7 Simple Traffic Getting Tactics

Here’s 7 ways you can tap  into more traffic to help build your business.

1. Write a Roundup Post

A roundup post is an entry that speaks about a group of people in your niche. This strategy is used to build relationships with influencers in your niche. Let them know that you are reaching out to them and promoting their content. More often than not, this leads to them returning you the favor by blogging or tweeting about you.

If they are indeed influential in your niche, their return of favor will be sending massive traffic your way.

2. Interview Experts in Your Niche

If you can get interviews with experts in your niche, your credibility will be greatly boosted thus generating more traffic. All you have to do is ask: email experts a list of questions that is relevant to your niche and get some great content from their answers.

At the same time, build relationships with these experts because you never know when a powerful partnership will come knocking at your door.

3. Twitter Traffic

Twitter can be a huge source of traffic for you if you know how to build your Twitter network on a daily basis. Your goal with Twitter is to network and build relationships and these relationships can lead to more traffic. One Twitter post can become so viral that it can send tens of thousands of visitors to your sites if done in the right manner.

4. Create a Facebook Page

Studies have shown that people are spending more time on Facebook than any other website on the internet. By being in front of such traffic, you have the best chance of being seen on the vast web. Create a Facebook Page for your website and install a “Like Box” into your website so that your visitors will know you are on Facebook and join as a fan on your Facebook Page.

5. Create an Infographic

If you are great with design, you can take the statistics of any topic and create an infographic to represent the figures. Infographics can go viral very easily as people like to share them all over the web. Do remember to include your website URL within the infographic so that you can get the traffic when it is re-blogged elsewhere on the internet.

You know what? Forget about being great with design, you can outsource it to someone else to get it done for you!

6. Build an Email List

Building an email list enables you to drive traffic at the click of a button. With a substantial number of subscribers in your email list, you can also build a community around your site or even your niche and eventually make sales after you have
established relationship with your list.

However, it takes time, effort and the right strategies to attract people to subscribe to your list. Also, it is essential to use an autoresponder service to build your email list. You can check out Aweber, iContact or
GetResponse for autoresponder services.

7. Use Squeeze Pages

A squeeze page is a landing page used to capture prospective leads on the internet who are interested in what you have to offer. In this way, you will build a traffic getting list very quickly. You can giveaway a special report, coupons, an eBook or anything at all that will have value for your visitors.

These are just a few of the ways to get additional traffic to your site so you can build your online business.

Then, through Google’s Adwords program an advert appears on the front-page in the top 3 positions, or on the right-hand-side. For example if you have a dog grooming business, then the most likely search would be for ‘dog grooming your city name’.

The great news is that the advertiser only pays for their advert if someone clicks on it, hence: pay per click. And you must bid for the search phrases (keywords) that you want your ad to appear for. The more you bids the more chance you have of your ad being seen.

The Secret To Successful Adwords Campaigns

One of the secrets to successful Google Adwords campaigns is making your ad copy as relevant to the search query as possible. Other companies offer a pay per click advertising service, but Google AdWords is by far the most popular.

AdWords can be broken down into six stages al of which help to make sure that you can get the best possible return on your advertising dollars. Let’s have a brief look at each of those stages…

1. Keyword research:

Google provides you with a keyword planner tool that helps you to identify related keywords that you could potentially sue to drive qualified leads to your landing pages. They give you an approximate idea of how much it will cost to bid for pay per click adverts on them.

There are no limits to the amount of keywords you can use. Keep in mind though that the aim of the game is to convert this traffic to leads or sales. So over time you will need to determine what keywords are working to drive ‘buyers’ to your landing pages as opposed to just browsers or tire kickers.

I usually find that it can take up to 2 or 3 months of monitoring and measuring results before you have the Adwords formula working at optimum levels. And even if you start with 100 keywords, it will almost always be the case that there are just a handful that drive the bulk of the traffic.

2. Build your pay per click campaigns:

You then build your AdWords Campaigns. Groups of related keywords are put into ad groups. Each keyword was given an opening bid, and copy was written for adverts for each ad group. Multiple ads are created and tested (split tested) for each ad group.

