Find out how to increase eCommerce revenue and make more money online!

How to Increase eCommerce Revenue

A lot of online marketing people, whether they’re affiliate marketers or AdSense bloggers, know how to tread water but they couldn’t swim one mile in a triathalon. They might have read some website about how to make money online and got pretty good at it, or it’s something they do in their spare time to have a little extra money in their pocket.

I’ve worked in online marketing for years so I’ve learned a few ways that you can use to get more traffic to your site and convert more of that traffic to leads and sales, thereby increasing your eCommerce revenue.

1) Make sure people can find you on Google

These days, people usually find websites through search engine queries instead of via hyperlinks. Because of this, you need to make sure that people can find you on Google and other search engines if you want your site to get any traffic. The best way to do this is to hire an expert company to build backlinks to your webpage using anchor text for terms that people who would buy your product or click your AdSense ads would search for. This sounds fairly straightforward since it’s such a basic part of online marketing, but there’s more to it than just looking for “SEO companies” on Google and hiring one to build links to your site.

Beware of spammers

A lot of people hiring an SEO company for the first time make the mistake of hiring an outsourced company that gets lots of low-quality links from spammy sites. Usually, these companies employ people in third world countries who can barely speak English to write articles for them, and therefore the writers can’t get articles on any websites except websites owned by other writers who barely speak English.

This works fine for a few months but eventually the spammy links get the website they’re linking to delisted from Google’s search index. The only way to fix it is to get the company to remove the links, which could take weeks.

2) Make sure people see your site

Once people have found your site, they need to only need to stay on it long enough to register as a lead or complete a transaction. If you have an AdSense advertising blog, this means they need to stay long enough to click on a banner ad, but if you’re selling something or registering leads then they need to be there long enough to hooked. They’ve already clicked a search engine result for your page, so shouldn’t they already be interested in what you have to offer?

Utilize site acceleration

Once people click on your site, you need to make sure that the site loads fast enough so that they don’t get frustrated and lead. In the past year or so this has become an even bigger problem for website owners with the advent of tablets where you only have to “swipe back” to go back to the search results page. The solution is to find a good site acceleration service. Accelerated websites are hosted by super-fast servers so that they load faster, which means less people will leave your site waiting for it to load. On top of using top-notch servers, good site acceleration services like MaxCDN host a site’s content on multiple servers across the English-speaking world, which means that somebody in New York won’t have to wait for a page to load from a server in San Francisco or Australia.

About the author: David Henzel is the Vice President of Marketing at content delivery network and site acceleration services provider NetDNA.

A major advantage of inbound marketing is the ability to easily track the source of your leads and traffic. One simple way to both track and route leads to the optimum responder is to use different email accounts.

Here are some examples to illustrate exactly what we mean:

Here are some example email addresses a  car dealer in the U.K. might use:

• Separate email addresses for different sales or service departments: used.cars@uk.com, new.cars@uk.com, body.shop@uk.com, service@uk.com, parts@uk.com on business cards so when a potential buyer sends an email it is routed to the correct department.
• A dealer that carries multiple brands sold by different sales people could know immediately which vehicle someone was interested in if the email addresses on their salespersons business cards were make or model specific: alpha.romeo@uk.com or mercedes.benz@uk.com or honda.accord@uk.com versus honda.civic@uk.com – the possibilities are endless for both new or used automobile sellers.
• Different email addresses for different sales channels: cars.tv@uk.com, cars.radio@uk.com, cars.flyer@uk.com, etc.

The same tracking strategy would work if you had a store selling more than one product type. For example:

• Obtain a separate email address for each product type: flooring@us.com, lighting@us.com, plumbing@us.com – you get the idea.
• Here’s another example: mens.shoes@eu.com, womens.shoes@eu.com, childrens.shoes@eu.com, purses@eu.com.

Maybe you advertise in specific magazines. You could use email addresses like this:

• fashion.elle@eu.com or makeup.elle@eu.com or shoes.elle@eu.com
• fashion.vogue@eu.com
• fashion.glamour@eu.com

By using a separate email address for each product or service, when an email comes in you will immediately know what that person is interested in – and if you use different email addresses for different advertising channels – you can even know what type of ad they saw and how they found you.

