Making the Jump from Traffic to Sales

One of the biggest blinders that hold people back in online marketing is the focus on traffic numbers alone.

Now obviously, websites need visitors.  The more visitors a website gets (or so we’re told) the more profitable it will be.  What many marketers soon find out, however, is that traffic numbers are not always related to sales numbers.

Visitors are great.  Your website needs to get people visiting it and engaging with the information you present.  It also needs to convert these visitors into paying customers.

But how do you do that?

Two Different Objectives

Part of the problem comes from the fact that sales and traffic generation have two different objectives.  Traffic generation (generally) focuses on getting the greatest number of people on a website as possible.  Sales, on the other hand, focuses on your specific target customer.

You can’t simply put a million people in front of your sales page and expect to rake in the cash.  It just doesn’t work that way.

The difference here is that one focuses on capturing anyone while the other focuses on a specific person.  Sales certainly doesn’t work if visitors aren’t targeted, so your advertising efforts absolutely must be.

Targeting Customers

Traffic generation is great for creating a long list of leads, qualified as best you can tell.  This group of people may contain a few buyers but you’ll need to weed out the mass of people who will never buy something from you.  This can be done through the material posted on your website.

Each article, video, or audio file you post should be targeted to the specific market you’re trying to sell to.  When visitors come across an article on weight loss, for example, only those people interested in losing weight will read it.  That would be a great place to promote a weight loss product.

A Leaky Funnel

The trick to combining traffic and sales is to weed out the people who aren’t customers and sell to those who will spend money.  This is done with what we call a “Sales Funnel”.  Picture the shape of a funnel.  It’s larger at one end than the other.

A sales funnel works by directing all of your traffic into the sales process.  With each progressive step, the audience gets smaller and smaller in number.  Eventually, you’re left with only those people who will be interested in your product.  These are the people to whom you present your sales copy, products, and other offers.

Building a Funnel

The basic blueprint for a sales funnel is pretty simple.  You start with a general audience and then begin to shave it down until you’re left with a small group of people who are more likely to spend money. In some cases this can be less than 10% of your overall traffic numbers.

You can tell who they are by their behavior—which they usually take after you ask them to do something and see how they respond.

A truly powerful sales funnel can make or break a product.  They take a lot of tweaking, testing, and continued improvement.  And, it can be so difficult to build an effective sales funnel that many companies will spend tend of thousands hiring someone to do it for them, and several times more buying traffic to test it.

Fortunately for you, there’s no need to spend that kind of money.  You can get insider access to the most effective sales funnels and best-selling products in the home business niche today simply by clicking here.

What Media Buys Are and How They Work

“Media Buys” is a term you’ll often hear in marketing circles.  They are widely used, yet some people still don’t understand what they are.  To put it as simply as possible, a media buy is basically advertising space purchased on some sort of media, like a website ad or TV commercial.

There are a great range of options when it comes to media buys and each one has its benefits and drawbacks.  Some companies will spend millions of dollars every year and need to hire a dedicated media buyer to handle it all.  It’s actually quite easy to end up spending a significant amount of money, but you don’t need to break the bank if you know what you’re doing.

What media can you buy?

 Advertising space can be purchased on every form of media imaginable.  Television commercials and radio spots have long been popular options.  Space can also be purchased in magazines, newspapers, or circulars as well.

With the rise of the internet, however, web-based media buying has become a huge industry.  Websites of every type in nearly every market will sell advertising space.  Think of every website you’ve ever seen with ad space on them! This can often be a low-cost option that will still reach a large audience.

How to Know What to Buy

 They key to getting the best return on a media buy is to have an effective plan laid out before you spend any money.  Focus on developing a specific strategy.  You’ll want to know who your target audience is, how much you’re willing to spend, and what you want to get out of it.

One mistake many people make is buying a lot of ad space right off the bat, lured by the total number of views without regard for how relevant the ads will be to their audience.

Just as with anything in business, you need to have a plan to follow or you’ll get lost.  Media buys can either be a great investment or a total waste of money.  Having a focused plan is what makes the difference.

