Decorate-redecorate.com
Strategies You Can Apply to Your Business:
Pursue multiple streams of income:
Decorate-Redecorate.com is Barbara's main site, but she has many others on the go. Plus, she offers online and in-person consulting services. This diversity allows Barbara to take advantage of several profit streams:
There are actually seven ways to earn income online, and Barbara's using four of them on her main site. The other three are:
Not all of these profit streams will work for every site, but Barbara's sites show how several profit streams can easily be combined to create a steady, solid income.
Drive traffic to your site:
Barbara's first few months online didn't bring in the level of income she'd hoped for, and she started to feel discouraged. But once she started taking proactive steps to drive traffic to her site, she saw an immediate (and significant!) increase in sales. There are lots of ways you can quickly and easily start driving traffic to your site, including:
Mastering even one of these techniques will have you on your way to creating a steady stream of targeted traffic.
Sell your expertise:
Barbara turned knowledge she already had into an original product line. Her eBooks cost her virtually nothing to produce, so she has a really high profit margin... and it was super easy for her to compile her eBooks with easy to use software. Plus, by selling information products, Barbara is able to reach more people than she ever could as a one-person service business.
Increase sales and opt-ins with pop-ups:
When Barbara added three pop-unders to her web site, sales and opt-ins skyrocketed. While there's much debate these days about whether pop-ups and pop-unders are still effective (because of pop-up blockers), there is new technology available that might be an even better solution for you. You can find out more here:
http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/862721
Automate, automate, automate:
Barbara's using various software programs to automate almost all of her day-to-day business routine, so she only spends 30-60 minutes a day working on her site. She's used the free time this automation provides to create seven eBooks in just over a year!
3 Ways to Optimize Your Site Navigation and Make Your Sales Skyrocket!
Studies show that well-planned navigation can help boost your sales by more than 50%!
Your navigation should be structured with only one thought in mind: making it easy for your visitors to find information and buy your product or service. You have to make sure your customers are guided toward the action you want them to take, whether it’s signing up for an opt-in offer, filling out a survey, or making an actual purchase.
The better your site is at helping visitors find the information they’re seeking, the more likely it is that
they’ll view extra pages and return for another visit.
1. Streamline Your Architecture
Your web site should contain as few pages as possible. Web sites that have a lot of pages can quickly become a tangled mess if they’re not well designed.
Believe it or not, studies show that 30% to 60% of visitors drop off with every click they’re made to take! The deeper visitors have to dig to find what they’re looking for, the less likely they are to stick around and see what your site has to offer.
2. Standardize Your Navigation Menu
Your navigation HAS to be consistent! Navigation features exist to help your visitors figure out how to get around on your site. You don’t want to make this difficult for them. Otherwise, you’ll lose far too many potential customers.
Make sure your menu is located in the same place on every page of your site
Your menu should be instantly recognizable to your visitors, with the same buttons, size, and color on every page.
The menu should be placed across the top or along the left side of the page. Those are the first places people look when seeking information. Whether you choose top navigation or a left-side menu depends on what kind of web site you have.
Keep your navigation menu as simple as possible.
Also be sure to include a direct call to action in your navigation whenever possible. Tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do. For example, if you want them to learn more about your product, include a call to action like this:
Learn more about Product X!
This encourages visitors to click through to another page to read more information your product.
3. Cater to Your Customers
In order for your web site to turn visitors into buying customers, it has to cater to their needs. Focus on what your potential customers want and make sure they can easily locate it on your site.
Help them find what they're looking for
Cater to browsers and searchers
Online shoppers fall into two general groups: browsers, who like to explore and click on links that take them deeper into a site, and searchers, who would rather focus on the specific item they’re looking for. Do what you can to cater to both types.
If your site has a lot of pages, consider adding a search function to make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for.
Consider adding a table of contents
If your site is large, consider adding a table of contents (organized alphabetically or by topic) or a site map that features links to all your site pages. This should be clearly accessible from every page on your site. That way, if visitors want to find out whether your site includes certain information, they have an easy reference tool at their disposal.
Final Thoughts
Always organize your navigation with your customers in mind. It should be easy for them to find what they’re looking for. Keep your navigation menu consistent on all pages, and include a clear and obvious link back to the home page on every page, so your visitors don’t get lost.
Above all, make sure it’s easy for visitors to buy your products or services!
Your navigation should guide your visitors toward the action you want them to take, whether it’s signing up for an opt-in offer or making a purchase. And, if a link takes visitors off your site, make sure the new page opens in a separate window so visitors can easily get back to your site.
Remember, navigation isn’t the same thing as design. Your site may look really great, but if it isn’t easy for people to find what they're looking for, you're losing potential sales -- guaranteed.There are more than a few beautiful sites out there that have won design awards while still costing their owners thousands in lost sales!
A site with well-structured navigation, on the other hand, can increase the number of page views you get as well as the amount of repeat traffic you receive. By streamlining your navigation and increasing its usability, you can send your sales shooting right into the stratosphere!
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"I used the methods you told me to use and for three days my phone's been ringing! I sold over $3500 in goods and services in three days! It's the first time in 5 months that anyone had really purchased anything..."
-- Preston Reuther
wire-sculpture.com
"Just one idea from your program TRIPLED my coaching practice & income. Since I invested in this program I made over $100,000 profits."