These are not JUST for tracking either! How many times have you written down an email address or taken a business card and looking at it later been unable to recall why you have it?

If your email address IS the reason imagine how many more potential customers will remember why they have that email address!

The shortest premium email addresses on the most exclusive domains mentioned in these examples are available from emailme email service.

EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDERS:

• Warning to Consumers: Major Email Security Breach – What to Do

My friend Regan recently took over the marketing at the Ministry of Paintball.

He came across an interesting inbound marketing tactic by accident. He released a new advert which is a little risky.

Well interestingly it was picket up and got blog coverage in a number of places and some good links back.  You could say it is good link bate

Steve Hall said “With the image of a scantily clad woman wearing a camo print bikini and black leather boots while holding some heavy paintball artillery, the double entendre headline, “It’s time to play,” cuts to the heart of the matter. It is, indeed, time to play. One way or another. Depending, of course, upon how you choose to interpret the ad.”

I know his boss at the Ministry of Paintball had some questions but the ad seems to have had a good reception so far.

Any one for paintball J

The Affiliate Marketing Awards have just been launched by Murray Newlands

They will take place in San Francisco on the 12th of April 2011 at the W Hotel, sponsored by VigLink.com and HasOffers.com.  

“The Affiliate Marketing Awards will shine a spotlight on the year’s most creative and effective campaigns, partnerships, advertisers and publishers. Top affiliates, influencers, innovators and strategists will gather to recognize the latest talent in on-line marketing. It’s a can’t-miss event for anyone involved in affiliate marketing.”

Judges include top affiliates and entrepreneurs like Shawn Collins, Joseph Morin, Peter Bordes, Jay Weintraub, Oliver Roup and Steve Hall.

It will be an event not to miss so book your ticket to the Affiliate Marketing Awards at: http://theaffiliatemarketingawards.com/buy-tickets/

Over the past few years, content marketing has taken many steps forward and in that time has taken its place as one of the most talked about areas of business strategy. Over the past year it has become more and more apparent that content marketing is moving up a gear and that 2011 looks like the year that it really hones its strategies for success.

For any business considering focusing more time and resources on content marketing, it can sometimes be difficult to know exactly where to direct its attention. Of course, no one has a crystal ball (or at least one that works), but there are a number of key areas where companies can be confident that content marketing will be moving towards. The following three are arguably the most significant.

1. E-Newsletters

Over recent years, e-newsletters have been used by all kinds of organizations as well as individuals. The problem has been that many businesses haven’t really developed a strategy for what to include in these communications. This has lead to many half-hearted attempts to communicate with customers which in turn has somewhat sullied the reputation of e-newsletters.

This is now being regarded as a shame as the true potential of the format has become clear. They are a simple yet really effective way to communicate with customers (both current and prospective) and they manage to bridge the gap between old-fashioned newsletters and the instant feedback world of the Internet. This means many customers are more comfortable being contacted this way and therefore more open to the newsletters’ contents.

The key goal for the e-newsletter in 2011 is to really focus on content marketing, and tighten up approach and content to provide a dynamic platform to fully exploit the untapped potential of the e-newsletter.

2. Social Media

Although social media seems to be relentlessly marching ever onwards, there have been fewer than expected inroads from content marketing. One of the reasons for this has been the reluctance of companies to invest time and effort into really getting to grips with what is for many a very exciting area.

The problem is that some businesses simply fail to create engaging social media platforms that can draw in customers and therefore create an environment where content marketing can be most effective.

However, many companies now realize the importance of this and therefore it seems certain that 2011 will be the year where the improvement of social media is given a very high priority.

3. Strategy

For many companies, close inspection reveals that they simply do not have a formal marketing strategy. This may seem to beggar belief at first glance, but it should be pointed out that social media is a rapidly developing technology made up of a number of platforms.