4. Landing pages:

A landing page is the first page people see after they click the ad text on your AdWords ads. These pages need to be relevant to the ad groups and keywords that you are targeting for the page. Google have an algorithm that looks at the ‘quality score’ of your campaigns based on the quality of the ads and landing pages triggered by the keyword.

Typically, the higher the quality score the better your campaign will run and the lower the cost-per-click you will pay and the better position you ad will receive on the front-page (i.e. higher up).

5. Tracking, measuring and reporting:

Impressions (how often your ads appear), click-through-rate (how often your ads are clicked on), response rates (how often people respond to your site’s offers) are all measured and monitored for your
different keywords, ad groups and ads.

6. Campaign optimization:

The work of a good online AdWords campaign is never done. Using that monitoring data, keywords, ads and landing pages can be constantly refined and improved upon. Google make sure that they give you all the tools you need to be able to optimize your campaigns for the best results.

They offer FREE world class online Adwords training for you to easily get started with Adwords and learn how to effectively master the basics, manage ads, measure results, take care of the billing and be educated on their programs.

7. Keep on going!

Keep what is working. Improve or lose what isn’t working and move on to the next campaign.

 The Major Benefits of Adwords (PPC)

Pay per click advertising has made other forms of online advertising, such as CPM (Cost Per 1000 impressions), banners and classified ads, pale in comparison. While they still have their place it is possible to spend money on these types of adverts and not see a single response in exchange.

Pay per click advertising is different. Your ad could be seen thousands of times by plenty of different people, but unless someone actually clicks on your advert you won’t pay a cent for the privilege. In truth, AdWords advertising is heralding a whole new age of cost-effective online advertising.

With AdWords PPC advertising you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. With normal offline advertising you have to pay for people to see your ad whether or not they respond. This makes it a highly targeted form of advertising that puts your business right in front of the right people at the right time simply.

You can also use AdWords for the following reasons:

• Flexible – AdWords is flexible. If you have a new piece of content an ad can go up today – with organic SEO he may have to wait some time before he is listed on the first page of Google results.
• Control over location – you can control the locations (countries, cities and even postcodes) and when (i.e. what day(s) and even what time of day) your ads appear in relation to the keywords and sites you choose. With organic SEO this is possible, but it is a lot of work and certainly not possible to choose a day, or time!
• Multiple formats – with pay per click he can advertise on sites in many formats on the Google content network – this is normally faster and cheaper than going to each site individually.
• Long tail keywords – most importantly, you can target ‘long tail’ keywords – three or four word keywords – these can be much harder to target with organic SEO and of course take 10x the amount of time to get ranked (if ever).
• Control over budget. You get to set how much money you want to spend per day on your ads. Most people new to Adwords typically start out low and then scale up as they increase confidence that it is a good fit for their business. This will vary greatly depending on the product or service competition levels and the size of the location you are targeting.

Overall, Adwords is a good fit for almost any product or service you want to promote online. The key is that the more skilled you get at using it, the better your results will be. Your choices really are to either invest the time yourself in learning how to run it yourself, or pay a qualified Adwords professional to to run it on your behalf.

However, there is some validity to the doom and gloom arguments about SEO. What has really happened in the industry is that SEO as a standalone technical exercise has become redundant. As well, low quality (often outsourced or software driven) tactics have also met the fate of the Google’s jungle beasts:

• Comment spam – Dead
• SEO mini-sites and low quality link sites – Dead
• EMD’s (Exact Mtach Domains – Dead
• Outsourced linkbuilding – Dead
• PBN’s (Personal Blog Networks) – Dead
• Thin Content – Dead
• Bad On-Page SEO – Dead

So, while standalone Search Engine Optimization may be dead, holistic SEO that puts your visitors first is more important than ever.

