Online Business Strategies – How Does Your Website Maintenance Fit In?
Sometimes the best blog posts are stories that illustrate a point. Well this one is one of those posts. I am sharing this with you from a story I heard and realized the importance and how it could have been prevented. So if this post saves only 1 person from potential loss of online business, then I’ve done my job.
An Internet Business Strategy not only includes how to build business from your website, but how to maintain your website through upgrades as well as your exit strategy. How do you exit yourself from an established website that is earning revenue for your business? These stages are just as important, if not more than building up your website.
Maintenance as far as this post is concerned includes content management (blogging goes under this), upgrading software, changing the branding/look and feel of the website, and adding new features to the website. Each of these situations should be implemented via a well thought out strategy and business process. It can be very simple and as easily documented via a spreadsheet of a Word document, but it is followed religiously.
In the case of updating your website or changing your website platform, (say from a static website to a wordpress website) you will need to have the following or a similar strategy in place before you make any updates.
Coordinate the list of your service providers whether internal or external…. Web hosting, web developer, online business strategist consultant, SEO consultant, marketing consultants, graphic designers, and social media consultants.
Document in detail, the desired changes you want to make on your website, and how you will make them.
Send these changes to your service providers and ask them how these changes might effect how […]
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10 Ways to Generate Revenue with Your Website.
Your website is much more than an online brochure. It is actually an online asset. It can be used to generate residual revenue for your business. There are a number of ways to create residual revenue streams for your business from your website that can be a healthy income addition to help fund your business growth.
So what are the ways in which you can create an income with your website? There are 10 ways to generate revenue with your website. Depending upon the site you have and your business, some of these ways may work better than others.
So what are the different ways in which you can create an income with your website? Here they are:
1) Ecommerce – selling products and services from your website. Even if you are a service oriented business, you can sell your expertise in the form of an ebook. This is an excellent way for consultants and coaches to additionally monetize their knowledge.
2) Affiliate Marketing – selling other’s products and services from your website. If you specialize in offering a certain expertise, and you believe that offering a complimentary product or service will serve your clients, then if they have an affiliate program, it would be a great way to support you clients/customers while creating additional income for yourself as well. When a visitor you refer to the vendor purchases their product, you receive a commission from that sale.
3) Text link advertising – getting paid for clicks on your website. One of the most well known and popular text link advertising is Google Adsense. Everytime someone clicks on one of these links, you get paid. Other text link companies include Kontera, and Chitika. Some work better than others depending […]
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Online Business Strategy – the Top 3 Things You Need to Know to Lock in Online Success
Creating success online is like creating success in any other endeavor in life. You first will need a roadmap of where to go and what to do at each step of the way. There are so many tactics and techniques out there that anyone can get confused and overwhelmed about what they can do to create ultimate success for their own business and online presence.
What most website owners don’t realize is that many of these courses available about how to be successful online cover some great information, yet they only cover that one small topic, and not necessarily how it fits into the whole. For instance, there might be a course on how to set up your website to be on autopilot in creating residual revenue through Clickbank, and the ideas are very sound, yet they don’t talk about how to send the traffic to your website to make the sales, or how to determine which kind of traffic is best to send.
Understanding your overall online strategy first before you either hire out someone to implement part or all of it for you, or end up taking the training you need to be able to do it yourself will give you the edge because you will know what kind of training you need, what the courses must cover to know if the will be helpful or not, and the ability to immediately implement what you have learned in the courses.
So the top 3 things you would need to know that will set the right foundation for your web strategy include:
Who is your target market? – This is absolutely crucial because this will determine how you need to communicate to your visitor, where your website […]
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Website Conversion – Increasing Web Form Submissions
Let’s face it, even though social media is taking a big place in creating an effective online strategy for your business, your own website is still a very important part of the equation. Email is still an effective way to maintain communication with your prospects, as you take them down the sales funnel as you move them from prospect to customer. The standard way of increasing your email list size is to get your prospects to sign up for your mailing list from your web site….. and to do that, the most long term effective way is to have them fill out a web form with their information.
Filling out web forms is one place where visitors drop off from your web site. So increasing the conversion rate of your web forms is not a trivial notion. Every person who fails to fill out your web for is one additional person who can’t be a potential client for your business. So what are some of the things that you can do to increase your web form submission rate?
Placement:
Where your web form is on your website makes a big difference in how many sign ups you get to your web site. You want the form to be above the fold and designed so that it grabs the visitors attention. Forms that blend into the site too much tend to get overlooked and will have fewer signups. Make the color of the form and the heading of the form stand out from the rest of the site without it being too tacky, as it will defeat the purpose of tweaking your form. You want your visitors to be able to see your form easily!
WIFM (What’s In It […]
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How do I get my web presence to generate more business?
Sign up for our free web conversion webinar on how to get more business from your website!
This is a very common question that really has several parts to it. Overall, generating more business can mean 1 of 2 different things, or both things together. The first step is to have an overall business strategy. You will need to decide on a target market and connect to that market. Who is it you love to serve? That passion will show itself on your web site, and that is what gets the clicks, phone calls, sales, email signups, etc. That passion cannot be communicated to your target market if it isn’t there.