Where to Buy

 The strategy you develop needs to be focused on a target customer or audience, because this will tell you where to buy your media space.  Consider your ideal customer.  Do a little research to determine what sort of media they consume on a regular basis and what will get them to engage with your marketing.

When it comes to websites, you’ll want to pay attention to the traffic stats for each site.  If the visitors fall into the same range of age, location, and financial ability as your target customer, then this is a great option.

Determining Value

 It’s important to test a number of different media buying options to find the best one.  You can do this by assigning a value to each one after you’ve run some test campaigns.  Simply take the cost of the media buy and compare it to the traffic it generated.  Then, take that and compare it to the number of sales or leads generated from the campaign.

Media buys can be a wonderful way to increase the awareness of a product, promote a brand, or generate revenue through sales.  Once the media is bought, it is basically fully automated so it’s also one of the easiest marketing options around.

If you really want to supercharge the effectiveness of your media buys then you need to know the secret 4th ingredient of my master Sales Formula that can instantly double your income overnight. Check it out!

Fail-Safe Tips for Effective Media Buying

Media Buys (buying packages of ad space) can be a great way to help grow your business.  Finding the right place to advertise will open up a large audience that might be receptive to your current marketing efforts.

There is, however, a right way and a wrong way to do it.  These six tips will put you on the right track to getting the greatest return on all your media buys.

#1: Budget It

 Media buys can be a great addition to your marketing strategy, but they can also be a great way to empty your bank account.
To avoid spending too much money, it’s vitally important that you set a budget for media buying and stick to it.  Once you go over budget you’ll be cutting into your profits.  I suggest starting small, finding out what works, and then incrementally increasing your ad budget.

#2: Shop Around

 It’s never a good idea to purchase the first thing you find.  When it comes to media buys, the cost of the buy isn’t always related to the quality of the audience.
While it might be tempting to spend a lot to advertise on a well-known website, you might be able to find cheaper options that are just as effective.

#3: Goals

 It’s important to keep the goals of your campaign in mind when looking for media to buy.  Different websites will have different types of visitors.
If you’re focused on gathering leads, then one site might be a better option than another.  If sales are your goal, then you’ll need to find a website full of real customers.

#4: Test It

 Every campaign is different.  The only way to really tell which media buy offered the best return is to constantly test different campaigns.  Instead of just running one campaign and hoping for the best, diversify your marketing efforts.
When the campaigns are over, you’ll be able to run a few numbers and find out which one brought you the highest return.

#5: Cost Per Lead

 You need to have a method of determining the most valuable media buys, and focusing on your cost per lead is a great way to do this.  Traffic is always nice, but if it doesn’t convert into leads or sales then it’s only wasting your time and money.  The cost per lead can be determined by taking the price of the media buy and dividing it by the number of leads or sales.  Needless to say, anything with a negative ROI should probably be thrown out.

#6: Get Creative

 At the end of the day, media buying is just advertising.  Once you’ve purchased it, you’ll need something eye catching, inventive, and enticing to use it for.
Make sure you leave room in your budget for creativity.  Hiring designers, writers, and even musicians can really boost the effectiveness of all your marketing.  Don’t fall into the trap of neglecting to budget for creative design.

The real secret to effective media buying can be found in planning and analysis.  It can be tempting to just jump right in and start buying anything you can find.  To get the most out of it, however, you need to know what you’re doing.  If all of this sounds just a bit too complicated you can get immediate access to my traffic-generation team that will get qualified leads for you here.

How to Use Bing to Advertise

Bing Ads is an advertising platform used to display ads on the Bing network including bing.com, yahoo.com, and aol.com. Smaller affiliates like duckduckgo.com and slickdeals.net also fall under this umbrella.

Ads show up on Bing when a visitor searches just as they would on any other search engine. The top and sides of the page are premium real estate, and you want to be sure people notice you first by making your ads relevant.

How Bing Advertising Works

Bing shows ads relevant to a visitor’s search based on the terms used. Searching for “hardware store Kansas City” will return ads for hardware stores in Kansas City. Yes, that’s quite obvious. However, you may not know that whenever someone conducts a search, Bing gives ad placement to the highest bidder. Just because you have an ad on Bing, doesn’t mean people will see it.