What does Holistic SEO look like for you? Let’s have a look at some of the many different elements:

• Make sure that you have all your technical website issues in check. There are many things to consider and Google’s PDF Starter Guide to SEO will give you a good overview.
• Do keyword research to discover what language your audience uses to search for the type of information you offer.
• Refer to this research as you write (or edit) your pages to make sure you are using the same language your audience understands.
• Itemize all your site’s pages in an Excel spreadsheet, assign relevant keywords to each page, and then write custom meta page titles and meta page descriptions for each page in this sheet. We call this document an “SEO Matrix” and it’s a great way to keep everything organized for yourself and anyone else who administers your site.
• For keywords and topics you address meaningfully on your site (and want to show up for in search), make a point of conducting competitive research to see how established your competitors are and how hard you will have to work to show up ahead of them in search.
• Become a regular content creator (i.e. get a Blog or News section on our site and get to work) and publish regular, valuable content about the topics most important to you and your visitors.
• This valuable content is then great material to share though your social media channels. It gives you meaningful material for sharing and drives traffic back to your site.
• Leverage your content and social media to network with other people as passionate about your subject matter as you are. You’ll soon find your content much more widely read and, if your content is worthy, you’ll find people linking to it. Natural, relevant links like these are the absolute most powerful kind of links to get and they show Google that you are a respected source of information for people searching on the topics/keywords you cover.
• As you build a reputation, it will also become possible to engage with larger sites and even news outlets, who may also write about you and link to you, which is hugely powerful.
• Consider other types of content your audience might like: recorded interviews, videos, podcasts, etc. Make sure to follow SEO best practices for each of these medium and make a point of sharing these pieces of content as far and wide as you responsibly can (and focus on engagement!).
• Make sure engagement is your top priority. Earning +1s (Google +), likes and shares are all great ways to build awareness and traffic.
• Understand “offsite best practices” for SEO and make sure to responsibly apply them. This includes signing up for Google Authorship so that Google can track your content and come to see you as a respected content creator.

This list is by no means complete, but the theme is to make sure you are using all your tools in an organized, authentic manner.

Quite simply, you want to leverage SEO best practices as you discover what your audience is interested in, create content around it, share that content and link the complimentary content together internally on your site. If you do this strategically and responsibly, you’ll find that SEO can be a huge contributor to your business.

As with any online marketing strategy don’t put all your eggs in the one basket. While SEO can and does help business to get leads, sales and customers, it’s good to use both paid and free traffic sources to keep your leads flowing into whatever sales funnel you are building.

No matter what type of marketing you do always remember the first rule of marketing is to test and measure results and know your stats. If you fail to do this then it’s as good as driving your car at night with a blindfold on and expecting to get wherever you are going safely – it’s never going to happen!

By knowing EXACTLY what your conversions numbers are and where they come from you can then easily upscale your marketing strategies anytime you like to grow your business and make more money.

What if you’re a plumber, dentist or hairdresser and really only service customers within a 30 km radius of your home or business premises? What if you sell fishing gear at a small beach side town, or pool chemicals at a suburban shopping mall. The trend to use the Internet as a source of information and to find suppliers is increasing rapidly, especially for the younger generation of consumers and business people who are net savvy.

More and more Internet searches are for local terms such as “pizza delivery in Sunnyvale” or “electrician in Sunnyvale”. As a local business you don’t need a large or expensive web site to be effective – just keep it simple. If you are not competing nationally, just present yourself well to your local target market such as local residents and those within driving distance.

8 Online Marketing Tips For Attracting Local Clients.

There are many ways that you can cost effective online marketing to attract and steady flow of leads, sales and customers to your website. Let’s check out what some of them are:

1. Include your physical contact details on every page.

This seems obvious but not all small local businesses do it. Include your physical address and your local phone number with area code. This helps visitors and search engines look for this level of detail to connect you with your location in the search results. If you don’t have a physical address, get a mailbox at your local post office and list this address on your site.

2. Give more details about your physical location on your Contact Us page.

Include your street address, city, state, postcode and local phone at the top of the page where search engines can find it quickly. Also provide directions that include as many location descriptors as you can – this helps both visitors and search engines.

3. Link to a Google Map on your Contact Us page.

This is one of the easiest ways of showing your business location via a map and the service is free. Simply visit Google Maps and click on ‘Put your business on Google Maps’. Adding a Google Map also helps your website be listed in search results for your suburb.

4. Include your location in Page Titles.

Page titles are one of the most important things search engines use to understand what you page is about and index it in the search results. So including your location acts as another sign post for visitors and search engines to tell them where you are located.