Another factor in generating more business from your web presence is being very aware of where your traffic is coming from. What is your strategy for placing your links out on the web? Random link exchanges and placing your links on directories that are filled with junk websites will not bring you visitors worth anything. Those links may get you some search engine ranking clout, but in the long run, it’s what you receive is not worth the effort it takes to do all of that insignificant directory submissions. 4 or 5 good, quality and targeted directories will give you better results than 300 poor quality general directories. So take the time up front to develop your strategy before you move forward on some random tactic here and there.
So what are the steps to generating more business?
Determine your target market – the more defined and the smaller the better. – you will be able to more easily connect with that market when it shares more characteristics in common. Find out as much as you […]
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Are your website visitors leaving as soon as they get to your website?
Your website is your online chance to connect to your target market. It is the chance to influence them to follow your call to action to have them call your sign up for your mailing list or even purchase something. So if your visitors are leaving as soon as they get to your website, then you are leaving business on the table.
A website metric that you want to pay attention to is something called the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site on the same page that the landed on your site…. so basically what that means is they come to your website, look at the page for about 5 seconds and then hit the back button or enter another URL in the browser address bar. A bounce rate of about 75% means that 3 out of every 4 people who come to your website leave as soon as they land on your website. This isn’t a good rate. You want to get your bounce rate down to below 30%.
What could be going on with a high bounce rate?
Your traffic is not targeted at all. People are coming to your website and expecting something else entirely.
Your traffic is targeted and whatever page your visitors are landing on, they don’t feel connected to your website, or like they can get what they need from your website.
You can place a form on your website asking visitors if they have found what they are looking for. That should give you some insight into your target market and what they are expecting, or what they feel is missing from your website. The information gathered from this informal survey will help you […]
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WordPress.com VS WordPress.org
I get asked this question from time to time… “what is the difference between
wordpress.com and wordpress.org?” Well they are both wordpress software, however the biggest difference is that wordpress.com is the solution hosted on WordPress’ servers (for free), and wordpress.org hosts the software files you can download so you can host the software on your own server. WordPress.org also has a thriving community where wordpress users can exchange ideas and get help to some of the problems they may be experiencing.
“So great! Why would I want to pass up free hosting?” you might say. Well, a big thing to take into consideration is that wordpress.com offers limited functionality than hosting the software on your own server. There is also the case that if you are selling a product or service and you are using your blog to do it (like affiliate marketing), then you would be violating wordpress.com’s terms of service, and at any time, your blog could be shut down. There is nothing like having your lively hood taken away overnight. I once had a client ask me about this very question as she had her blog hosted on wordpress.com and was wanting to use it to promote her business. I told her that it wasn’t a good idea and that she should invest the $10/month to host her own website using the wordpress software from wordpress.org. I told her that it may be a while before wordpress.com shuts her site down, but for $10/month, I think it’s worth the piece of mind. That’s like what, 2 1/2 lattes a month? If you have your Internet business strategy set […]
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Web Conversion – What is Missing?
One of the biggest factors that determine the success rate of your web conversion is do your visitors feel like you can help them or solve their problems? If they feel connected enough to the message you have on your web site then they will follow the call to action. If they don’t feel connected, then they won’t follow the call to action. Pretty simple.
There is one factor that will also determine if you web site is connecting to your visitors… That is having the right visitors in the first place. Pre-qualifying your traffic is something that most people don’t think about. They focus mostly on getting as much traffic to their website as possible but they don’t focus as much on how relevant is that traffic to their website? Remember, not everyone is your client. The more specialized you are, the more you can charge. The “less is more” concept totally fits this situation.
I’ll give you an example…. a friend of mine, who focuses on teaching people to connect to their love so they can live the life they dream about, years ago had the domain name securelove.com. She was getting a lot of traffic but no one as calling her up. Well it turns out that securelove.com attracted the crowd of people who were into S&M and bondage. Well, not really her target market was it? Needless to say, that was why her conversion rate was so abysmal. Putting more focus on targeting your traffic will have a phenomenal impact on your website’s conversion success.
What are some ways to really target your traffic? Stick to relevant websites that are related to your target. SEO is also a very effective means of generating […]
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The One Thing that Increases Your Website Conversion Rate the Most
One of the biggest things that is often overlooked is website conversion. Most businesses focus on getting more traffic to their website. They spend thousands and thousands of dollars getting that traffic to their website, yet they don’t seem to realize that if visitors are coming to your website and not taking an action, those efforts of getting the traffic to your website have gone to waste.
Before I go further, let’s talk about web conversion… what is a web conversion rate?
A website’s conversion rate is equal to the number of people who take a desired action on your website divided by the number of people who visit your website. I say desired action because leaving your website is also an action, but not desired! So a 3% conversion rate (slightly above average) means that out of every 100 people that come to your website, only 3 people take an action!
So with all those visitors who escape your clutches, what’s a poor website owner to do? Well enter the art of increasing your web conversion rate! There are few processes that will gradually allow you to increase your conversion rate, including things like split testing of various website elements. If you are really good, you can get your conversion rate to up to 8%, which is phenomenal!
The whole split testing thing can take some time and lots of effort and someone who knows what they are doing. If you are fortunate enough to understand how to do it yourself, and/or fortunate enough to find someone qualified enough and affordable enough for you, then you can expect to see an increase in your income. This is a longer term effort and will eventually reach a plateau […]
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