It has not always been easy to bring all the seemingly disparate strands together. This is now all changing as many businesses are beginning to appreciate the importance of a developed strategy. This means that 2011 will probably be the year in which content marketers really get to grips with a fully fledge marketing strategy. By doing this, they stand a much better chance of creating content that is engaging and will result in a much more effective use of the medium.

The year 2011 looks likely to be a key year in terms of content marketing in three main areas. By fully coming to grips with e-newsletters, social media and by developing a thorough and fully thought out marketing strategy, content marketers should be confident in 12 months of dynamic creativity that results in improved performance and greater market penetration.

Want to Learn More About Social Media & Content Strategies?

Don’t miss the Social Media Marketing Las Vegas January 12, 2011 (the day after Affiliate Summit West) at the Flamingo Hotel.

About the author: Carla Sanchez is a freelance writer for a world leader at online marketing services. Software such as cms software enables you to better understand your customers and increase your sales.

There’s something to be said for marketing that doesn’t send you straight to a “Buy Now” page, but gives you some entertainment along the way. Headline Shirts Gift Finder does just that, and they do it in an intelligent way. It’s a good laugh, and they’ve got some funny t shirts – one of my favorites being the flying Kangaroo from Wikipedia:

By way of explanation, they break down the truth about Wikipedia:

Some say Wikipedia can’t be trusted, but I think it’s great for getting basic info. Like, did you know that the Civil War and the War of 1805 were actually separate battles, despite occurring in the same century?

I also learned that pornography has been around since the dawn of sex. Speaking of sex, Gordon Jump once guest-starred on an episode of Diff’rent Strokes as a pedophile who attempted to molest Arnold and his best friend Dudley (played by Shavar Ross, who has been married since 1992 and has about two children).

Speaking of the eighties, John Lennon (born Johnathan Chaz Ono Lennon) was shot and later died during the 1980s while wearing his favorite “New York City” t-shirt during his last concert at Mets Stadium.

Speaking of t-shirts, check out this Wikipedia t-shirt. Did you know that Kangaroos are actually not born with wings but develop them later in life? Guess where I learned that!

To find your own holiday ridiculousness, or just find something to look interested in for 5 minutes in the office, check out their Headline Shirts Holiday Gift Finder quiz. You won’t be sorry. Well, maybe you will.

It was 1993 when the Adobe corporation started calling its Camelot file format by its new and permanent nomenclature: Portable Document Format or now widely referred to simply as PDF. Initially, this new way of generating documents was completely proprietary and the only way an author could create the file was if they had invested in Adobe’s Acrobat software.

As the years progressed, each subsequent version of the Acrobat development program added more features to the permit the user to create interesting end user files. The only real challenge early on was that file sizes were quite large and the cost of software required to make the files was somewhat north of inexpensive.

Fortunately, Adobe began a multi-year campaign to embed PDF usage across the Internet. By giving away its Acrobat Reader program for free, end users were able to download a lite version of the fuller Acrobat software which allowed them to easily read, save and print PDF files.

As more advanced features like bookmarks, 2-D and 3-D image integration and even clickable links made their way into the document specifications, the reader application also grew and developed the abilities to handle these and other interactive features.

Today, the PDF specification has been released to the open source community and enterprising developers have been creating derivative works around PDF since 2008. Anyone can get in on the action by simply applying for a free license to use the PDF specification. A large number of products and companies have been created bringing a much wider offering of reader, converter, and creator applications to the public.

If the work you do requires the creation or editing of PDF files, you’re in luck. There are literally hundreds of programs with a wide range of abilities (and price tags!) available to aid you in your process. As more folks become savvy in creating PDFs, users become accustomed to features that only a few years ago were considered extremely advanced.

Take for instance the bookmarking capability. Today, if you are not including this in the documents you make, your end users may consider your products somewhat elementary. Especially with longer PDF documents, the ability to quickly jump from one section to another can be very important to readers with limited time to spend on your file.

Much like placing a physical bookmark in your book so you can quickly and easily pick back up where you last left your reading, the PDF bookmark feature allows you to annotate where you are in the digital file.