5. Include a list of all the suburbs you service.

If your local business is located in Sunnyvale, but you also service 10 other neighboring suburbs, list these on a suitable place on your web site. This might be your Home page, About page or Contact Us page. You can also include these suburbs in your meta tags for those search engines that still use this information.

6. Build local links.

Exchange links with other local business that are in your local area and that are complimentary to your business but not in direct competition.

7. Submit to local online directories and yellow pages.

This might include your local council website; local business directories and other online directories that will help your website get found by people doing local searches.This will help you get additonal leads to your site as well as extra links for the Search engines to find.

8. Local pay per click keywords.

If you use Google pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords include location specific keywords and narrow where your ad is displayed so you do not waste your online marketing spend displaying your ad to those outside your service area.

These are just a few of the ways that you can dominate in your local area, tap into a steady flow of new leads, customers and sales from your website… and build your business using online marketing strategies.

1. Decide who your Ideal Customer Is.

The very first thing you need to do before starting any business is to decide who are you actually trying to ATTRACT to your website…Building a website is easy. All it takes is a little time, creativity and sometimes if you’re paying someone else to do it, money.

But what’s the point of having a website that never gets found or attracts a flood of visitor’s but none of them turn into paying customers? For that reason you have to decide right up front, before you even start to look website design or driving traffic to it, who it is you ideally want to do business with.

If you don’t do this then the visitors that do find your website won’t stay long or do business with you. What we’re talking about here is targeting quality leads that come back and do business with you over and over again.

Imagine having 100 visitors to your website a day and no-one makes an enquiry or gives you a call. How frustrating would that be? Let’s face it, getting your website found online isn’t a popularity contest, it’s a marketing tool. The way around that is to decide on the type of visitors you want to attract to your website.

For example, what age and sex are they, how much money do they earn, what do they do for a living, where do they live? These demographics are critical in deciding WHO your customers are. This may seem like common sense to you but the fact is that all too often websites are not designed properly and end up being nothing more than a poorly constructed brochure.

By having a clear picture in mind about who your ideal customer is then you can design your website copy and graphics to suit your ideal customer & your target market. This will help you to start making profits or turning clicks into customers from your very first lead.

2. Build your Website With The End in Mind

Now that you’ve decided who it is you want to attract to your website, you can work out what it is you want them to do once they arrive there. There’s a massive difference in the type of website you build dependent on what result you are looking to achieve.

Do you want your visitors to:

• Phone you
• Send an email enquiry
• Complete an online quote form
• Opt-in to a regular newsletter
• Download a giveaway (i.e. free intro DVD)
• Make a purchase online
• Any combination of above

You see, some people will just want visitors to give them their name and email address so they can add them to their data-base for future marketing campaigns, whereas others will want to have the chance to convert the lead to a sale.

No matter what your goal is with your website you need to think carefully about what it is you want your visitors to do before you start developing it. In some cases a 1 page ‘sales letter’ website will be all that you need, whereas if you are building an eCommerce website you will need to have multiple pages and a large amount of good quality images to do the job properly.

The 5 different types of websites that I have come across are:

1. One page sales letter website
2. Standard website with basic content /graphics
3. Professional website with animated flash /graphics
4. Custom built website with online databases
5. E-Commerce website with shopping cart attached

3. D.I.Y (Do It Yourself) or D. F.Y (Done For You)

Once you’ve decided what type of website you need then your next step is to decide whether you do it yourself or engage the services of a web developer.

The main thing to keep in mind here is that if you really don’t know much about the web environment then I’d suggest finding someone to build you site for you as it will be far less time time-consuming and you’ll end up with a better website in the end.

I know this for a fact as I used to build all my own websites, now because I run several different online  businesses it’s a much better use of my time to get a web developer to do it for me and all I do is provide them with what I want it to look like and the content that goes in it. What used to take me days or weeks now gets done in hours by qualified professionals.

Make sure you have a good looking website. The fact is that you have just a few seconds to attract a potential customer and keep them interested enough to stay. Good looking is more about keeping your layout simple, yet easily searchable. Try not to clutter it too much with text, pictures and flash objects.

It’s not how much you fit on the page it’s what you fit and the page and how it’s positioned.