Bing makes money off of the ads businesses place, so if you outbid your competition, your ad is more likely to appear. However, Bing only gets paid when someone clicks an ad. That’s because you only pay Bing when someone clicks on your ad.

This is why relevancy matters. If you operate a hardware store in Dallas, your ad will never appear using the search terms above no matter how much you bid, because no one would ever click on it. They need hardware stores in Kansas City, not Dallas. Showing irrelevant ads profits no one.

On your end of the ad, make sure when a visitor clicks your ad, it sends them where they expect to go. If your ad promotes drills, send the clicker to the drill page of your hardware store website, not the page with pipe fittings.

Advantages of Bing

Bing has a host of advantages that are similar to other search engines. Using proper keywords, you get your business in front of people when they need it, increasing your conversion rate. You only pay if your ad works, so you don’t spend money on useless advertising, and you’re less likely to exceed your budget by placing bids for the maximum you’re willing to pay.

You can also track your engagements on a dashboard, showing you how many people saw your ad, how many times they clicked, and how much you paid for each click, giving you the ability to segment your future ads based on what worked and what didn’t.

While Bing doesn’t have the same volume as Google, this proves to be beneficial. Fewer businesses advertise on Bing, meaning less competition for you, better ad positioning, lower cost per click, and higher quality conversions.

Cost of Bing

A pay per click model determines how much advertisers pay for ads. You only pay when someone clicks your ad, but how much you pay depends on how much you bid. You pay different amounts based on keywords. Niche keywords in small communities can cost less than $0.20 while popular keywords in big markets cost more than $20.

Bing’s keyword planner suggests bids for your ads, so you have an idea of how much you need to bid for your ad to appear in someone’s search terms. You choose how much you are willing to pay based on how much you stand to profit from acquiring conversions. $20 is worthwhile if a new customer means $500 or more to your business.

Factors to Consider

Switching to Bing from Google doesn’t mean you’ll lose your previous campaigns. When you sign up for a Bing account, you have the option to import these from Google AdWords. You can then use them to run similar campaigns and benchmark which service is better for your business.

Diligent keyword research tells you which terms have high volumes and low competition. Bid on keywords with purchasing intent. If someone searches for “best toilets to buy,” it’s likely they plan to buy one soon. If they search for “best toilet repair near me,” you don’t want your hardware store ad to appear. That is unless you also offer toilet repair services.

After selecting targeted keywords based on your product, service, or location, you can also choose your match type. This allows you to select how closely you want your keyword to match the user’s search when your ad appears. Broad matches will look for searches containing synonyms of your keyword, whereas exact matches will only show up when someone searches for that exact keyword or phrase. Broad matches have the potential to appear on searches that aren’t relevant to your business, so you may have to narrow your match type over time after some careful study.

After several months, you should review and optimize your ad to improve future results. You have visibility to keyword impressions so you can refine and change as needed. Remember to remove negative keywords from your campaign.

Bing has a variety of targeting options you can use after you evaluate your initial campaign. You can run A/B tests, increase your visibility on weekends where you see more traffic, and bid higher on demographics like age or gender.

How Link Building Affects Your Marketing Strategy

I get it. You want to be discovered. And search engine optimization is part of that. But it’s easy to stuff keywords into your articles or blog posts anywhere to get visibility. There’s more to online marketing than that. There are specific techniques you can employ to get the best out of your marketing strategy without affecting the readability of your content.

You have to use keywords the right way, or you won’t get noticed like you thought you would. Google and other search engines are smart. They value quality over quantity and can identify keyword density and its effectiveness.

Techniques

Engaging online with people who already interact with you and your website promotes your website to relevant audiences. By showing an interest in your followers, you present yourself as genuine and sincere, and you can provide a more meaningful and customized experience for them. Use a blog to accomplish some of this. You can create sharable content by being unique and original. Linking to other blogs or external sources shows that you foster a community of sharing within the industry and value the opinions of other industry experts.