Table of contents are another aspect of bookmarking which allows you readers to easily skip to desired portions of your file and get to what’s important to them when they need it.

Another advanced feature related to bookmarking is the ability for the document creator to indicate whether or not the bookmark sidebar will show automatically when a reader opens the file. This can be an effective graphical way of displaying various important sections of your document. By choosing to show the bookmarks on document opening, you’ve made it just a bit easier for your readers to use and they’ll appreciate the hard work you put into the PDF.

Being able to include video playback regions, integrate working, interactive forms, insert live, clickable links and many other advanced features continue to show up in the PDF specification. When you combine these features with PDF’s ability to work on most platforms the value and benefit of truly “portable” document files continues to prove worthwhile and should do so in the foreseeable future.

This is a guest post by Kevin Harris, a freelance writer who uses doc to pdf software to turn posts to ebooks.

Gone are the days of the simple telephone ring. Thanks to SmartPhones, myriad apps, and the incredible leaps in cell phone technology over the last two years, everyone now has access to literally thousands of songs, jingles, and harmonic tones to alert them of an incoming call – even your grandmother has a custom ringtone for each of her grandchildren.

And while there is no doubt that this seemingly infinite library of catchy and personal ringers is cool and excited, there is equally no doubt that a huge portion of potential ringtones are not necessarily appropriate for a business environment.

Check out the list of top 10 most unprofessional business tones to make sure you don’t end up on a potential employer’s “Do Not Call” list!

10. Jay-Z’s “On To The Next One” – the king of Rap doesn’t disappoint with his major hit “On to the Next One,” about the topics Jay loves singing about the most: making money, making albums, and making his rivals jealous. The thirty second sample iTunes sells as a ringtone is absolutely slammin’, however its gangster flair mixed with some choice expletives and non-PC names for your wannabe rivals make this ringtone a big no-no for anyone looking to be taken seriously in the workplace.

9. “Busy Tone” – This little gem mimics the noise you get when you call and the line’s busy. While it gets points for ingenuity, it loses lots of points for the obnoxious sound it makes. Unless you want to drive you boss, prospects, and coworkers crazy, scratch this ringtone completely.

8. Lil’ Wayne’s “We Be Steady Mobbin’” – In the thirty second clip you can download on iTunes for your iPhone, this ringtone uses just about every word Mrs. Cheney fights to keep censored on the TV and radio. Unless you’re working in the record business (and even then this is a stretch), this ringer will definitely make you stand out in business meetings for all the wrong reasons.

7. “Rotary Phone Ringer” – While this is kind of cute in some respects, it is mostly disarming. Having your digital cell phone sound like a rotary phone from the eighties is really just confusing, especially when it goes off in your pocket and no one can figure out when an outdated phone was installed in the room.

6. “Zombie 1” – While the sound of a Zombie’s breath made it to twenty two on iTunes fifty most popular ringtones list, chances are your business contacts won’t appreciate the terror and freakish implications the respiration of the living dead suggests. Keep your love of bad horror flicks to yourself if you want to get ahead in your job.

5. La Roux’s “Bulletproof” – The catchy dance floor anthem is a great accompaniment to a rocking Saturday night, but decidedly inappropriate for a workplace ringtone. Spare your dignity, especially if you’re a guy, by saving this ringer for your friends who know better than to call you between nine and five.

4. Timberland’s “Carry Out” – Chart topping and featuring the fabulous Justin Timberlake, this song is smooth and sexy. Yet as a ringtone, the cowbell-heavy beat sounds more like a McDonald’s jingle and will likely confuse your colleagues more than impress them.

3. “New York Traffic Jam” – Everyone hates traffic, especially your comrades in business who have to fight it on a daily basis to do their jobs. Don’t torment the world more by adding this ringtone to your phone.

2. “River Flowing” – “Excuse me, Jim, it seems there is a river sound coming from your pants.” “Oh no, it’s not a river, that’s just my Blackberry.” ‘nuff said.