4. Will Your Website Be Easy To Find On The Search Engines? 

Let me introduce you to a new way of thinking about your customers and your marketing. What if you targeted your customers using keywords that you already knew people were using to find products or services like yours? I call this doing a keyword and competitor analysis.

This involves using some pretty sophisticated software to analyze the main keywords that people use when trying to find products or services like yours. Then discovering how much competition there is in your industry and what’s required to get a top 10 ranking on Google, Yahoo & other search engines.

Sometimes it may be that there is too much competition for your main keywords and you will need to come up with relevant alternatives to make sure your website is easy to find. This is where a search engine optimization (SEO) expert becomes invaluable.

They do all the hard work for you and then simply tell you what you need to use to get good rankings. The second part to this is that once your website is being highly ranked on the search engines, you need to make sure that it stays there.

This is important as the search engines will change the way they rank websites and your competition will also change what they do online. Once again, your SEO specialist can do this for you as they understand what it takes to keep your website at the top of the search results.

Make no mistake if you don’t know what you’re doing with SEO then don’t expect to get results. With Google alone there are more than 150 different factors to consider when optimizing your website to get a high ranking.

While SEO experts will range in cost and ability, if you are serious about generating business online or increasing qualified traffic to your website then this is one investment where you will see a measurable return in a short time. Turn your website into a high CONVERSION, lead generation machine.

5. How Well Does Your Website Convert?

Now that you’ve created a website that is easy to find whenever someone does a search for your product or service online, the next step is to make sure you keep them there long enough to take whatever action you want them to take.

If you’ve already spent time & money building your website you also need to work out how much you can afford to spend on conversion strategies. The moment a visitor arrives at your website you have just seconds to give them a reason to stay.

This might come from a compelling headline, or catchy sub-headline or simply just having easy to navigate pages that are laid out in a ‘user friendly’ format. An example of a strategy that can increase your conversion rates by up to 50% is having your phone number in large easy-to-read font put on the top of each page (preferably in the banner area).

The harder it is for your visitors to make contact with you the less likely it is you will ever hear from them.

Some of the other ways to help convert more clicks to customers are:

• Use a value based Headline to gain interest
• Offer giveaways such as free reports, ebooks, newsletter, free quotes, etc
• Let your visitors know what is unique about the way you do business
• Offer money back guarantees
• Have compelling copy that keeps your readers interested and wanting more
• Have a powerful call to action
• Set-up a shopping cart to sell products while you are sleeping

By the way, the smart way to make sure your website is maximizing it’s conversion potential is to do one thing that many business owners neglect to do and that is test and measure the results of each part of your website.

The great news about the Internet is that you can test and measure your conversion strategies in just hours or days. This is the only way to make sure your website is going to bring you the best return for the money you have invested in it.

6. Keep In Touch With Your Customers on a Regular Basis.

It’s one thing to go to all the trouble of getting leads to your website, it’s another to keep them coming back. Real marketing whether online or offline is more than just acquiring new leads to your business. It’s also about using marketing skills to increase the average life-time value of your past customers and, the best way to do this is to keep in touch with them all.

Fortunately, this is one of the easiest things to do now with auto-responders that can be set-up to automatically send out regular newsletters, special offers, new product updates, value added opportunities, webinars, podcasts, ‘how-to’ video’s’ or just about anything you like.

When you think about the lifetime value of 1 customer in comparison to how much it cost you to acquire each new customer it makes good business sense to keep the old ones coming back. It’s the good old 80/20 rule, 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers, so focus on looking after them!

In fact, for every happy customer that does repeat business with you there’s every opportunity that they’ll refer others to your website. And, what’s more every study I’ve ever read shows that when a person has purchased from you 3 times or more, they’re at least 10 times more likely to refer you to their friends.

If you don’t bother to build the relationship you’re throwing away ‘real’ profits. Take the time to build a database of your online customers and then take the time to communicate with them often.

Online businesses that stand out from the crowd invest time and effort in offering consistent value added products or services that have a low cost to them but a high perceived value to the customer. From free E-books to membership programs, special reports to teleseminars, with experts in your field there’s endless potential to turn your customers into raving fans on the Internet.

6. Publish Online Articles

Let people know why they will benefit from your product or service. Imagine how many people in your target market there are surfing the net right now reading articles about products or services exactly like yours.