Case studies highlight individual clients and their success stories. It helps other potential clients feel like they have second-hand experience with what you do and makes you more trustworthy. Present these case studies in a visual format like a video showcasing a client interview, or ask your clients to write a quick testimonial you can post on your site.

Pump out news articles to your readers that are relevant to your industry. Keeping up-to-date on the current trends or industry struggles will always benefit you in ways other than direct marketing. Sounding knowledgeable when you speak with clients will get you farther than almost anything else will.

Online promotions or contests engage your social media followers, inspire friendly competition, and offer freebies that everyone likes. This is one of my favorite SEO marketing techniques because it gets the online community buzzing about your brand, no matter what sort of freebie you’re offering.

You should always use these marketing techniques safely and effectively. Ethical business practices and principles are at the core of everything you do. Using these techniques effectively can help you improve your marketing strategy performance and maintain integrity.

Link Building

Search engines are smart enough to recognize quality over quantity, so link building is an essential marketing tool that you shouldn’t overlook. Acquiring links from education websites and other trusted industry experts can drastically increase your rank on any search engine and make you easier to find.

I would even go so far as to say that it’s impossible to rank on Google or any other search engine without links. Here’s why:

• Links are Google’s #1 ranking factor
• Links define the entire internet
• Links point to other great content that deserves to rank as well
• Links transfer power and trust, hopefully back to you
• Links help people discover your site

As I mentioned above, blogging is a great way to start link building. Linking to relevant external sources in your blog helps to build credibility with other experts in your industry. By sharing blogs on social media sites, you begin to develop inbound links as well.

Linking to other blogs on your site sometimes generates a ‘return the favor’ sort of attitude within the community, and simply linking to other people’s work can build a good linking foundation. You can also create organic inbound links by guest blogging on someone else’s site.

Researching the links your competitors use is a useful tool for knowledge building. You can learn a lot from the way your competitors link to other content. You gain valuable insight into their strategy, the keywords they are using, and what they feel is important. Using this information, you can build better links to outrank them.

Calls to action with internal links keep people on your site and help them to discover more about you. Writing content that links back to yourself does many things. It creates a backlink, and it promotes other products or services you offer. You can use these tactics to upsell as well.

Providing your users with genuine, useful content comes in many forms. It is critical that you understand how to use keywords effectively because keyword density impacts the readability of your content. Link building techniques provide structure and understanding to what you publish. Check out my done-for-you system for more ideas.

Five Best Opera Extensions for Marketing

Browsers are a highly personal choice. Everyone has a reason for using the browser they use, and often it’s not based on performance or features, but on habit. Switching browsers just feels weird.

With Chrome gaining sixty percent of the market share as of October 2017, the majority of extensions are available for Chrome only. Some are available for Safari, but Opera has been left in the dark for a long time. However, the Norwegian company is pumping out some new features, and users might be pleasantly surprised with the options.

Built-in Extensions

Opera recently introduced their newest version with a built-in ad blocker and VPN service. Ads significantly slow down website performance, so the addition of a built-in ad blocker increases battery life and strain on the processor.

Opera also has a power saving mode that reduces the activity of tabs that aren’t active, decreasing the energy your computer uses. Compared to other browsers, this can extend battery life up to fifty percent. It’s great when you need to power through essential tasks or have a lot of references open at once for writing a blog or scheduling multiple social media posts.

MailTrack.io

It’s important for digital marketers to track email opens, clicks, and generate daily reports. MailTrack used to be available only for digital marketers, but they’ve made it easy now for everyone to use it. One green check indicates that a message was tracked correctly, and two checks mean it was opened. All of this is at a glance and easy to see.

LastPass

The number of accounts you have between email addresses, client portals, and social media accounts makes your head spin. Keeping a document full of your usernames and passwords is highly volatile, using the same username and password for everything compromises every account in the event of a data breach, and writing them all down on a piece of paper is cumbersome.

LastPass is versatile, allowing you to store usernames and passwords, as well as credit card information, shopping profiles, and URLs. You can safely store all of the data you have in one place while maintaining security.