1. Miley Cyrus’s “Party In The USA” – Number one smash beloved by all, this song was an instant ringtone around the country. While chances are your boss cranks this song up in his Beemer on the way home, he doesn’t want to admit it, and certainly doesn’t want to hear it at work. And who really wants to admit they are a Hannah Montana fan? Save your reputation and stick to the vibrate option instead.

This guest post was brought to you in the spirit of fun by Vern who loves music ringtones, but in moderation.

Whenever you are marketing, your first impression may be made through your social media networks or with your website. So just like being dressed in a suit is much more impressive than being in tattered clothes, having a great web design is better than having something that looks like it was designed when websites were first born. And if you are not looking to build a blog using platforms such as WordPress, or you do not want to use website templates, what do you to develop your website content?

Shareware, freeware, open source software, proprietary programs. There are literally hundreds of thousands of computer programs in existence today. Web development professionals have their favorites which they download and place in their toolboxes. Even if you’re not a working pro, web development software downloads are probably a part of your life to some extent.

Some of the more popular titles are listed and discussed below. Just because you’re satisfied with the tools you currently use doesn’t mean there isn’t something better out there for you. Check out the list to determine if you might find a program that will do a task better, faster or have more Swiss Army functions that could help you reduce the number of tools cluttering your box.

7 Web Development Software Applications and Tools

• FrontPage 2003 – One of the earliest WYSIWYG web development programs, this software download is now used mostly by amateurs who are hoping to quickly, easily and without code knowledge, develop web pages and entire web sites.
• XAMPP – For slightly advanced web developers, XAMPP allows you to set up all the web server software needed on your local computer. Now you don’t even need an active Internet connection to code and develop web sites.
• WebLog Expert Lite – The longer you develop web based applications and sites, the more your clients will want to know their success (or failure). This download provides useful graphical renditions of the data collected by your web server’s logs.
• PHP Designer 2007 – Though a few years old, this program is still quite popular with developers wishing to improve analyzing, editing, publishing, and debugging processes coded into their applications.
• AdSense Earnings Tool – If you have webpages receiving appreciable amounts of visitor traffic you probably are attempting to monetize them with Google’s AdSense program. This tool will help you gain more control and understanding over your campaigns.
• WebLog DB – Power developers are constantly looking to refine their web applications. This program provides easy log data insertion into databases for advanced statistical analysis.
• WebShot – Designers and GUI developers often need to grab screen shots of the web pages they are working on. WebShot is a newer program that seems to be quite popular based upon how much it’s being download.

While the above are only 7 programs out of hundreds of thousands, the real take away is there are always new and improved versions of the tools you currently use in your web development. If you’re not constantly evaluating and downloading new applications, you might be missing out on time savings, bandwidth reductions, and other methods to improve your work process and end product.

Your Web Development Toolbox

With hundreds of thousands of software titles, and many programs performing similar functions, which web development software do you download and use most?

This is a guest post by Vern Marker, a freelance writer and web designer who tends to download program after program for various needs.

Is your Inbound Marketing really connecting? In this video, Brian Solis points out what may not yet be obvious to many who are still “excited about the number of followers” they have on Twitter instead of “actually connecting to people uniquely”.

“We’re not connected as much by relationships as we think; we’re connected by ideas. We’re connected by the things we’re passionate about.”

Do you still think Social Media is about Technology rather than Sociology? Watch this video and you may change your mind:

After watching that video you’ll know why he is such a popular speaker. Here are some other excellent videos featuring Brian:

• Brian Solis Word of Mouth Tips Video from a Gas Pedal Word of Mouth Event
• Brian Solis Social Media Video – Social Media Primer from a Honda Motor Corp. and SoCal Action Sports Network Keynote Speech

Brian is a popular speaker at Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing Events including Influence People‘s upcoming Email Social Media Marketing Event September 17, 2010 in San Francisco.

There may still be Early Bird Tickets available to hear what innovative methods Brian and many other leading marketing experts, email companies and brands recommend to maximize your Social Media results.  Use that link or enter discount code iem18 to save an additional 10% off your ticket.