If just one of your articles gets picked up by an online publisher who broadcasts it to their database of say 10,000 customers you could get an instant flood of new leads to your website. Typically, articles that you post online have a dual benefit.

The first is that if you post them in the right places your message will reach the right people at the right time. As more people read your articles and follow the links back to your website the number of quality leads will increase. Over time, as you consistently write and publish articles the amount of traffic you can generate is literally unlimited.

The second benefit is that by placing linked text in your articles this will also over time create ‘backlinks’ to your website which is one of the best ways to improve your rankings in the search engines.

Now, you don’t have to write these articles yourself. Especially if it’s something that you find frustrating or you just don’t have time to sit down and do on a regular basis. Some of the businesses we work with use people like our article writers who can put together an article a day if need be to really boost the awareness of your products or services to the online community.

As you develop a strong group of readers online you can set-up and store them on your host server and use them as a way to build credibility and keep people coming back to find out more interesting information.

7. Know Your Websites Statistics

Get familiar with how to interpret your websites performance results and determine what changes need to be made to improve your bottom line. Rather than just loading your website onto a server, writing some copy and hoping that everything you’ve done so far works, make sure you know what your websites stats are telling you.

There is an abundance of useful information available at your fingertips to help you make minor or major improvements to your websites results.

Website statistics and analytics can tell you what search engines a visitor used to find your website, what keywords they used, how long they stayed at your site, which pages they clicked on, what cities and countries they come from, what time of day they found you, and so the list goes on.

Writing better ads, strengthening your marketing strategies, creating higher-converting websites, using website analysis tools that your website host provides,(or you can use a free web-based tool like Google Analytics, will rapidly help you increase your website effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).

One the most exciting parts of using statistical information on a regular basis is you get watch as your marketing strategies start to generate more leads to your website.

As the number of visitors increase you can then refine your conversion strategies including your advertising, headlines, copy, and calls to action, by monitoring each part independently until you have it working just the way you want it to.

Don’t be too daunted by the amount of information that is available to look at. Once you get familiar with it, it’ll all start to make sense to you.

By following these 7 steps you will give yourself and your business the best chance of online success. These strategies are proven to work and will help you navigate through the increasingly competitive environment of online marketing and sales.

Well, in a parallel universe this could possibly be true, but in this world, you and I know that there’s ALWAYS room for improvement.  So let’s look at what 7 of the most common mistakes business are making and what can be done to fix them.

Deadly Mistake #1 – Your Call To Action Stinks…

Most business owners just forget this piece completely, so if you even have a call to action on your website, you’re a step ahead of the competition.

But what is a call to action exactly?

Simple…

A call to action is simply a statement somewhere on your website telling the visitor what to do.  First you’re going to need to decide exactly what action you want a visitor to take. Do you want them to purchase from you right then, or should they contact you for a quote first?

Put this on your website somewhere. Here are some examples for getting visitors to fill out a quote form.

“Just fill out your information below to receive a comprehensive, no-strings-attached, completely free quote from one of our representatives.”

“Fill out the form to receive a free quote from our sales team. Your request will be processed within 24 hours and you will receive a call between the hours you specified in the form.”

Tell your visitor exactly what you want them to do. The more detail, the better.

Bonus Tip: Focus on the benefits your visitor will have if they purchase your product or service. What will change in the way they live their life? Will their coffee be better in the morning? Will they save more money on taxes? How will their life be better because you showed up?

Deadly Mistake #2 – Not Gathering Email Addresses

I recently had a conversation with a business owner who we’ll call John. John wasn’t anything special… he had an average business with an average income. He worked about 60 hours a week and spent the weekend at home with his family.

His company was a service business and he provided a good service that helped his clients. He was good at what he did.  There was a problem though… he wasn’t getting enough clients. This is something most business owners can relate to. At times it’s hard to bring customers or clients through the door.

Much of John’s business came from his website. He did well getting his website into the search engines, but wasn’t doing so well with converting visitors into clients.

It wasn’t until he started collecting email addresses through a simple form on his website that he really saw an increase in clientele. Nowadays John’s practice is packed. His schedule is full and he’s been able to double the price he was charging. He was also able to cut back to about 30 hours a week, instead of 60.