Evernote Web Clipper

If you regularly save articles to reference later or take screenshots, Evernote helps to organize these things, so you don’t lose track of them. You can keep your bookmarks and tabs under control, while never forgetting where that article was that you wanted to read. Evernote automatically syncs with all devices so that you can access your saved pages from your smartphone or tablet as well.

Download Chrome Extension

Just because your favorite extension is only for Chrome doesn’t mean you can’t use it. A lot of people who love Chrome only love it for the extensions and are reluctant to switch to a new browser because they don’t want to lose productivity.

However, if there’s an extension not available at the Opera Store, just use Download Chrome Extension to add it to the Opera browser. It’s easy and keeps you moving with great marketing apps only available for Chrome with the increased performance of Opera.

Opera is one of the best browsers for reduced processor load and faster web browsing because of all of the built-in extensions. Opera continues to increase its offering by offering a power saving mode on all future versions which recognizes when your computer isn’t plugged in and reduces the activity in background tabs, wakes the CPU less often, pauses unused plugins, and much more.

Whether you’ve been with Opera for a long time and are a dedicated user or are looking for a browser to increase your performance and help your laptop run more optimally, Opera has a wealth of plugin options to keep you moving. Check out my done-for-you system for more ideas.

Firefox Extensions for Small Business Marketing

While the browser wars are far from over, there remain only a few significant players in today’s business world. Everyone knows that Internet Explorer comes with Windows, and the running joke is that it’s “a tool used to download Google Chrome.” Speaking of Google’s powerhouse browser, the Mountain View web client has a chokehold on the browser market, owning nearly sixty percent of the market.

Still, there are other alternative browsers which provide unique and innovative options for small business marketing. Firefox, for instance, includes add-on tools that Mozilla has developed which can help a small business keep up with larger and faster-growing markets in today’s online industry. Below are just a few of the best Firefox extensions for small business marketing.

Shareaholic

This social media sharing aggregator allows businesses to integrate all platforms into one unified application. If you have a message you want to get out, but don’t want to take the time to post it to each platform, Shareaholic provides the answer. Businesses can share content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and StumbleUpon all with the single click of a button.

Firefox Blogging Extension

The beauty of the blogging extension provided by Firefox is that it allows for marketing and promoting through the use of an online blog. In today’s marketplace, blogs are more important than ever in their use to attract visitors to your site. These integrated blogging tools make it easier to promote and provide greater visibility to your blog. It also helps with optimization of links, tags, and metadata, along with many other marketing features.

SEO Quake

In the world of online and internet marketing, everyone knows how crucial SEO can be. SEO Quake is an essential Firefox extension which allows users to set a variety of SEO parameters which can track data and provide valuable information on how a website is performing. Through its simple, yet intuitive interface, SEO Quake can offer a detailed report relating to each SEO parameter.

RiteTag

As a small business, no one needs to remind you of the importance of the Twitter hashtag. This powerful feature can drive traffic to your site when used appropriately, so it is essential to keep a weathered eye on growing trends or tags. RiteTag provides the opportunity to see how well a hashtag will perform before being used with your tweets. It can also suggest alternative tags, or point out when a hashtag is overused. Use this tool to create the best tags when marketing your business, creating campaigns for social media, or reaching out to others within your industry.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a fantastic Firefox extension to use to measure your performance against the competition. This plugin goes a long way toward showing your company’s strong points along with areas for improvement. You can view your global, national, or local rank, receive traffic overviews, determine where your traffic is coming from, and which sites are referring yours most often. SimilarWeb is a handy extension for small business marketing.

Bitly

This Firefox extension provides many features that are beneficial to small business marketing. Users can create customized, shortened links, view analytics, and share the link easily on social media. Additionally, Bitly has a component which allows for bundling similar links, which can make shortened links easier to find and manage. It will also notify you when the link you created reaches a specified number of views.

Remember, just because a browser doesn’t command the same market share as some of its competitors do, does not mean that it doesn’t offer key features, extensions, or plugins that can create marketing and social media benefits. Install and play around with some of the more interesting ones, and you’ll be sure to find the extensions that work best for your company. Check out my done-for-you system for other useful advertising tips.