive time of each affiliate marketers is mismanaged because of too much time is spend on reading and sending emails, checking stats and other non productive things. Managing your time is key to any successful affiliate marketing and making it profitable is very important.