By running a simple newsletter sharing valuable information with your customers, you’re going to keep buyers coming back and bringing new buyers through your doors.

Deadly Mistake #3 – Failing To Optimize For Search Engines

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the closest things to friends your website will ever have. So you have to make sure they play extra nicely together.

By following a few simple rules, you can have your website ranking well in the search results for popular terms in your local area.

Let’s say you wanted to rank well for the search term, “Dallas plumber”. You’d want to make sure that you have that term on your main web page at least three times. The best places to put search terms are…

• The title tag
• The headline
• The first and last line of content
• The sidebar
• And in image ALT tags

Some of these may sound like Greek to you, so talk with your web developer about them and make sure that your website is up to date with terms you’d like to rank for.

Deadly Mistake #4 – Failure To Track Statistics

Yet another factor that is critical to any businesses online (or offline for that matter) success is tracking. You really need to keep track of where your leads and traffic come from so you can replicate and scale any success you have.

Google Analytics is a free tracking suite that will give you each and every statistic you could possibly need for tracking visitors on your website. By watching closely what people do on your website, you’ll be able to craft an experience that gets visitors to act in exactly the manner you’d like them to.

Going back to Mistake #1, if you want somebody to fill out a contact form, you need to find a way to get them to your contact page. Watch how people interact with your website, then use that as a cue for where to add links to the pages you want visitors to visit the most.

Another stat you need to watch is where people are coming from. Do most of your visitors come from a link the newspaper printed about your business in their online edition? If so, keep trying to get published. If most of your traffic comes from searches, do some optimization and get higher rankings for more terms.

Deadly Mistake #5 – Not Using Longtail Keywords

Longtail keywords are a god-send to anybody who uses search engines for traffic. This goes for both paid traffic (See: PPC) and organic traffic. A longtail keyword is a key term that’s more than three words long.

Examples would be…

• Dallas plumbing specialists
• Family doctor in Chicago
• Remodeling companies near Houston

Since you’re probably a localized business, focus on keywords that use your city name. This way you’re guaranteed to find people who are in your area looking for your services. Use this tool to search for keywords that have a good number of searches every month – https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

Deadly Mistake #6 – Not Focusing On Benefits

If you’re a software company, you know that features are important to buyers. That arena is the only one where that’s important though. People generally don’t want to know the features of your product. New widgets don’t matter to a buyer unless it has a dramatic impact on the product’s performance.

If your product is 50% stronger than the leading option, focus on how much longer your product will last instead of the space age material it’s made of. Tell readers just how your product will help their life and you’ll see an instant increase in sales.

Let’s take some features and turn them into benefits.

• Feature: Your software uses SQL databases to store a users information.
  Benefit: All information is encrypted and stored securely where hackers can never touch it – keeping your identity safe.
• Feature: The latest waterproof cameras can submerge to 12 meters
  Benefit: Any amateur underwater photographer can now take stunning pictures or video’s underwater like the pro’s. Now you’ll be able to see your images or video’s exquisite detail just like it was right in front of you.
• Feature: Now included with a one-touch speed dial marker.
  Benefit: Never enter another number into speed dial again – simply hit the * key after a phone call, and the number will automatically be entered into your speed dial.

You can see just how powerful this will be for selling people on your products.

Deadly Mistake #7 – Not Marketing Using Emotions

People buy on emotion and justify using logic. No matter the product or group you’re selling to this is true. Even if you’re marketing to businesses you need to use emotion to sell. If, for example, you were selling to the accounting portion of fortune 500 companies, you should focus on what goes through the buyer’s mind.

Most of those buyers have bosses they must go through before the sale is made. He’d likely need to be reassured that this decision would be a good one for his career in order to buy.

You’re going to need to talk with potential buyers in order to find out what sort of emotions they go through when making a purchase. Most of the time they won’t give you an answer straight-away, so you’ll have to infer from his statements just what’s going on in his mind.

Once you get this right though, you may never have to write another ad again…

Using emotional selling is by-far the most important thing you can do for your advertising. This goes for both online and offline sales. If you are making 1 or more of these mistakes in your business, then it’s time to switch it up and get things moving in the right direction.