-- Michael Bolduc
guaranteedsuccess.com
New Home Business Keyword Optimization Rules
Major search engines like Google are constantly striving to ensure that
home business sites at the top of their result pages offer invaluable
information or service to their visitors. However, webmasters who are
looking to make quick money while offering very little quality content
are always finding new ways to beat the search engines at their own game.
For this reason, search engines regularly change the methods they use
to determine relevancy and importance of your site.
Evolving Search Engines
The first step you should take is to ensure that your website will do an
effective job of turning visitors into money. The content needs to be optimized
so that both search engine visitors and human visitors both deem it to be a
useful website. Once upon a time, effective optimization entailed cramming
content with as many keywords as possible and while this once generated good
search engine results it invariably put visitors off. It is also now frowned
upon and penalized as being spam by all of the major search engines.
The Evolution And Improvement Of Algorithms
Search engines use specific algorithms to determine the relevance of your
website. The calculations from these algorithms determine where on the search
engine result pages your website will appear. In order to keep the unscrupulous
webmasters guessing and ensuring that results are always up to date, major
search engines regularly update their algorithms.
Recent Advances
The result of some of the most recent changes has seen the impetus move away
from optimizing home business websites for search engines and instead the
algorithms are now geared to promote websites that give true value to visitors.
They're not only changing, they are evolving into more intelligent and accurate
algorithms. While the use of keywords based around the relevant topic is still
important,it is also important to ensure that visitors are your main priority.
Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization is now more heavily guarded. Those who include keywords too
often will have their sites labeled as spam, whereas not enough instances of the
appropriate keyword means you won't receive the desired results. However, the
algorithms have become particularly smart and as well as the keywords you want
to target you should include other relevant keywords. Including inflexions of
keywords is one excellent way to ensure that your site is deemed to be
relevant. Inflexions are slight changes to your keyword. For example,
inflexions of the keyword "advertising" include advertise, advertised,
advertisement, etc...
Keyword Inclusion
Weight is also given to keywords that are included in certain sections of a
page. These sections include the title tag, meta tags (only relevant to smaller
search engines now), header tags, image alt tags and formatting tags (e.g.
keywords in bold or italicized) of your text. With image alt tags and hyperlink
title tags it is important that you don't simply fill these with keywords
because this will be ignored at best, and penalized at worst.
Natural Content Writing
One of the most effective ways to ensure that your home business site is
keyword optimized properly is to write the content naturally first. Once
you have done this, go through and ensure that any relevant keywords are
included throughout the text. Only place them where they would appear naturally
and remove them from anywhere where they appear awkward. Once you've written
the content you should also check the remaining factors to ensure everything is ok.
Rule #1: Focus on a well-defined niche market
Don't worry if your area of expertise seems too obscure or specialized. The beauty of the Internet is that it is the perfect medium for niche marketing! The perfect "niche market" is a specific, targeted group of individuals who need or want what you have to offer -- no matter how small or specific that group may be.
Most successful entrepreneurs get their ideas for their businesses by studying niche markets and then developing a product or service that meets their needs or solves common problems. Others make the mistake of developing a product first, then trying to find a market for that product, but that’s a backward way of doing it.
By finding the demand first, and then filling it, you’re way ahead of the game. Not only are you guaranteeing the success of your product or service (people are already actively looking for what you are about to develop), you will also be able to efficiently focus both your time and money on marketing to those people most likely to buy from you!
Once you know where your niche market is and what they want, all you need to do is put your offer in front of them, and your profits will explode!
Rule #2: Develop a strong Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
If you have a lot of competitors in your specific industry, then you need to develop your own unique selling proposition. You need to emphasize what makes you better than your competition. Explain to your customers exactly how and why they'll benefit from doing business with you as opposed to someone else. For example...
Whatever your angle, the bottom line when promoting your product or service is to emphasize what makes you special or unique. Find an obvious void in the marketplace and fill it! Adjust your company or product to meet a specific need and then specialize, specialize, specialize!
Rule #3: Spend your advertising dollars wisely
Once you have defined your market and developed your unique selling proposition, figuring out who you are advertising to, and where they hang out online suddenly becomes way easier. And this means that you can strategically place your ads where they'll pull the most targeted potential customers.
As e-business owners get tired of spending their limited advertising dollars on high priced CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions) that pull pitiful results, the demand for more performance-based advertising continues to increase. Pay for customers... not overpriced, unproven advertising.
Rule #4: Model success
Obviously there are a lot of steps involved in building a profitable e-business. You need a strategically designed web site, you need a quality product or service, you need killer sales copy, you need a flawless sales process... you need a cutting-edge marketing campaign designed to blow your competitors right out of the water!
That's why you'll be far better off -- and way ahead of your competition -- if you take the time to educate yourself. Why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from someone who has been there, spent the cash, researched the techniques, and made the mistakes for you?
Rule #5: Plan to profit
Having a well-developed business plan that includes a clear definition of how you plan to profit might seem like an obvious requirement... Unfortunately, too many people get caught up in some plan or scheme and don't take the time to research, test, and plan exactly how they're going to make their money.
An idea is NOT a business plan. It's just that... an idea. It becomes a plan when you've researched it, defined your market, figured out exactly how you're going to market yourself, and planned to profit within a set period of time.
http://acceleratedinternetwealth.kim-lar.com
Bravenet.com