Sometimes it’s the small things in business that make the biggest difference to not only our customers experience, but also to your bottom line profits and ROI (return on investment).

There’s is a specific strategy that I have adopted that not only works for me but I’ve also seen it working for everyone who makes a full-time living from internet marketing. I’ll share this with you in a few moments.

When I got started online, I was working a full-time job which meant I had to do it on the side. I didn’t have any savings to speak of  and was living paycheck to paycheck so quitting wasn’t an option for me when I started out.

Obviously, this is not ideal as it is very taxing time and energy wise but lets face facts, I’m sure that’s there’s going to be a lot of people in the same boat as I was.

I needed to replace $5K per month before I’d be able to sack my boss and feel good about it. Now I had no previous internet skills, wasn’t tech savvy and couldn’t program to save my life, so if you’re one of those people who thinks these are a MUST have to succeed online – it’s not the case.

In fact, making money online is more about using skills you already have that can be translated into a product or service online, and then having the tenacity to follow through until you are making a living from it.

The biggest challenge is that most people tend to quit when it doesn’t happen for them overnight. Lord knows, I wanted to quit to almost every day for 2 years before things started to take off for me.

My work was incredibly stressful, I was never at home and even though I was making good money I woke up every day with a feeling of dread and despair. Funnily enough though, the fact that my life sucked added rocket fuel to my veins.

No matter how tired I got, or how many setbacks or hurdles I faced, I just kept pushing through. Even my friends, family and loved ones gave up on me and told me I was crazy to be working so hard on something that wasn’t paying me a dime for almost 2 years.

Get Rich or Die Trying

Even though it added more stress to start building an online business on the side, I had no other choice. It was do or die trying time. I knew I deserved a better life and that, ‘if it was to be – then it was up to me’.

What I’ve also discovered after coaching hundreds of people to success is that some people just don’t have what it takes – plain and simple. It could be that they are too comfortable with where they are at in their lives and while it’s a ‘nice’ idea to have an online business there’s no real urgency.

Or, it could be that they just don’t have the discipline or the willingness to stay committed to their dream no matter what life throws at them.  Either way, if it’s a wishy-washy idea rather than something that your determied to succeed in, then it probably won’t happen and you’re better off no wasting your time.

There are thousands of ways to make money online but they all require 1 thing… and that’s for you to put in a consistent effort and stay true to your course. I see so many people who get started online with all the right intentions and enthusiasm only to get easily side-tracked by something more ‘alluring’ to them.

I call this the ‘shiny-object’ syndrome and it is the biggest killer of dreams around. If you really want to know what the fastest path to cash online is it’s to take whatever passion and skills you have, do your research on how you can monetize it and then get started immediately and don’t let ANYTHING distract you until you’ve achieved you financial targets.

I know people who have started up a blog around their interests and have done daily posts for 12 to 18 months without making a penny before they started to see success. But guess what, they put in the ground work. Some people expect to put up a blog, do a few posts and then watch the sales come in – well that’s never going to happen.

Once you decide what your area of focus is, then do your research on how you can make money from it. The way you do this is look at who your top competitors are that are succeeding and see what they are doing to make their business work.

Almost always it will boil down to building a list through a free giveaway and then making money on the back-end as you work your list. This is still one of the best working models for online success.

The Two Most Important Online Business Skills 

Using the example of setting up a Blog, once it’s setup then you need to get targeted traffic to it which happens using either free or paid traffic marketing strategies and then you need to be able to convert a percentage of those leads to customers. This is all you really need to get good at to succeed online.

Yes, there are hundreds of other ways to make money online, some require more skill than others. The bottom line though  is to start with what you are passionate about, don’t stop working on it until you’ve reached your financial goals and then you can start branching out into different areas.

The last piece of advice I’ll give is get real good at getting low or no cost traffic to your site, and get real good at converting visitors to customers. Once you develop these skills you can approach any niche you like and make it profitable.

It’s not rocket science, it’s just plain old knowledge that comes from hands on experience. If you leave this to others then you’ll be putting your fate in the hands of those who may or may not have your best interests at heart.

So if you don’t want to get caught with your pants down and your business failing before it even begins, these are the skills to develop.